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By Root 1260 0

King. Mike was a cop—one of legions of “us” that made up the Boston Police Department. If the beating had been posed to him as a hypothetical scenario, Mike would have said that the code did not apply—not when the crime victim was another cop. But that hadn’t happened. Instead, Mike watched good cops—good guys, friends of his—not wanting to get involved because doing so meant testifying against another cop. This included black cops—when he would have thought a racial solidarity among the black officers would have kicked in to override the silence. But that hadn’t happened either. The code had a power Mike never imagined. It even trumped race. While a second investigation began in the ashes of the first, Mike was seeing that the reach of the blue wall extended beyond concern for any one individual. “And I just happened to be the individual.”

In June, the Boston Herald reported that District Attorney Ralph Martin and the police department’s Anti-Corruption Unit had taken over the investigation of Mike Cox’s beating. “This was nothing but another Rodney King situation—only this time there was no video camera,” one of the paper’s unnamed police sources was quoted saying. Since it was located inside the tabloid, the casual reader might easily have flipped past the story. But interested parties—meaning the police world—would certainly notice, and for those readers there was more: The story named names. “Two officers from Area C–11,” it said, “James Burgio and David Williams, have been questioned in connection with Cox’s beating, but no formal charges have been brought against them, sources said.”

The account was brief, only 408 words long—hardly headline coverage. The rest of the Boston media barely blinked. In fact, the report was only the fourth article since the January 25 beating. Such a low story count was surprising. For one thing, the chase was considered the longest in Boston anyone could remember, involving the most cruisers ever. Then a high-ranking police official began referring to the assault as “singular” in the department’s history. Police Commissioner Evans’s chief of internal investigations, Ann Marie Doherty, based her characterization on the combination of “the type of injuries that were sustained and the fact that medical attention was not immediately provided.” The newsworthiness of the case was crystal clear. It was a no-brainer: Journalism 101.

But the story hadn’t gained any traction. It wasn’t as if the local press was not busy covering the police department—good news and bad. Commissioner Evans and Mayor Tom Menino, along with a number of city officials, posed for photographs at the ground breaking for a new police headquarters in Roxbury to replace the seventy-year-old building in the Back Bay that was obsolete. It would take two years to complete the new $62 million structure Evans boasted would house state-of-the-art ballistics and crime labs, and the relocation to Roxbury was viewed as improving the department’s community policing programs along with its accessibility to residents.

There was the bad press Evans and the mayor continued to get over Accelyne Williams’s death during a raid the year before. Negotiations with the elderly minister’s widow, Mary H. Williams, had broken off, and she’d sued. One of her lawyers called the bungled drug raid that led to the minister’s death by a heart attack “a crime that the city of Boston and the police department have to be punished for.” Mayor Menino’s press office released a statement calling the suit “regrettable.” It noted the city’s proposal to pay $600,000 was “the largest litigation settlement the city has ever offered.” But that response only infuriated columnist Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe. “Rodney King,” wrote Jackson, “collected $3.8 million.” Mayor Menino, he wrote, was Mayor Scrooge. “Williams vomited and died of a heart attack. Williams was a pristine victim, with not a scintilla of warranted suspicion. One could not possibly imagine a more obvious case to settle quickly, not just to ease the pain of the family but also to send