How they respond will say everything
We need a big turnout at city hall on Tuesday!!
Hello, Sucksters! It was nice to see and meet a whole bunch of you at the Vernon yesterday. The Worcester Punk Rock Flea Market exceeded my expectations by a mile. I had a blast! Will be returning for the next one. What a great little community event. Already have my boy Travis Duda cooking up a fun new design also.
You can probably guess what I’m focusing on today. So I’m putting it right at the top here that we really really really really need a big turnout at city council Tuesday night, (agenda here), and then the Department of Justice-led community meeting Wednesday (flyer here). I have an icky feeling, as I’ll explain below. The people who are going to speak out need the community there with them. Strength in numbers. I’ll be there as the in-person cameraman for the WCT3k stream (6:15 p.m. on Twitch). If you read no further, just consider coming down to city hall for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday. Third floor. You don’t have to speak. That part’s covered. The more bodies in the room the better.
All week I’ve wrestled with a whir of thoughts and emotions brought on by the DOJ report. It was a struggle to arrive at how to write about it with substance. Not confident that I’ve gotten there yet! But what’s below is my best attempt. I feel grateful for the freedom afforded by this outlet and its business model. I can take the time required to write as well as I’m able, and decide for myself the tone and urgency.
At the least, I can say with certainty what I’ve come up with is unlike anything else you’ve read about this DOJ report. So, onto it.
Project Priceless demands apology—B & Officer 1—the chief speaks—catching up with the council—a note from the community fridge—odds and ends
How they respond will say everything
Five demands: acknowledge and apologize, empower the self-organized work of unhoused women, provide reparations, criminalize sexual exploiters, and commit to abolition.
Those are the expectations of Project Priceless, a collective of unhoused and prostituted women.
The DOJ’s report exposes the horrifying reality we’ve lived for years: Worcester police coerced prostituted women into sexual acts under threat of arrest, perpetuating systemic male violence and state-sanctioned abuse. Disgusted? Yes. Shocked? No. This is what patriarchy and poverty do—they prey on the most vulnerable and call it “justice.”
The demands go now to the Worcester Police Department and an attendant city administration that so often serves as a rhetorical spike strip when the behavior of the police is called to question.
On Tuesday, the city council will be made to answer publicly. Project Priceless submitted its demands to the council as a series of public petitions (7y-7cc on the agenda). How the council responds will say everything. The safe bet is a 7-4 vote give or take to ignore them. Every councilor who votes to ignore them (and it will be most of them) will show the public who they consider human beings and who they do not. I say so with a dry clarity. All the more depressing that it is not an exaggeration, and that this is what the present situation asks of us: Can you see a prostituted woman with no fixed address as a human being? In this city it is an open question.
Last Monday, the Department of Justice’s report on the abuses of the WPD hit the city like a cluster bomb. (If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a summary of the report I put together.) It leaves us with two paths out of the rubble: Do we harden around the blind fealty to the police department that allows officers to behave monstrously with impunity, as has been the case for decades? Or do we change that? Do we start to say, at the very least, that they must prove their worth to us. That it’s up to them to demonstrate they aren’t inherently rotten, as the present evidence clearly shows.
Most have already decided their path. Certainly, anyone predispositioned to cozy themselves up to police power has already done so. This has emerged in the narrative as a strange and tortured rhetorical gambit: Give us more evidence, they say, and we’ll do something. What they don’t say is that they already have the evidence, and they’ve already chosen to discard it.
As an example of this bad-faith argument, let’s turn to the statement made by Councilor Kate Toomey, the chairwoman of the council’s Standing Committee on Public Safety.
The recently released Investigation of the Worcester Police Department Report included very serious charges which need to be addressed. The Department of Justice has an obligation to give us facts and evidence to be brought forward so that we can address the egregious allegations outlined in the report and take action.
Hers is a subcommittee that, in theory, provides public oversight of the police department. In practice, under her leadership, it doesn’t. The ineffectual management of the subcommittee is by design. Mayor Joe Petty appoints Toomey knowing she’s the least willing of all the councilors to scrutinize the police. In the two years since the DOJ launched its investigation, there hasn’t been a single public safety meeting to discuss the matter. But now she wants “facts and evidence.” It’s difficult to take that seriously.
“What the city doesn’t say, what the union doesn’t say, is there are many court cases that are discussed in the Department of Justice (report),” said Hector Pineiro, a lawyer whose civil suits over use of force, discrimination, wrongful conviction, and countless other charges represent the only accountability measures for the WPD, on Morning Edition a few days ago.
“Many of them are our cases, and they know their names, they know the facts, they know that policy makers, captains, deputy chiefs, chiefs of police, the city manager, are aware of those cases and aware of what happened.”
Toomey’s statement is in line with those of other councilors, the mayor and police officials. It has become the prevailing talking point among the “inner circle.” The police unions of course have been the most garish. Threateningly, they warn: "This summarized report creates a 'dark cloud' over the WPD, with the potential to destroy all the positive strides we have made with the community at large."
Anyone talking about the report this way is lost to us. There is no convincing. No path except to overpower. In order to do so, it becomes important to win over those who don’t want to blindly curl themselves on the lap of the cops in the fashion of Toomey et al., but haven’t yet allowed themselves to understand that there is no compromise position.
Perhaps some will come around when they see the way the city responds to the first and most seemingly innocuous of Project Priceless’s demands: to apologize. When the city fails to do even that, as they almost certainly will, what belief could you possibly harbor in the power of training sessions and policy tweaks?
To apologize is to admit to the fault of the institution, and right now we are seeing a narrative coalesce around the “bad apples” that absolve the wider structure. Give us their names, they say, and we’ll arrest them. But they have their names already, and they didn’t arrest them. At the same time they cast doubt on the allegations. We protect the peace, they say, so how could we be capable of something so violent? To apologize is to admit they do not protect the peace, in other words. To admit they are violent. To apologize is to take a small step toward fulfilling the stated promise, and therein lies the risk. The apology is the most dangerous concession because it requires an acknowledgement of the truth of things. And only a monster could do what the police truly do. To apologize is to come clean. And if the cops came clean on the monumental lie they’ve so long upheld, what then? What else will be pulled from behind its disguise? To apologize is to finally recognize the humanity of those they routinely rob of it. And that’s why they can’t.
Before we go any further I want to illustrate one moment in the 43-page DOJ report. With so many horrific acts in one document, it can become a gloss—a MagicEye illustration best left blurry, two dimensional, its hidden layer unlocked. But it serves no one but the powerful to avoid it. What we need to do in the coming weeks is center this horror against a concerted effort to push it aside, in favor of more petty, workable dramas. (Listeners of the most recent podcast episode will find this story familiar. It wasn’t until reading it aloud for the show that I really understood what it held.) In the report, this story begins on page 20.
The woman in this story we’ll call B, for the sake of assigning a personhood less bureaucratic than “the woman.” In the report, the woman is anonymous, and should stay that way. The cop we’ll call Officer 1.
B & Officer 1
It was 2015. B was 19, homeless. She spent nights turning tricks with her friend. Money for sex. It was somewhere in Worcester. One of the ad-hoc reservations, where the practice of street prostitution isn’t quite allowed, but isn’t so swiftly cracked down upon as it would in the “nice” parts, where no one is naive enough to try.
It was on one of those nights in one of those places B met Officer 1. She was on the street with her friend when he rolled down the window of his patrol car and asked B if she was a “good girl” or a “bad girl.” He drove off. Another night, he came back. A few weeks of this. The squad car rolling up. The window rolling down. A taunting routine.
Then one night it was more. Officer 1 called B over to his car. It was an unmarked car this time. Not the usual patrol car. B told her friend she didn’t want to go over to him. She thought it was a sting, that she would get arrested. Her friend said she should, if she knows what’s good for her. So B did. She got in the car.
Officer 1 took B for a ride. He told her he knew she had a clean record. “It could stay that way.” He told her that if she did not have sex with him, he would make her life difficult. As an officer of the law, he laid a better claim to this than most men. The threat was not idle or impractical. B submitted to it. He drove his unmarked car to a nearby cemetery.
The pair of them sat there, in the front seats, among the graves, Officer 1 forced B to give him oral sex. Then he moved her to the backseat, where the sex was no longer oral. After, Officer 1 returned B to the street. He drove off—perhaps to a home in some suburb, where prostitution is a thing that happens on the TV, in the cop shows where the bad guy gets caught at the end, or in another of its fictions, at once more vague and more palpable, of the “bad neighborhood.” The place that’s somewhere else, Thank God. Where the drug busts and gang activity and murders happen. The places, the TV assures, that your neighborhood would become if not for the police.
For Officer 1 and B, it was the first night of many. Two or three times a month it would happen. She’d give him her body in exchange for her freedom. This went on, would have kept going on, until the state intervened. She was arrested by another officer on another matter. Incidentally, the arrest initiated a property transfer—one for which there’s no documentation, no data to study, no technocratic analysis to apply. No policy tweaks because there is no policy. No training doctrine to alter. Whoever taught Officer 1 how to claim B learned from someone else—someone we’ll never know. The chain of custody for the administration of this particular police training is not documented. It doesn’t exist within the formal annals of the bureaucracy, and so the bureaucracy sees no need to apologize for it. With no documented pattern of this practice, the bureaucracy comfortably frames the rare instance of a publicized account as an anomaly. A “bad apple” at work, if of course the allegations are “true.” The witness is “credible.” If it can be “proven” within the parameters of a system designed to make proof impossible.
The 1926 Slavery Convention, an international treaty called to end the practice, defined sexual slavery as "status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised, including sexual access through rape or other forms of sexual violence."
Just shy of 100 years later, we see in this story an obvious sexual slavery. To hold the threat of arrest over someone’s head and demand sexual favors is to trade on their literal freedom. To avoid prison they become a prisoner of a different kind. Rather than to a prison, their body is forfeit to an individual, who holds a monopoly over what is done with it. A slave, in other words. Like all modern slavery, it exists in a legal gray area. This officer held no title over B, and so when the prison came calling for her, she went. It was only physical incarceration that ended her carceral obligation to the officer’s sexual whims.
In other words, ownership over B was pried from the informal state apparatus and delivered over to the formal.
To see both circumstances as slavery by another name, it becomes difficult to discern when B was ever free. Just as difficult to imagine is a path for future emancipation. If not Officer 1, it’s easy to imagine an Officer 2 waiting for B once the prison is done with her—to seize the same opportunity as Officer 1 did when he rolled down his window and asked if B was a good or a bad girl.
B’s friend told her she’d get in his car if she knew what was good for her. The hard truth about it is that B’s friend was right.
The chief speaks
“These guys are reading this," Interim Chief Paul Saucier told the Telegram. "You’ve got to go home and tell your wife and kids, your mother: ‘This wasn't me. This didn’t happen.'"
This was his first public statement on the matter, released Friday morning.
“Give us something we can look at, that we can verify,” he said, including descriptions of times, places or officers. “There’s absolutely nothing but people making these allegations.”
Not once does he recognize the “people” behind the “allegations.” He speaks at length about the unfair treatment of Officer 1. B, on the other hand, does not even register in the narrative.
“I would like to know where this evidence came from," Saucier told the Telegram. Then, with much bravado, he said "I would like to analyze that evidence, and if there is a person out there that was doing that, I’m going to be the guy putting handcuffs on him and taking him to jail.”
Saucier was speaking to Brad Petrishen, the Telegram’s best reporter, who’s been doggedly following this issue for years. In 2022, shortly after the announcement of the DOJ investigation, he published a story headlined “Feds may investigate claims of Worcester police misconduct involving prostitution.” Within, there’s ample evidence that the issue was, in fact, known to Saucier and others in the police brass.
In a series of interviews with the Telegram & Gazette, leaders of Living in Freedom Together ― a city nonprofit that serves prostituted women ― confirmed its founder brought concerns to the DOJ in 2020, after finding city officials unresponsive.
The city declined to grant interviews or answer questions for this story, including about an allegation that LIFT’s founder, Nicole Bell, told the city’s human rights director in 2019 that an officer in Main South was forcing women into sex to avoid arrest.
The officer was moved off the beat, Bell said, but never formally investigated.
The allegation, which would constitute a crime, is among several claims LIFT alleges city officials have failed to investigate.
But to listen to Saucier, and everyone else adopting his line—from the mayor to the police unions to the majority of city councilors—it’s as if these allegations in the DOJ report came from thin air, with no prior precedent. That narrative is, of course, in their favor. But Petrishen’s 2022 story shows that Bell went to the authorities, and found them uninterested. For them to now say they need the DOJ to give them evidence, when it’s documented that they have it, should dispel the belief they’re making earnest statements. They are all lying in the particular way that cops lie.
This lie will also get a hearing Tuesday night, by way of a petition from police union officials (item 7w) that reads:
Richard Cipro, Anthony Petrone and Thomas Duffy on behalf of the International Brotherhood of Police Officials Local 504 and New England Police Benevolent Association Local 911 request City Council request City Manager request the Department of Justice release and present in a public forum the full investigatory report, specifically to what the DOJ states are "creditable allegations" of criminal sexual misconduct alleged to be committed by members of the Worcester Police Department. Further, request City Council request City Manager request the Department of Justice include the dates, times and names of all individuals alleged to have committed the stated misconduct and/or potential criminal activity.
There is a likely scenario in which the council votes in favor of this, and against the four petitions filed by Project Priceless. To do so is to confirm they are not at all interested in the evidence they claim to desire.
It’ll also demonstrate to the city manager that the majority of his 11 bosses are not interested in his proposed solution: a civilian review board, something city officials have resisted for a decade. The difference between a review board that works and one that doesn’t is in the details. A council that’s unable to apologize, that sides with the police over victims of police violence, is simply not going to endorse the version of a civilian review board with teeth. One with subpoena power, a dedicated staff, and a membership that truly reflects the wider community more than the “law enforcement community.” It falls on us to call this out, because we’ve seen time and again that Petty and Batista are all too comfortable pulling the most classic municipal move: propose what looks like a solution on the surface, but is designed to be useless in practice. If we’re ever able to discover whether the public is able to hold the police department accountable, we first need elected officials who actually want that. Right now, it’s painfully obvious that the majority of our councilors and our city manager do not.
To illustrate, we need only look at what happened at the last meeting.
Catching up with the council BS
Four councilors prevented their colleagues from speaking about the DOJ investigation of the WPD at council Tuesday night. Regular readers may be able to guess who! Candy Mero-Carlson, Kate Toomey, Donna Colorio, and Moe Bergman voted against a motion to allow the conversation—something that requires a 2/3 majority but almost always passes. This is the second exception in recent memory. These same four councilors also voted to block Gaza demonstrators from speaking on their ceasefire resolution in October, a decision the ACLU is now saying violates the first amendment.
Before we go any further let me just point out that of the four, three are exceedingly vulnerable in the upcoming municipal election. Mero-Carlson in particular. In 2023 she won by less than 200 votes. And Bilotta is running again! Turning out just 150 new District 2 voters could swing this one.
Colorio and Bergman came in fourth and fifth in a six-way race. Bumping off any of the three of them is an attainable goal—Mero-Carlson especially, and it just so happens she’s really the intellectual and political center of the crank project. If she lost to a progressive it would be an embarrassing blow not just to the cranks but to the whole growth machine running the city for its own benefit.
Bilotta campaign is priority number one heading into November as far as I’m concerned.
As these things usually happen, they came at the very end of a four-hour meeting. Things that happen after the Friday before the meeting, no matter how important, are reserved for a portion of the meeting nicknamed “under suspension.” This portion doesn’t have to happen at the end, but the timing is useful for the powers that be. It allows Mayor Joe Petty to tell members of the public they can’t speak on a given item of public importance (which he did several times Tuesday). Not on the agenda! He and everyone else knows a councilor will bring it up a few hours later, as happened Tuesday. By that time, public input has been safely suppressed and very few people are still watching. If they pulled that move at the beginning of the meeting, it would look transparently bad. This way, it only looks bad when you squint hard enough, which almost no one does.
So, right before adjournment, the thing everyone knew was going to happen happened. Councilor Khrystian King said he wanted to talk about the DOJ report.
This part is worth sketching out in some detail, because it demonstrates just how uninterested the city administration is in engaging with this report in good faith. Batista and Petty are both caught in weird, illuminating lies.
King begins:
“We know that the Department of Justice has issued a report to the city, Mr. Chairman, and this is an item that could not be anticipated given the fact that it just came out.”
Petty, uncomfortable, asks for an opinion from the city solicitor on whether King can speak about it. King said they don’t need an opinion. This is “unanticipated,” and so, fair game. The report did, after all, come out on Monday. “We do this all the time. We do this after every meeting.” Still, Petty insists. The deputy city solicitor (always forget her name) then makes an interesting comment.
My advice would be that we do not speak about the DOJ report because it is an anticipated report. There was a meeting on Friday. We were aware of these issues and we should advertise it the next public
Who’s “we”? King, like the rest of the world, found out on Monday. But apparently some people knew about it Friday. A quarrel ensues. Thu Nguyen speaks up. Wait, they say, who knew about it on Friday?
“I didn't know about the DOJ report until Monday. And so did someone else know in here that it was on Friday? Clarification please.”
The quibbling over process goes on for a while. Nguyen asks again.
My question was never answered or clarified. Did someone else know that it could have been on the agenda by Friday? I did not, which I found out Monday. So did someone else know about this and could have put it on the agenda?
Batista responds:
The DOJ spoke to us in confidence on Friday and asked us to not disclose any of this information. And so in confidence we could not disclose whether we received or not received a report that Friday.
They took the vote after that. It didn’t pass. But Batista let slip a very interesting detail at the end there. The DOJ asked the city to keep it confidential, and so Batista and Petty didn’t tell any city councilors, and didn’t put it on the agenda. What they did do was have an “outside lawyer” draft a statement and then, following his advice, released it to the Telegram three hours before the DOJ released their report. The statement, as we’ve been over, is crazy. Pure Trumpian bullshit. But it’s also crazy that Batista committed to keeping the report confidential, then violated that commitment brazenly, without any input. He lets this attorney call the report inaccurate, saying he speaks for the entire city. The next day, Batista puts out his own statement, saying the findings are shocking and unacceptable. He told the Telegram, on Wednesday, “my statement can be true, and his statement can be true, as well.”
But no, it can’t actually. In an email to all employees sent Tuesday, Batista clumsily walks this line from one paragraph to the next. He says...
It is imperative that the public have trust in their government and its public safety institutions. They must have faith that they will be protected by the system, and not victimized by it. That faith and that trust must also be earned.
Then...
I acknowledge the scrutiny law enforcement is faced with in today's climate and appreciate the commitment and sacrifice of our public safety officials. I ask of our entire municipal workforce that we stand united and remain devoted to our mission, vision and values as a City.
(Full thing here, I don’t think any other outlet has released it.)
As Kevin Ksen put it, “This is a game.”
The city administration is simply not seriously interested in reform. They will need to be bullied and shamed into taking this seriously. There is no other way. And the first step is an apology. Until we get there, we get nowhere. And as of right now, the city hasn’t even acknowledged the victims. Nowhere in all the statements made by the mayor, the city manager, the police brass, the majority of city councilors do women like B even register.
If the city can’t even recognize B, let alone apologize to her, it won’t do anything about Officer 1, or anything to stop the inevitable Officer 2. The pattern and practice will continue.
Please support this outlet!
In this moment, independent media couldn’t be more important. I really like J.P. Hill’s recent take on corporate media’s inability to meet the current moment:
The most influential papers in the country want you confused about class now more than ever. Their cynical take is that being born into the working class and making your way into the financial elite makes you a working class hero. This is a cynical lie about the nature of class, and they're not fooling a soul by bringing it forward in this moment of ruling class fear.
Locally, this manifests in our paper of record’s inability to contextualize the DOJ report for its readers. They have one reporter, Brad Petrishen, doggedly advancing the story. There’s no columnist to give that work moral weight, and help the community coalesce around a way of talking about these findings and the appropriate demands.
We’re stepping up to fill that gap—indeed that’s mostly what we do here. And if I had the money to match Brad’s salary I’d do everything I could to poach him. Maybe one day. But dreams like that are contingent on our ability to keep building this thing from the ground up. Every paid subscription gets us closer. Each represents a small investment from the community in a media apparatus that has no incentive other than to serve its readers. We want the city you want. And local independent media provides the new connections necessary to build it.
Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Send a tip on Ko-Fi
And check the merch store! I’ll be mailing out another round of stuff tomorrow. Got these sick ass camo hats in. I love them! There’s 20 and I expect they’ll be gone quickly.
A note from the community fridges
In a recent post and the first episode of the new podcast I shared a personal story about a ridiculous claim made by a man watching me stock the Portland Street fridge up one night. He told me he saw some Asians in a $100,000 car go into the fridge and take everything. I shared the story in an effort to demonstrate a certain thing mutual aid work is up against—that people can’t get it out of their head that a good thing will be abused, and have to invent ridiculous stories to confirm their suspicions.
The Worcester Community Fridge group wrote me on Instagram the other day to say these “fridge myths” are more common than you might think. They also took some issue with the way I presented it, which is fine. Allow me to state the moral of the story more overtly: the guy was being a racist dickhead and was obviously lying.
Here’s what they have to say:
Hi Bill!
Thank you for all the fridge love and support! We got a chance to read the latest substack and listen to the (new!) podcast, and we love how you are framing the purpose of mutual aid as opposed to charity.
The story you shared about the neighbor commenting that someone with a nice car was shopping for everything in the fridge is a story we've heard a lot in our organizing. We wanted to reach out to share what we've learned about navigating what we call 'fridge myths.'
Fridge myths often pinpoint a neighbor of a different race / ethnicity who is 'taking everything.' This feels very much like the racist trope of 'the welfare queen': a racialized 'other' who is 'taking advantage of' public programs, resources, and policies. The salience of racism, sexism, and xenophobia in our culture creates a harmful lens through which people perceive the actions of their neighbors. There is also an underlying desire to control that is entangled in fridge myths too, the idea that someone is shopping the 'wrong' way and that 'someone' should stop them.
Similar to how you responded, we try to encourage neighbors to be curious about each other, to learn folks' names, to listen, to take care of each other, to not assume someone's story.
We wanted to reach out in case this context is helpful. These stories have existed for a long time around the fridges, and they reflect how challenging it is to actively build solidarity and community in the context of a white supremacist culture. Using a leftist platform to retell a story about a wealthy, Asian neighbor cleaning out the fridge without naming the latent xenophobia in that story may be a missed opportunity to unpack some of that.
If there's an opportunity in the future to reshare this story (or a similar story), we hope that you will take the time to unpack it for your audience, so they are also empowered to recognize and disrupt these myths.
Odds and ends
Not gonna do the whole spiel again but your support would be much appreciated.
Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Send a tip on Ko-Fi / Merch store
It’s come to my attention there’s some quibbling over the Project Priceless statement in some corners of the “local left” such as it is, and it has mostly to do with certain semantic choices. As a result, organizations that should be signing onto the statement are not. I’ll keep my thoughts brief:
SMOC, the service provider at the temporary winter shelter at the old RMV, is getting $1.4 million in additional funding from the state, but is apparently not going to add any capacity.
The funds will not increase the number of beds that total 60, but it will help pay for staff, meals for the homeless, building security and maintenance costs...
Hm.
A reminder that investigators have so far been mum in the case of Enrique Delgado Garcia’s brutal and deadly beating at the state police training academy. Advocates for the family demanded justice at a rally over the weekend.
As a follow up to my Hell World piece about the shelter system, it looks like the strain of the migrant crisis was exaggerated, not as costly as projected. Hmm now why would they go and do a thing like that in this blue state?
Even though you can only backorder it like I did, I think it would be good to join the campaign to get Refaat Alareer’s posthumous poetry collection, If I Must Die, to the top of the New York Times best seller list.
Lastly, a good song about the United Health Care stuff right here!
See you on Tuesday.