Outrageous Government Conduct
The DOJ, Governor Healey, the ACLU and "Candlestick Bowling"
Sheeeeesh is this shaping up to be a banner week for Worcester! Can we get accused of violating all 10 of the Bill of Rights by Friday? We shall see.
Today’s newsletter is a special, rapid-fire edition. Just trying to get everyone up to speed on all the crazy stories going on before the city council tonight, which we will be streaming of course. (WCT3k Twitch 6:15 p.m.)
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Further down in the post I’m sharing an excerpt but on Monday Welcome To Hell World published a piece I wrote on the statewide shelter cuts and I’m really proud of it, so I don’t want it to get lost in the fray of this crazy Worcester news week: “It becomes hard to see the difference”
Here’s what’s on the menu.
The DOJ investigation—the city’s response—the shelter cuts—the ACLU on the Gaza ceasefire—council tonight—odds and ends
“Outrageous Government Conduct”
The DOJ released its investigation of the Worcester Police Department yesterday—a task it had been engaged in since 2022. The 43-page document is a stunning summary of police abuses of power and lack of accountability. As an indictment, it is damning. But, unfortunately, the solutions proposed are lacking. Even more unfortunate: the city has already taken an antagonistic position, opting to kick and scream over engage with the document in good faith. And they’re being used by an ambitious Trumper in doing so, but we’ll get there.
I’m going to address the three points—problems, solutions, city response—in cliff notes fashion. There’s so much to dig into deeply, but it’ll have to wait. Heading into the council meeting tonight, it’s important we all have a solid understanding of the basic facts, as city officials are sure to recklessly distort and obfuscate the Department of Justice’s findings. (Come watch it with us on Twitch baby).
Problems
Trigger warning for this part: rape, sexual abuse, coercion
Three general themes: 1., Wanton exploitation of sex workers, up to and including rape. 2. Excessive use of force, involving tasers, punches to the head, and aggressive police dogs. 3., clear pattern of racial discrimination in stops and arrests.
—On the sex abuse issue, ten harrowing pages (16-26) cover three sections: sex while undercover, credible reports of sexual assault, and problems with the way the department investigates sexual assault in the rare instances it gets reported.
“Unwanted sexual contact by an officer—from groping or fondling to penetration—shocks the conscience and serves no legitimate governmental purpose,” the report reads.
Here are a few choice examples:
“one woman who was involved in the commercial sex trade recounted that a WPD officer sexually assaulted her in 2019 after pulling up in a rental car, announcing he was a police officer, flashing his gun, showing her a bag of drugs, and threatening to arrest her on a drug charge if she did not provide oral sex ... the officer took her for a ride. He told her that if she did not have sex with him, he would make her life difficult on the street...”
“A WPD officer who happened to be at the party and was wearing a badge offered to take her to the hospital. She told us that she “thought he was a good guy” for offering to take her to the hospital. However, once she got into his car and he began to drive, he refused to take her to the hospital until she provided oral sex. She did not want to perform oral sex on the officer, but told us that she complied with the officer’s demand to so she could “get to a safe place.”
Another woman reported that in 2015, when she was just 19 years old, a WPD officer forced her to have sex with him. The young woman, who was homeless, had become involved in the commercial sex trade at the same time as another young woman. She recounted that an officer used to taunt the pair from his patrol car. He asked if she was a “good girl” or a “bad girl.”
“...one woman said that, in or around 2021, an undercover officer touched her breast and permitted her to touch his genitals before he arrested her. Another woman described an undercover officer asking her to touch his penis, which she did, before being arrested as part of a sting.”
“...an undercover WPD officer summoned a woman over to his car and asked if he could touch her ... “Can I get some nipple?” He then started fondling her and twisting her nipple. He then drove her to a different area where she was arrested.”
“(a) captain endorsed sexually touching women during stings, erroneously stating that such behavior from officers is not illegal because it was consensual and is not sexual assault because “the prostitutes have been doing it for a while” and it is not necessarily unwanted.
These are only a few of many. “This predatory sexual misconduct shocks the conscience, tarnishes the badge, and traumatizes the women subjected to it,” the report reads.
—One section covers the use of force (6-15), and leads with the WPD’s use of tasers—specifically the penchant WPD officers have for setting them on the more powerful “drive stun mode” and applying electric shocks to people who are already detained. Like so...
“WPD unreasonably uses Tasers to gain compliance from people who do not immediately follow officers’ demands...” In the situation depicted above, it was a 55-year-old man they’d found guilty of “criticizing the police,” according to the report. A WPD officers once used a taser on a man for loitering.
The report then goes over WPD officers’ penchant for punching people in the head. Here they reference the infamous stretcher moment. But it’s far from the only one.
Then they move to police dogs, which is a tough read. A police dog once bit a woman in an abandoned building who was hiding under a blanket. Using the dog for such an operation in the first place is bad policy, says the DOJ. Hiding under a blanket. Some others:
“WPD officer ordered a police dog to bite a man who was on the ground and surrounded by at least two officers ... as two officers continued trying to handcuff the man, a canine officer ordered his dog to bite the man. The police dog latched onto the man’s leg and thrashed its head for at least 15 seconds before releasing its bite.”
“…in October 2019, a police dog bit a man who had committed no crime, posed no threat, and had simply tried to enter his apartment building.”
That last one cost the city $275,000 after video showed the officer lied about what happened. Much of these use of force sections play like greatest hits compilations of the past few years in “WPD brutality.”
—Section E (27-32) covers racial disparities, and reads like a rewrite of the city’s Racial Equity Audit, but the point is worth stressing: WPD doesn’t collect enough data to prove whether or not it’s being racist and you have to imagine that’s on purpose. Still, with the data available, the pattern is clear. Black and Hispanic people are much more likely to be stopped, searched, beaten, arrested, charged. A choice highlight:
“According to the man’s deposition testimony, after learning that the man was from Ghana, one WPD officer asked him, “Is this how you fucking monkeys treat your police officers?” before using so much force while the man was handcuffed that he defecated on himself.”
Sheesh.
Solutions
Two pages at the end of the report are spent outlining “recommended remedial measures.” Almost all of them are policy changes, some laughably vague, some already enacted by the department. Compared to the summary of abuses, these proposals receive scant attention. Even if enacted, they’d do little to reform the department. In its own report, the DOJ references several instances of police abuses in which officers went against training. Like this line about an officer who punched a guy in order to make him less mentally unwell:
The officer—who had previously received 40 hours of training regarding crisis intervention—was never held accountable for this excessive use of force, though he was disciplined for failing to report the incident.
The last recommendation is the most interesting, and frustrating.
Throughout the report, it’s made quite obvious that the “bad apples” outlined lie within the gang unit and the vice squad, but they’re never named directly, not even in this last recommendation, which uses the obfuscatory term “specialized units.” I wrote at length about the issues with our “plain clothes units” last year. We’ve always known right where the bad apples are we just don’t care.
Anyway—It would be a cinch for the city to say “Ok, thank you DOJ,” and adopt these tepid reforms in short order. Just a few policy tweaks. But will they?
City response
Nope!
At 9:23 a.m. yesterday, the Telegram’s Brad Petrishen (the best reporter on police issues in the city, bar none) had a story up: Lawyer for Worcester slams U.S. Justice Department investigation of police as unfair. A few hours later, around 1 p.m., the DOJ published the report. The city’s statement came from Brian T. Kelly, a lawyer from a high-powered Boston firm. The city spokesman confirms in the story Kelly’s statement is the city’s official position. City councilors had no idea Kelly was contracted for the job or what he said until it hit the Telegram website.
Before engaging with the substance of the city’s response, several questions: why did the city put a statement out before the DOJ made the report public? Why did they choose to make the statement through an “outside attorney”? And why was it sent directly to the Telegram, rather than thrown on the city’s website, as is the traditional method? We deserve answers to all of these. Hopefully we’ll get them tonight.
Kelly’s statement was deeply antagonistic—an indication the city’s not going to ‘play ball.’
In a statement sent to the Telegram & Gazette early Monday morning, Brian T. Kelly, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice, alleged the report to be “riddled with factual inaccuracies” and said it “ignores information provided by the City which debunks many of the anonymous claims.”
Kelly then accuses the DOJ of “racing to publish an inaccurate report before the change in presidential administrations” and says the DOJ “has done an extreme disservice to the entire Worcester community and, in particular, to the hundreds of honorable Worcester police officers who risk their lives every day to make Worcester a safe place to live.”
Who even is this guy, and who allowed him to speak for “the entire Worcester community”? Kelly is a partner at Nixon Peabody, a Boston law firm, with a specialty in “white collar defense.” This is a guy you hire when you know you’re wrong. Past clients per his page include a for-profit hospice company accused of defrauding medicare and patients, a financier of Kurt Schilling’s criminal foray into video games, and “a Fortune 100 technology company in an internal investigation into alleged FCPA (bribery of foreign officials) violations.” Hmmm. Now, he’s the city’s point man against the DOJ.
Just last week, Kelly was quoted in a Boston Globe story speculating on who Trump would choose for the state’s attorney general.
“I’d expect a short window of time for the Trump administration to act on these positions,” said Boston attorney Brian T. Kelly, a partner at Nixon Peabody LLP and former federal prosecutor who headed the public corruption unit.
Two grafs later the Globe reports that he himself is a contender.
Kelly, a Republican, has been mentioned in legal and political circles as a contender for the US attorney job under Trump, but declined to say if he is vying for it other than to say, “Anyone would be honored to be considered.”
After all, the Globe reports, it was Kelly that brought a civil case against a group that tried to get Trump off the Massachusetts ballot earlier this year.
Again—this is the guy that Eric Batista’s city administration has entered a partnership with, loudly set against the federal government. This decision was one that city councilors, Batista’s supposed boss, were not made aware of. And then Kelly spoke for “the entire Worcester community.” And Batista has, so far, said nothing.
Did no one in city hall find it suspicious this guy, a top contender for Trump’s MA US Attny pick, was ready and willing to publicly lambast Biden’s Department of Justice & grandstand about police officers? Just a few weeks before Trump needs to make a pick?
Yet again, the city is getting rinsed by a more capable villain. Absolutely unbelievable.
I submitted a few public records requests for emails between Kelly and the city, trying to get a sense of how this statement was contracted. It’ll likely take at least a few weeks, and that’s if they don’t force my hand and make me file an appeal, like they’re currently doing for Shotspotter correspondences I’ve been trying to get for six months now.
Now to the city council, who will likely discuss this only briefly at the very end of the meeting tonight. In a piece I wrote about the DOJ investigation for Welcome To Hell World back in 2022, A department that has never faced any serious scrutiny, I wrote:
After this DOJ investigation was announced, one of these city councilors attempted to defend the WPD by saying “just because things have happened in the past doesn't mean they’re happening now.” That councilor’s name is Kate Toomey and she is the chairwoman of the council’s public safety subcommittee, which is the body designed to be the main pressure point of police accountability. The person in charge of the accountability body says ‘idk if there’s anything to worry about.’ You couldn’t write a better Parks & Rec bit.
We can expect that bit to continue tonight.
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It becomes hard to see the difference
Today, new cuts to the state’s family shelter system go into effect. This latest round is all but guaranteed to put families on the street—something the state has a legal obligation to prevent, in accordance with the 1983 right to shelter law.
I wrote about the cuts, and the fact our Democratic governor is scapegoating migrants in order to enact them, for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hell World, the first newsletter ever created in history. Here’s how it starts...
In August of 2023, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency. The “rapidly rising numbers of migrant families,” she announced, are hitting the Massachusetts shelter system in an “unsustainable manner.” The declaration came with a letter to Biden’s director of homeland security. “Simply put, we do not currently have the tools we need to meet the rapidly rising demand for emergency shelter,” it read.
Two months later she signed a package of tax cuts that will cost the state $1 billion annually in perpetuity. The big winners there were the offspring of dead millionaires. Estates worth more than $2 million are no longer taxed as they’re passed down to inheritors. Day traders also made out. But the benefits to normal people were negligible, as per tradition. Renters for instance got about $50 each (conditions apply). Upon announcement, she took a victory lap, embarking on the “Cutting Taxes, Saving You Money” tour.
Within weeks, she also announced cuts to the shelter system, saying “state and local budgets can only stretch so far," and imposed a new 7,500 family cap. It’s a number that the state was guaranteed to hit, and hit quickly. Families in the shelter system had risen from 5,500 to 7,000 in the months preceding. Most of the new arrivals came from Haiti, a country recently thrown into a new round of chaos, another harvest of empire. Their migration is a symptom of longstanding US policies to keep the country in debt and controlled by our chosen warlords. Massachusetts, with its large Haitian diaspora, is a natural destination.
Despite the fact roughly half of the families in the shelter system were still “from here,” the governor’s messaging now had a villain in the form of the “new immigrants,” an inciting incident with the “recent wave,” a conflict, meaning “the strain,” and a protagonist known as the “taxpayer.” Coincidentally, the cost of the system was inching toward $1 billion, the same amount the state had just handed back to the rich in tax cuts. By and large the statewide press glossed over that, and left Healey’s narrative unchallenged – to varying degrees of vulgarity.
In January, Healey, who often brags about having sued Trump more than 100 times as the state’s attorney general, joined eight other governors in penning an open letter to the Biden-Harris Administration, calling for more border patrol agents, more immigration judges, and more asylum claims adjusters. The border, they said, needed fixing...
Read the rest over at Welcome To Hell World and, if you haven’t already, subscribe to Luke. Great stuff. So great I flagrantly ripped it off when I started Worcester Sucks.
Shorty after submitting this piece I drove past the Shaw’s on Gold Star on the way to deliver some merch, and saw a police officer talking to people who’d had a small tent setup for weeks on the side of the building. It was just starting to rain. On the way back, it was pouring. The cop was gone and the people were packing up their stuff, on the way to... somewhere. To another place where another cop will make them pack up in the cold November rain.
In a viewpoint-discriminatory manner
Yesterday the ACLU sent a letter to city officials explaining the way they handled the Gaza ceasefire petition was a clear first amendment violation. The council, they said “has applied its City Council Rules in a viewpoint-discriminatory manner.” Continuing:
...the City has excluded the Coalition’s proposed resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza from the City Council’s agenda when it has previously allowed other resolutions involving international matters to be placed on the agenda, including another resolution regarding Israel and Gaza just last year. Such differential treatment threatens the core constitutional protections enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Articles 16 and 19 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.
The ACLU is calling upon the council to put it back on the agenda, either at the December 17 meeting or in January. Read the full thing here.
If they’re not going to listen to the DOJ, it’s doubtful they’ll listen to the ACLU. The city would have to be outright sued to get this back on an agenda. And even then...
Man, this has got to be an all time embarrassing week for this city.
Council preview
None of the above stories are on the agenda tonight. Instead, per Mike Benedetti’s great agenda preview newsletter, we have this…
“Candlestick Bowling”: Candlepin bowling was famously pioneered in Worcester. Councilor Bergman wants a memorial “at or near the location on Pearl St. where candlestick bowling was invented 145 years ago (in 1880).” Is this a term for candlepin I haven’t heard of? I’m no expert, but the experts I know are outraged, I can tell you
You just have to laugh sometimes.
Here’s the full agenda. Biggest thing is the city manager’s contract (10a), which itself includes a potentially illegal clause that he be paid $10,000 more than the next highest paid official (the superintendent). For more, from last week: “Batista demands to be paid more than Monarrez.”
Other stuff: setting the dual tax rate for next year, a $200,000 TIF for developers at 57 Exchange St. (12.4 C), strengthening regulations around sprinkler installation (14 B and C), a probe into the relationship between the city manager and the Human Rights Commission (14f), and Moe Bergman criticizing the city’s plan to reduce pedestrian deaths (14j). Right after that we’ll hear from him about “Candlestick Bowling.”
You gotta laugh... come do so with us: WCT3k Twitch 6:15 p.m.
Odds and ends
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Today’s post was expedited so if you saw any typos… sounds like a personal problem.
If you missed it, the first episode of Outdoor Cats is out now! Thanks for all the kind words about it so far.
This Saturday I’m at the Worcester Punk Rock Flea Market!! Might just have a special guest! Come hang. Hotel Vernon 1-7 p.m.
City lawyer Mike Traynor picked a convenient time to announce his retirement you gotta hand it to him.
WooFridge did a Worcester meme dump that’s 10/10 no notes.
Lastly… The Gun Club was such a good band, damn.
I read the complete DOJ report and I am horrified! So the plan is to "sweep it under the rug?" I agree the corrective plan should be stronger, but at least it identifies the multiple problems, and it is clear the DOJ is not going away. WOW!