Hello! Happy Sunday hope everyone’s staying cool.
An Amuse-bouche...
It do be feeling like that. I used to work there and always fantasized about how to get that thing (‘ummmm his name is Buster, actually’) on top of Union Station as some elaborate prank. Luckily for Eric my beloved former general manager (Hi, Eric) I was never able to roll the 25/20 I needed to pick Buster’s lock.
Had to set aside the primary election primer I was working on all week because the city manager did a very annoying Friday news dump, our main focus today. Said dump, coming juuuust before 5 p.m., was a terse three paragraphs: the DOJ,the manager said, “informed the city” that the investigation into the WPD is closed.
On the one hand, which faces upward, a wet finger extended to the wind, no shit. On the other, which extends downward, wrist-deep in the muck of our little political backwater, sifting around, questions, questions, questions.
Also in this issue:
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Let’s get to it.
“For Immediate Release”
By way of a classic Friday news dump, City Manager Eric Batista demonstrated he’s learning how to be a truly evil little guy.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 8/7/2026 4:52 pm
WORCESTER, Mass. – The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) informed the City of Worcester Thursday that is has chosen to close its investigation into the Worcester Police Department without further action and without sustaining any allegations from its 2024 report.
When the DOJ released its original report, the municipality was already taking steps to improve its practices to promote fair, safe, and unbiased policing in the community. That work continued after the report was announced and will continue into the future, as ongoing improvement is necessary to have an effective police force.
“I want to thank the DOJ for recognizing the positive steps the WPD has taken to strengthen its policies and practices and for their thorough attention to this matter,” City Manager Eric D. Batista said. “I also want to thank Chief Saucier and the entire department for working cooperatively with the DOJ and for their work every day that helps make Worcester one of the safest mid-sized cities in the country. While the DOJ investigation may be closed, we remain committed to proactive evaluation and improvement.”
And that’s it! Just three little paragraphs that seek to put a firm cap on four years of “the DOJ report” resting as the backdrop to pretty much everything in Worcester politics.
How did they inform the city? When? What did they say exactly? What does “without sustaining any allegations” mean?
I sent an email to the DOJ, not that I’m expecting anything back on it. But it read:
Hey there just reaching out to confirm information being shared by city staff locally: that the DOJ reached out to the city (Worcester MA) On Thursday 8.6.26 to “that is has chosen to close its investigation into the Worcester Police Department without further action and without sustaining any allegations from its 2024 report.” Here’s the release the city put out. Don’t see anything on the DOJ’s end.
And I filed two FOIAs with the city: one for emails between the DOJ and city officials about anything at any time on Thursday (pro tip: ask the city to search by domain, i.e. “@usdoj.gov,” rather than query individual email addresses), and the other for calendar entries. If these queries bring back hits, I’m sure it’ll take the maximum amount of time the city has (25 business days all told) and an appeal or two to the state’s records supervisor to actually get the documents. We’ll see.
As it remains, the manager’s release is wholly insufficient. We have no idea what “informed” really means, and the manager, it seems, is banking on the news-consuming public to fill that gap in a way that’s advantageous to the police department, and thereby to the prospects of Batista keeping his third floor office.
In order to properly understand the situation, we need to zoom out and look at what’s been going on at the DOJ lately.
The Worcester investigation was one of the last acts of the local DOJ civil rights division under Biden. When Trump took over, most of the attorneys who worked on it were replaced within months.
It’s been no big secret that the DOJ’s work in Worcester has been effectively over. Without the involvement of the DOJ, it would fall to local advocates to push the manager to make good on his promises, the civilian review board being the most prominent.
The DOJ’s capacity to investigate civil rights cases, including pattern and practice investigations into police departments like the one in Worcester, has been severely diminished over the past year and a half—a conscious dismantling of the ability to investigate racism, while doubling down on “fraud” (of the “Somali fraud” variety) and other such racist dog whistles in the administration’s war on immigrants.
The Civil Rights Division is down from 90 or so attorneys in 2024 to 20, according to a Bloomberg Law report in April. Who knows how many more cuts have been made since.
DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which has lost about 75% of its career attorneys since President Donald Trump took office again, has fewer than 20 attorneys handling civil rights investigations into patterns or practices of constitutional violations by state and local law enforcement, according to the MacArthur Justice Center report, shared exclusively with Bloomberg Law. That’s down from more than 70 attorneys working on these types of cases at the end of 2024, the report said.
In early 2025 Trump issued an executive order directing the DOJ to “review all federal consent decrees” with law enforcement agencies.
Worcester never got that far. Consent decrees are the end result of a pattern and practice investigation like the one announced in 2022, then released in fall of 2024.
But they often take years to get there. In nearby Springfield MA it took two years, with a fully staffed and willing DOJ, to get from releasing the investigation (2020) to signing a consent decree agreement on police reforms (2022). Emphasis on fully staffed! As opposed to the present circumstances: “barely staffed.”
Presciently, George White, a professor of race and public policy at CUNY York, was quoted in a Capital B story in April, 2025, saying the gutting of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division would leave cities like Worcester, with open pattern and practice cases, “adrift for the next four years, or until we get a completely different administration in place.”
“If you don’t have that kind of external pressure in place to make sure that these actors are actually doing the right thing — creating equity, and creating fairness — they’re not going to do it.”
The way the process typically goes: 1. DOJ announces the investigation, 2. DOJ investigates, 3. DOJ releases findings of the investigation and suggests reforms, 4. city and DOJ negotiate in court to reach an agreement on the scope and nature of the reforms. This last part is the “consent decree.”
Worcester only ever got to step 3. That was back in early December, 2024. Shortly after Trump was inaugurated, in January 2025, the DOJ started ghosting the city. We heard less and less until we heard nothing at all. What should have been happening stopped happening. The U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts overseeing the investigation was replaced by a Trump appointee, who made wishy washy comments about the investigation.
In March, the chief of police put together a response document, which the council sent to Kate Toomey’s Standing Committee on Public Safety, where it of course went nowhere, by design. At that March meeting, the chief said he’d recently met with the new U.S. attorney, Leah Foley, and said that they didn’t even mention the DOJ report. At the point he said that, we could more or less call the DOJ report dead in the water. I wrote as much at the time:
And we need to be operating with clear eyes about a DOJ that’s most likely to just... quietly dip out. ... The federal government situation makes the path to meaningful reform an unusual one for such an investigation, but there is a path. The situation isn’t by any means hopeless, it just falls to us—the community that pays this police department—and not the federal government. It all falls to us and how we organize.
Really, what Batista’s answering in this moment, with his recommendation against a civilian review board, is the question of whether or not he would listen to the community that continued organizing after the DOJ dipped out. And that answer was a “no,” as we’ve well covered by now. This Friday news dump amounts to tacking an exclamation point to the end of that “no.”
That context is important for understanding this release from the city—what’s in it, what’s not in it, and why now.
Let’s take those three questions one at a time.
—First, what’s in it: not very much. At three paragraphs, there’s little information to be gleaned, even between the lines.
Then, the customary “I’d like to thank...” quote from Batista, the tacit implication being some sort of victory occurring. Let’s look at it again.
“I want to thank the DOJ for recognizing the positive steps the WPD has taken to strengthen its policies and practices and for their thorough attention to this matter,” City Manager Eric D. Batista said.
When did the DOJ recognize the positive steps? How? Did they, even? The manager provides no answer, leaving the reader to assume the DOJ said it when they informed the city they dropped the investigation. Or, even worse, Batista is advancing the idea that dropping the investigation means a tacit recognition of progress, which as we’ve established is not the case.
The prior two grafs give no indication the DOJ dropped the report because of the improvements made locally. If they did, you’d have to imagine that’d make the release… reaching, as it already is, to pull the framing of a “win” out of this.
—What’s not in it: how the city was informed, anything at all that the DOJ officials said, who reached out to who, and what this bit of “informing” was apropos of. It also doesn’t even mention the fact that the civilian review board is on the agenda for a week and a half from then. It also doesn’t acknowledge that they waited until 4:52 p.m. on Friday to make it public, despite having apparently learned on Thursday. The “Friday news dump” is a classic fuck you move government officials pull. The timing of this news dump sets up a situation where the news consuming public has a week and a half to finish chewing the narrative they served about the DOJ’s apparent decision to drop the investigation.
What’s also not in the release, and this one feels the most on purpose, is what in tarnation “sustained any findings” means. It’s worked into the sentence quite cleverly, so as to avoid direct attribution to anyone in particular, but just by order of appearances, looks enough like something the DOJ said to a reader not thinking very hard about it.
In Worcester, let’s be honest, that’s most readers. The framing allows for a colloquialization to happen, a game of townie telephone, ending with the sentiment “the DOJ took it all back” spreading far and wide. It’s something we might very well hear Kate Toomey say out loud in the coming weeks. But the DOJ didn’t “take it back” they just dropped the investigation before they could “sustain” the findings—if that’s something they even do in these investigations, which is itself unclear. And taking this news in light of the dismantling of the division responsible for carrying it out, it’s much more likely they didn’t have the resources to pursue it than they decided there was nothing to pursue. The release tries very hard to slyly advance the idea that the DOJ had a change of heart, when in reality they had a change in man-power and in top-down directive. The victory here for the city manager is not an earned one, but rather the luck of the draw: a byproduct of a white supremacist executive branch reshaping its DOJ toward priorities that advanced white supremacy and gutting the rest.
For instance, on the very same day (Thursday) the manager apparently heard from the DOJ, the Trump administration announced the launch of a website called Fraud.gov. Fraud Dot Gov, folks. The best 30 Rock joke never written. Fraud Dot Gov is a dashboard of sorts for the public to view the hard work of the Task Force To Eliminate Fraud, an entity created in 2025 that essentially repackages the DOJ’s financial investigations.
It is much more likely the DOJ dropped the Worcester investigation because they had to send all their lawyers down into the fraud mines than it is what the manager would have you believe, that we were such good boys and girls the DOJ said “you did it, gold star.”
You can’t condemn the brutish behavior of ICE and celebrate the inability of the DOJ to hold police departments accountable. To do so is fundamentally contradictory. So, in the case of the Batista administration, having now done both, the question becomes: which one’s the lie?
The shock tactic cruelty of ICE’s street rips, as seen on Eureka Street, is part and parcel with the dismantling of the DOJ’s civil rights work. The MacArthur Justice Center last April, in a report on the gutting of the civil rights division, put it well:
As federal agencies, including the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), have grabbed headlines with their shocking cruelty, the Administration simultaneously has leveled a devastating—but far quieter—attack on mechanisms designed to check state and local law enforcement. Emboldening state and local police departments and prison systems in this way risks disaster. After all, the combined size of these departments’ personnel dwarfs the number of federal officers who answer directly to the Administration.
—Why now: Given all the questions presented above, I think it’s a safe assumption that the “Friday news dump” was a tactical move to head into the next council meeting on the winds of a more sympathetic narrative to the city manager’s decision. It allows the old guard of the council to say, “look, even the DOJ doesn’t see a problem anymore.”
It’s a smarmy move, relying on the majority of this city’s political class being credulous, simpering, conflict-averse and in a state of complete fealty to the police. It will probably work.
When the council inevitably throws the CRB proposal in the proverbial trash, be it at the next meeting or some other time in the future, they will have told basically everyone in the city who cares to go fuck. The coalition that showed up at the last meeting is massive and will grow. The Human Rights Commission and Worcester Regional Research Bureau have recently been joined by the Board of Health, who called for a joint meeting with the HRC, and the Commission on LGBTQ+ Affairs, which took a vote in support of the CRB proposal. Basically, the entire bench of city hall is set against the small group of police loyalists and townies who will make this extremely consequential decision. And they will make that decision in a callous and insultingly low-IQ fashion. We’ve seen this show before. For instance, Kate Toomey has not bothered to even respond to the people who’ve called on her standing committee to hold a meeting on the issue. Flagrant disrespect, in keeping with the modus operandi.
While we’re at it, a good thread on the most often heard response, ‘we already have the POST commission,’ to which the only response is ‘yeah, and… ?’
Giselle l Writer | Avoider of Burnout (@notjustawriter) • Instagram photos and videos
Worcester Working Families (@worcworkfam) • Instagram photo
How do they think that’ll work out for them in the long run? Moe Bergman, who remained on the council by the grace of some 36 votes, and is the second-longest running member of the Standing Committee on Public Safety, should be especially nervous. By any indication, he isn’t.
Odds and Ends
That’s it for today! We’re already “at length” and the hour grows late. Thank you for reading yet another edition of this newsletter. I hope you found it useful, entertaining, enlightening, etc. If you did or didn’t I suppose please consider putting down a deposit on my ability to continue churning these things out.
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There were a few important stories I wasn’t able to get to in this issue. (Need a sign that says “you can’t cover everything” like the “every second counts” one in The Bear.)
—One we’ll definitely cover on the next Outdoor Cats: Went to the premiere of Burning Down The House at Hanover Theater Thursday night with Chris and Katie. Will have lots to say about that.
—One we might if Chris wants to: There’s been a development in the bad faith lawsuit police union president Thommy B. Duffy II filed against This Week In Worcester‘s Tom Marino. He’s angling, apparently, to flush out Marino’s sources on a string of hugely revealing and important stories following Eureka Street. Highly suggest giving Brad Petrishen’s story on the matter a read. That a police union official is using the courts to ferret out a journalist’s sources is a press freedom issue that should be getting much much much more play than it has been. Should Thommy B succeed, it would set an ugly precedent in this state, which, as Brad points out, is one of only 10 in the nation that lacks a “shield” law protecting sourcing. Free country for me but not for thee says the legislature.
Some lesser important but noteworthy happenings. The Hanover Theater’s recently departed director Troy Siebels is set to do that job at The Worcester Guardian. In an interview with Radio Worcester he says pretty much outright he’s there to fundraise. Best of luck, big dawg.
Program transfers are finalized as Community Health Link offloads and closes up, generational homelessness epidemic be damned. WBJ has it.
You love to see it! Rent control advocates flooding the statehouse…
Keep Mass Home (@keepmasshome) • Instagram photos and videos
A mesmerizing video about data centers and how we all love them.
New Ceremony record out hell yeah!
Ok podcast soon then another one of these after that. Talk soon!
The Guardian has a silly little poll in their writeup which has a very small number of people voting but it’s overwhelmingly (70%+) “I have less confidence in WPD” which is hilarious given their audience.
"smarmy" - ingratiating and wheedling in a way that is regarded as insincere or excessive:
"a smarmy, unctuous reply". Yep, unctuous too, Bill. Excellent reporting. Thank you.
Regarding the City Manager's recent drop, I've followed commentary from the Guardian, T&G and Tom Marino's Front Page News. Like Tony Economou said, "just words on paper". The City Manager continues to fortify his job security by supporting the shadow government of Worcester.
Imagine, just short of hallucination, that Worcester had an independent Civilian Review Board with subpoena powers when the DOJ report came out. Nearly 2 years of deflecting, distorting and outright denial could have been avoided by a CRB whose members simply knew how to read.
Looking forward to your commentary on "Burning Down The House". The T&G apparently had no problem with publishing a photo of the Hanover with a lot of empty seats.