The Fence - Dick Lehr [91]
Mike also learned about Ian Daley taking the Fifth. It made him mad that someone he believed definitely had evidence about the beating had gone stone cold. But if Mike was upset, Craig Jones was furious. Craig was convinced Daley was either a beater or a witness to it. “I was pissed,” he said. “I couldn’t believe no one was going to step up.” He was also taken aback that many cops didn’t seem to realize the severity of the beating. “I had people coming up to me saying something like this happened to them. I’d say, Oh, you did? You had blood in your urine?” Craig tried to set them straight. This was not a case of one cop mistakenly spraying another cop with mace or whacking him with a glancing blow, “and the cop immediately apologizes and it’s over.” This was much worse. “It was a crime,” he said. Mike was owed “a lot more than an apology.
“Some things you can let go, but some things you can’t, and this was one of those things,” he said. “If you were pissing blood, I’d tell those guys, would you let it go?”
Throughout the three months Internal Affairs was investigating the beating, Mike continued to puzzle over Police Commissioner Paul Evans. The commissioner was less aggressive than he’d expected. “Initially he didn’t take it seriously enough,” Mike decided. The top cop’s generally silent posture, he thought, had created a vacuum where the downplaying of the beating that Craig Jones kept running into was able to gain traction. It was the fertile ground for rumors questioning the department’s commitment to hold the beaters accountable. Was Evans serious? Or should everyone sit tight and ride out a whitewash? One thing was certain. In his first year, the commissioner was proving himself as a master of policy statements. He issued a series of impressive and high-minded new directives aimed at improving the department’s tarnished image.
Less than two months after the beating, Evans in March promulgated a new order explicitly listing the duties of sergeants and patrol supervisors when force has been used by officers in their command. It amounted to a checklist of what the three sergeants at Woodruff Way—Isaac Thomas, David Murphy, and Daniel Dovidio—did not do following Mike’s injuries. The order was called “Special Order Number 95–16: Amendment to Rule 304, Use of Non-Lethal Force.” Its purpose was “to more clearly delineate what constitutes a full and complete Patrol Supervisor’s investigation in cases where the use of non-lethal force is used, or alleged to have been used, on a subject.” The new rule required that “prior to the end of the tour of duty,” the supervisor was to prepare a report that included reports from officers alleged to have used non-lethal force, reports from all police personnel at the scene, and reports from civilian witnesses.
Two days later, on March 17, Evans announced a second new directive called “Special Order Number 95–17: Identification of Plainclothes Officers.” Its purpose was “to minimize the potential risk to officers assigned to plainclothes duties by establishing policies and procedures that will aid in their being properly identified.” The rule, which had been in the works for months, established for the first time a hand signal officers working in plainclothes could employ to identify themselves to other officers—“in order to avert an unfortunate confrontation or tragedy.” The officer was to raise his arms over his head and cross them at the wrists, turn his palms forward, and spread out his fingers.
Then several months later came Evans’s new “Public Integrity Policy: Rule 113.” The nine-page, single-spaced directive addressed the need for the police department to “maintain the highest standards of honesty and integrity.” It noted that police departments throughout the country experience corruption. “Boston certainly has not been immune to those problems. Corruption, brutality, falsifying evidence, and