Imposing ignorance on the system
City manager lies to the public big time
Hello hello apologies for the late hour but I’m up against it. Leaving for a camping trip at 6:30 a.m. tomorrow. I’ll be back in time for the next city council meeting, which is going to be perhaps even crazier than the last. Until then? No phone, no nothing. Just the woods with some of my best and oldest pals.
The civilian review board drama keeps unfolding and unfolding and will again be the subject of today’s (tonight’s) post. The primary guide I’ve been trying to get out will have to wait yet again! Let’s get to it.
First, this outlet only exists because of the members of our community who want it to so much they send me the equivalent of one maybe one and a half Dunkies a month. If that’s you, thank you thank you thank you! If it’s not, it could be, and it’s just one maybe one and a half Dunkies.
Imposing Ignorance On The System
Next Tuesday’s council meeting (agenda) will again focus primarily on the manager’s decision to forgo the civilian review board proposal he floated, in retrospect quite obviously, to placate an angry community after the DOJ released its WPD investigation detailing all manner of horrible power abuses, up to and including systemic rape.
It’ll be another meeting to tune in to, show up for, make a stink about. The council will do... something... with the manager’s report. Remains to be seen. But it’s another opportunity to give ‘em the business. The course of the night colored by the bizarre news cycle around the DOJ’s abandonment of the Worcester investigation. As I covered last post, this was set off by a three paragraph, self-congratulatory press release from the city manager, in which our esteemed not-the-mayor Eric Batista tried to trick us into believing the DOJ absolved the WPD. The investigation, he said, was dropped “without sustaining any of the findings” in the 2024 DOJ report.
Turns out that was a lie! Flat out, unambiguous lie. Unbelievable.
Big ups to Sam Turken at GBH who got his hands on the actual letter the DOJ sent, releasing the full text of it earlier this week in a story headlined “Newly obtained DOJ letter sheds light on decision to close investigation into Worcester Police.”
The letter is from Patrick McCarthy, acting chief of the special litigation section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and it’s addressed to Brian Kelly, the lawyer the city initially hired to put out an atrociously Trumpian statement about the report when it was released. (Remember that? I can’t even bring myself to go get the link. It was so rotten. Ugh.)
Here’s the full text of the letter. As an exercise, humor me: read it closely. Be on the lookout for any language about sustaining findings.
I write regarding the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Worcester Police Department (WPD) pursuant to 34 U.S.C. § 12601. Our investigation focused on allegations of use of force and sexual contact during undercover operations. As explained below, the Department is closing this matter.
Since our December 9, 2024 findings report, WPD has taken a number of important steps and shared substantial information with us. We requested, and PD produced, existing and updated policies, training materials, incident reports, body-wor camera video, and complaint investigations related to use of force and sexual misconduct allegations. We reviewed all reported uses of force by WPD officers from July 1, 2025 through December 31, 2025, with the assistance of a subject-matter expert. On July 14, 2026, our team met with WPD leadership and personnel. including Chief Saucier. In addition, WPD clarified its policies to demonstrate a strengthened use-of-force review and explicit prohibition against officers engaging in sexual contact while on duty.
Based on these developments and lack of current allegations concerning the conduct that was subject to the original investigation, we are closing this matter without further action. We thank Chief Saucier and WPD for their cooperation, and we commend WPD for taking steps to improve its practices.
Did you see anything in that about the allegations being sustained or not sustained? Still an open question what “sustain,” the way the manager used it, even means. But the tone, I think it’s fair to say, is ‘you have made improvements since we found this pattern of bad behavior, there seems to be less bad behavior now and better systems to prevent it.’ The entire letter rests on the tacit assumption that the DOJ stands by what its investigators found.
The line that opens the third graf is the most critical: “Because of these developments and lack of current allegations...” i.e. no evidence of what we found and still believed happened is still happening (more on that in a sec). It’s not something you say when you’re doing a take-backsies. That the city manager tried to twist it into that, ‘the DOJ told me they made a whoopsie,’ is intellectually insulting. Grounds for termination for an executive who makes north of $300,000 annual. A willful misleading of the public on one of the most important questions the municipality has faced in a long time. He won’t be punished, I feel confident saying, and therein lies the true nature of corruption in this city. It’s in who he lied for, and who will happily swallow the lie, and who will parrot it, that the above-board corruption of our city government is and will continue to be on full display.
Exhibit A:
Wherein Kate Toomey is asking permission, for some reason and to whom remaining unclear, to hold a meeting of the subcommittee she has the sole legal authority to schedule meetings for. In keeping with the way she sees her role, this “discussion,” should it ever happen, will be for propaganda purposes only.
Reading deeper into this letter from the DOJ, knowing what we know about their greatly diminished capacity in the arena of civil rights, we should take the “lack of current allegations” with a grain of salt. The letter lists three things that happened prior to the DOJ dropping off: 1. a review of reported “use of force” incidents, which doesn’t include unreported sexual assault, i.e. most sexual assault, especially when a cop is involved. 2. They met with the chief once. And 3. the WPD demonstrated a “strengthened use-of-force review” and “explicit prohibition against ... sexual contact on duty.” This, in context, means there was no explicit prohibition against WPD officers having sex on duty prior. Alex here says it better than I could:
These are thin grounds on which to close out an investigation that required hundreds of man hours, dozens of interviews, and sorting through reams of documents to put together. It’s hard to imagine that a DOJ Civil Rights Division that wasn’t gutted by 70 percent over the past year, redirected to explicitly white nationalist enforcement priorities like “Fraud” with a silent “Somali,” would let years of work go so easily.
Celebrating this moment the way the manager did in that release is pig-like chauvinism, a great stain on this city that will linger for years and years.
While the majority of this city council is sure to swallow and spit up the lie, Councilor Khrystian King released a statement earlier this week that speaks plain truth to the situation.
It is beneath Worcester’s leadership to treat the federal government’s failure to finish its work as vindication or proof that the original findings lacked merit. The City Manager’s latest mischaracterization continues a pattern established at the outset, when the City Manager and Mayor approved a statement from the city’s outside counsel labeling the DOJ report “unfair, inaccurate and biased” before the City Council had an opportunity to publicly review and deliberate on its findings.
This effort to discredit the findings places Worcester’s leadership in disturbing alignment with a Trump administration actively dismantling civil-rights protections. Worcester’s experience must also be understood within the broader federal retreat from civil-rights enforcement.
If the manager’s calculation in releasing that lie of a statement was that it’d help paper over the civilian review board debate before Tuesday’s meeting, that has backfired spectacularly. Instead, he showed us exactly why we still need one.
I was pleased to find this sentiment echoed in a statement by the coalition for a civilian review board released this afternoon.
A department describing its own progress to the agency that investigated it is not equivalent to independent confirmation that the progress is sufficient, sustained, or complete. This is precisely why Worcester needs a permanent, independent Civilian Review Board: to verify progress independently of the department’s own account of itself.
A few more notes on this:
A meeting of the city’s Advisory Committee on LGBTQIA+ Affairs that took place on August 5 was finally uploaded to the city’s YouTube page earlier this week. The committee, which advises the city manager directly, took a unanimous vote to draft a memo stating its opposition to the manager’s abandonment of the civilian review board proposal. Staff Liaison Patricia LaFore, same one that does the HRC meetings, emphasized repeatedly that they only had the power to send a memo and could not vote to make a public statement, per a three year old rule implemented by the manager they ostensibly advise. As of press time, the memo is apparently on the way to the manager’s office, but it hasn’t been publicly released as far as I know.
Acting chairman of the Human Rights Commission Randy Feldman yesterday released a statement emphasizing the position of the commission (minus the police chaplain Batista personally appointed to it to placate the law enforcement community). Feldman said the the alternative offered by the manager, a separate system of review for some cases taking place under his DEI office but not replacing WPD review, misses the point: It’s not independent. He then details the long history of HRC policy suggestions being ignored.
An independent review board should also have the authority to examine departmental policies and practices, not simply individual complaints. Worcester’s experience with the Human Rights Commission demonstrates why this distinction matters. Over the past several years, the Human Rights Commission has reviewed and raised concerns about numerous proposed police policies.
Virtually all recommended significant changes were not adopted, save for one concerning using professional translation services if the officer at the scene did not speak the language needed.
Policies involving use of force, juvenile arrests, undercover operations, responses to individuals experiencing mental or behavioral health crises, and the operation of specialized units remained unamended by HRC suggestion.
A well-articulated summary of the current failures, providing a nice contrast for the next thing:
Joe Petty was cornered outside a diner it seems by a cable crew for Spectrum News and he gave an off-the-cuff interview about all this. “The chief has done a good job implementing the policies and procedures that they wanted implemented.” Going unmentioned was that a civilian review board was one of the things they wanted implemented. On that, Petty said: “Like they seem to cause some more chaos, more anxiety than getting anything done. Look what happens in Boston. The Commissioner just comes in, says, no, I’m not going to do it.”
It’s different here, where the manager and police chief ignore the Human Rights Commission, the Worcester Regional Research Bureau, the Board of Health, the Advisory Committee on LGBTQIA Affairs, a large coalition of local organizations, the hundreds of city council speakers at this point, the lawsuits for garish abuses of power, the reporters getting sued for writing about it...
“So people have with experiences, you’ve got to listen to them,” said Petty, as likely as not understanding that he was saying something that meant nothing.
The other day I had “Democracy Now” on the radio, courtesy local legends WCUW, and caught the line “imposing ignorance on the system,” delivered in a statement by a scientist with NOAA, as part of a comment on the Trump Administration’s abrupt decision to cease funding the Artic Report Card, an annual report tracking all manner of data on the Artic’s overall health. It seems to me, looking at this note next to the Petty quotes above, that Trump’s imposition of ignorance might be experiencing what the economists call the “trickle down effect.”
Later in the same show, I caught another line, “accountability should always be with the system designers.” Whatever this messed up system is in Worcester City Hall, it’s not the one on paper, and Joe Petty is for a certain fact one of its designers.
So with that in mind, do mark your calendars for next Monday night’s municipal operations subcommittee meeting. Charter change is on the agenda, and in so much as a way out of Petty’s system is possible, it will more likely than not involve a charter review process—a process that has only ever been used in this city to diminish the role of the public, not the other way around. But hey there’s a first time for everything, right?
Odds and Ends
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I also want to plug a fundraiser for the wife and daughter of local tattoo artist Christopher Welch. Chris died in a motorcycle crash on I-190 last week. Katie knew him, said he was the sort of guy who’s always a treat to run into, always had a story, something cool in the works, type of guy so crucial to any artistic community who’s always in everyone’s corner, always jazzed and hyping everyone up. Their daughter’s just two months old, a fact that could bring me to tears if I hang on it any longer. Here’s the link again.
Good Reddit thread from a Worcester Subredditor who found out how much money we pay Eric Batista to carry the water of the small and unaccountable coterie that actually makes decisions. As noted, it’s more than real and notable mayors such as Michelle Wu and Zohran Mamdani. Such is life under The Dome.
Two late night posts for the Worcester Sucks team tonight. Be sure to read Aislinn’s post on the WPS’ Friday news dump about residistricting. Releasing all that info juuuuust ahead of a meeting about it on Tuesday is very a very City Hall move from the folks over at Durkin Administration.
Ok I gotta get to bed ASAP. Good night, moon. Good night, computer. Good night, computer friends. Here’s a real deal rock and roll song.