Well I picked a hell of a two-week stretch to take off.
The events have been eventing at an exponential pace around here. Catching up it occurs to me I’ve got a unique vantage on the developments and how they all fit together, having been halfway across the country for most of them, blissfully unaware, and now, less blissfully, digesting them in all-at-once fashion.
We’ll go through them in timeline fashion.
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“Sticky, sticky sticky.”
Monday Aug. 31 — The Human Rights Commission had its annual meeting (translation: one meeting a year, for this board the manager said is the forum for public oversight of the police ) with the police department, to review what little data is provided and make suggestions on policy that are rarely adopted. The meeting opened with a sort of perfect metaphor of a moment: Chairman Randy Feldman asked if the letter they voted to draft in July asking the manager to reconsider his position on a civilian review board would be made public—something they are prevented from doing themselves, as a board, per rules Batista created several years ago explicitly to spite the HRC—in the minutes attached to the next meeting’s agenda. Already, it’s the quietest way to release a statement a municipal official could think of. I’d wager less than 1 percent of the city’s population could even find the HRC meeting minutes, and those of us that can will find it difficult and annoying and give up halfway through trying, as is by design. Every HRC meeting I’ve watched in the past few years involves some flavor of begging the staff liaison to make their work available to the public.
Like every other time, the staff liaison, Patricia LaFore, acted like Feldman’s request was a big inconvenience. “Yeah. It can be.” Feldman: “Okay, could we please have that attached to the minutes for the next meeting?” LaFore: “Sure.” While the meeting that followed is certainly worth catching up on, it’s too much for this week of all weeks.
Tuesday, Sept.1 — The police union and chamber of Commerce’s plot to crankify the state delegation failed big time. Both Jim O’Day and Mary Keefe smoked their Chamber- and police brass-backed opponents. Neither Raj nor Ron stood a chance, in retrospect, and the outcome called to question the true political influence, a of the police union and chamber, outside the city council, an arguably fake entity.
Wednesday, Sept. 2 — Kate Toomey rammed her car into a parked car on Harington Avenue just after the clock struck midnight, and while I guess we can’t say for certain we can allege with heavy confidence that she was on her way back from Ron Waddel’s election party, at crank HQ, Piccolo’s Fine Dining, taking a route back to her home on the Shrewsbury line south of Rte. 20. The route would appear nonsensical before considering a drunk driver might do well to avoid state highways and other known hot spots for state troopers, like lower Grafton Street.
We wouldn’t learn about this crash, nor how the WPD handled it, until a week and a half later. So hold onto the thought.
Monday, Sept. 7 — News broke of a UMass police lieutenant who was let off by WPD officers after a similar wreck in July, then subsequently charged after an internal review.
Tuesday, Sept. 8. — The public unaware of her own extremely similar incident, Toomey chaired a public safety standing committee meeting. They spent their time on the city’s noise ordinance, advancing an assault on one particular African church for being too loud in a ‘neighborhood that matters’ if you catch my drift. They talked about nothing else during the hour and 15 minute meeting, scheduled in such a way that it couldn’t go past an hour and a half, with the full council meeting scheduled in the same room providing a convenient “hard out.”
At the full council meeting, Toomey took possibly the most consequential vote on a WPD matter in her career, joining six other councilors in deciding to cease consideration of a civilian review board, over and against extremely loud community demand.
The vote came after another heated round of public comment. Labor organizer Kevin Ksen offered a through line that, in retrospect, really ties the whole room together.
The undermining and dismantling of the Human Rights Commission by this administration is disgusting. Disgusting. And it’s frustrating to see that having been done and then to turn around and say, “But don’t worry, we’re paying attention. We’re investigating transparency.”
Just last week, the T&G reported that the police turned their backs on drunken driving over at UMass Chan. Frustrating. Because those of us that have lived in the city decades know this has been an ongoing issue of the police turning their backs when somebody’s been stopped drunk driving. And the chair of the Public Safety Committee hasn’t done anything about it, and we as the city haven’t done anything about it. And it’s about time we start doing something to hold police accountable for their misdeeds.
Hmmm if only we had some evidence of exactly why the chair of public safety wouldn’t do anything about that. Then we could say something like “Worcester is a corrupt municipality and not a smart enough one to hide it very well.”
A reminder for those who are not municipal sickos: Kate Toomey is not just a city councilor, but the longtime chairwoman of the Standing Committee on Public Safety, the closest thing to a public police oversight body the city has, in theory. It is not, under Toomey’s leadership, used that way.
Where Kevin’s critique ages like a bottle of red, Toomey’s brief explanation of her vote, a few hours later, curdled in a way you rarely see.
The question isn’t whether we want police accountability. We absolutely do. The question is whether creating another civilian review board is the best way to achieve it.
The question is very much whether we want police accountability. This is a reality evidenced by Toomey’s own actions—in high profile fashion of late and on a more steady, mundane pace for decades. It is an open. fucking. question.
It is surreal that Kate said this—“…we want police accountability” —a week after she demonstrated exactly how much accountability we lack and exactly how she personally benefits from that arrangement. I mean, my god. Resign now while you have a shred of dignity. If you refuse to do so, Kate, I’m talking to you directly here, you will forever be remembered as a caricature: municipal corruption for and by police, distilled to its fundamental contours then exaggerated for comedic effect. “Kate Toomey” will cease to be a name so much as a symbol for this specific and, far as I can tell, universal flavor of municipal regulatory capture: the informal power structure of the police stuffing public office with their doddering buffoons, who then provide cover in exchange for some limited membership to the club. The public has glommed onto the Toomey Wreck Story in a big way. It’s never been so widely felt or publicly known that this arrangement is the way of things. It will not go away quickly.
And you are that way in, Kate. You are the avatar. You are the quiet part made loud as a car crash. Only a swift and full resignation gives you a shot, Kate, of making it temporary. Take that shot while you can.
Ok now back to addressing everyone else.
As we’ll get to she has not taken said shot, though she has inched closer.
The quote’s not over, though. This is how she ends it.
And I believe that Worcester should focus on an oversight system that’s independent, transparent, timely and grounded in professional expertise while preserving due process for our officers and protecting the public.
Nothing short of a lie.
Friday, Sept. 11 — Though the Toomey Wreck story ran on Saturday, via the Telegram’s Rachel Gow, the police confirmed the situation and supplied the body camera footage to the Telegram on Friday afternoon. I am realizing now this happened on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Reality racks up another score on satire. Game is a blowout.
Not to be outdone, on the same afternoon of never forgetting, the city manager put an encampment fine proposal on the council agenda for the following Tuesday, calling for $25 a day tickets for people found sleeping outside in our little slice of the land of the free, where what makes us different than the bad places of the world is our freedom from tyranny, which we achieve by sending our young people into the bad places, where they see the defense of our freedom up close, then come back veterans, who then experience the highest per-class-category rates of suicide, drug addiction, and—bringing it all back around—homelessness. That’ll be $25 please thank you for your service. If you don’t pay on time? Default warrant. Now you’re on the sharp end of the freedom stick you used play a part in holding. How’s it feel?
Saturday, Sept. 12 — The telegram releases an abridged cut of the body camera video the outlet was supplied by the WPD. Over the next few days they would release four unedited tapes from four different officers’ perspectives.
I went through the effort (considerable, for me at least) of getting all four views synced up on the same timeline
Let’s work through the minutiae. Lot of interesting little tidbits.
12:13 a.m. — She flashes a keycard badge at the officer closest to her, who’d asked for her ID. “That’s one,” she says, really chewing on the ‘apostrophe s’ sound in a way that only a drunk person does, as if it’s stuck in the back of their mouth like a spoonful of peanut butter. “That’s not your license, though,” the cop says. “I’m looking for it” she says, copping an attitude that’d get me yanked out of a car. The cop loses patience and asks her to spell her name so he can look it up. She spells her name wrong. “K - T - H” she begins... and it doesn’t get much better.
Meanwhile...
12:15 a.m. — A bystander, an older white man who lives nearby, says “looks like she might have clipped someone else too.” The back left of the white car has obvious black scuffing on it. The car she hit, with the front right side of hers, was white. The cops don’t ask Toomey about this detail in the available footage.
During the same exchange, he says “what, do you guys not lock em up anymore?” and then, after sharing a story about a similar crash in the past, he says that Toomey tried to get away, just like the other guy: that she was revving her engine and the ar wasn’t going anywhere. “My daughter comes out screamin’.” He also says a cop told them, after this similar crash in the past, that “we just serve ‘em papers, we don’t take ‘em in anymore.” Then later: “She didn’t know where she was. She kept saying “is the person all right?” I says ‘you hit a pahked frickin cah.”
This exchange occurred a few yards away from Toomey’s vehicle, where other officers are seen huddled around the open drivers side door as she continues to search for her ID.
Cut to: Cops next to Toomey.
A cop asks Toomey if she’s called someone to pick her up yet. “I have not yet,” she said. Then, “I tried to....” Another cop asks again and she says “I can....” One asks her if she needs an ambulance and the way she responds is no-doubt-about-it the slurred speech of a hammered person. They do not ask anything in any recording about whether she had anything to drink, this instance included. Must be nice. I’ve been asked a lot more, myself, for a lot less. I’m sure most people who’ve been pulled over can relate.
12:16 a.m. — Toomey hands the officer nearest a card, which the officer grabs like it’s a license, but we don’t know it’s a license, because it’s blurred out. He jots down some information then hands it back. Toomey then does something weird:
She flashes the license back at the officer, nods at him, knowingly, several times, then tries to call him over, closer. The officer to his credit just says “what’s up” then ignores her.
It’s at this point she decides to play the card.
“Can you...” She thinks about it for a minute: perhaps whether she should take it where she’s about to take it. And then she takes it there. “...call the chief?”
After she says that, a cop instructs our POV cop at that moment to step away from the vehicle. They move over to a nearby cruiser for a sidebar, during which the body camera is muted. The camera stays muted for the rest of that particular officer’s video.
A cop standing some 20 yards away, the sidebar conversation happening in the background on one side, the one-on-one conversation with Toomey happening on the other, whispers to himself, “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.”
12:19 a.m. — Toomey says “I’m sorry, I’m trying to get ahold of Anthony Petrone.” Playing her second card.
Here I should say it’s been five minutes and not a single cop has asked her anything about drinking. She plays her second or third get out of jail free card, with no indication whatsoever the cops were considering taking her to jail.
To the Petrone comment, an officer responded, “that’s totally fine. We just need you to call for a ride.” “Thank you, sir” Toomey replied, sounding genuinely grateful. “Thank you thank you thank you.”
12:21 a.m. — The cop who was talking to Toomey comes into the frame of the officer wisely standing out of earshot of that conversation. The cop looks at our POV cop knowingly, scratches the back of his head, says “sticky, sticky, sticky...” as in sticky situation. I’ll say!
Three minutes later, the “sticky sticky sticky” cop looks at our POV cop’s body camera directly, waiting for it to be muted. When the POV cop mutes it, he starts talking. They talk for a minute or so. After the cop walks away, the POV cop puts his mic back on. Several seconds later someone is heard saying “What? Are they gunna call fuckin’ Duffy?”
Duffy, for those unaware, is the president of one of our three police unions. Like Petrone, he is a well-connected power broker, but less of a political animal and more of a “cowboy up” type: the leader of the gang unit when the gang unit was racking up civil rights lawsuits at a steady clip.
A minute later, a cop is heard saying “Gotta love the City of Worcester, man,” while our POV cop whistles a work-a-day tune.
It’s just after this that an elderly woman strikes up a conversation with one of the idling officers. They’re just waiting on a tow at this point, milling around. She says something just on the edge of audible about a house down the street and what’s going on over there, some criminal conspiracy surely. Having duly reported the alleged crimes to the appropriate authorities she says, clear as day, in what-are-ya-gonna-do fashion, “well, they’re colored.” Cops laugh. One says “you said it, not me.”
A minute later the tow truck arrives and the body camera footage supplied to the Telegram ends. Toomey is still sitting in her car. It is unclear what happened from there.
With the full footage, even if most of it is muted... a feature of the Axon product that seriously dispels the myth it’s an accountability measure... we’ve had all week to digest what is very clearly two things: a public officials brazenly and cartoonishly flaunting her perceived immunity, and cops who may not have charged her with anything in the first place, despite there being probable cause a few different ways, and certainly didn’t after learning who she was.
It is also worth noting that Toomey was immediately lawyered up by Friday, when the story was in motion, speaking to the Telegram through one Michael Wilcox, a lawyer among the most prominent in the city, who’s also representing the family of deceased state police recruit Enrique Delgado Garcia. “There’s nothing nefarious about this situation,” Wilcox said, confirming the nefariousness of the situation. The car was illegally parked on the sidewalk, he added, as if to close the case. That Toomey was not charged with a crime but nevertheless contracted a defense attorney (and an expensive one, I imagine) to speak on her behalf is notable.
Monday, Sept. 14, another update: the chief of police made it known he didn’t speak to Toomey “during or immediately after” and would investigate whether any other police officials took a call. He used the investigation he’d just announced to decline to comment on why officers didn’t administer a sobriety test. Convenient! When that investigation will conclude and whether the details will be made public is anyone’s guess.
Around the same time, the coalition of community groups pressing for a CRB demanded in a statement that Toomey resign from the public safety subcommittee.
Massachusetts General Law c. 268A, § 23(b) is explicit and states: “An elected official may not invoke his position to seek preferential treatment from police officers during a traffic stop.” Body camera footage shows Councilor Toomey attempted precisely this, asking officers to “call the chief” and stating she would “get a hold of Anthony Petrone,” a Worcester police sergeant and former Union Police leader. These were clear attempts to leverage her official position for preferential handling. No officer challenged or documented this violation of conflict-of-interest law.
Full thing here.
The next day, she did, albeit “temporarily.”
Tuesday, Sept. 15 — Her momentary resignation was announced by way of a statement in which she otherwise maintained her innocence. Here’s the full text:
On September 2nd, I was involved in a collision with an unlawfully parked vehicle.Fortunately, nobody was injured. But to be clear, the police investigated the incident, I cooperated fully and was allowed to return to my home.
I was not in any way impaired and will face no charges.
In order to avoid any potential appearance of a conflict, I have decided to temporarily step down from the Public Safety Committee and recuse myself from any matter involving the Worcester Police Department until the investigation is over. I’m doing this out of an abundance of caution and to ensure that the work of our Committee and the integrity of the Worcester Police Department remain above reproach.
Flagging that she said with no equivocation she “will face no charges,” despite there being an active investigation into the incident, and that it’s extremely similar to another, involving the UMass cop, that ended in charges. “Have not faced” and “will not face” are two very different clauses in such a “live situation” to use some copspeak.
She also said she’s going to recuse herself from all police matters until the investigation is complete. This, of course, after voting on the most significant police matter in recent memory a week after she did what she did, but about three days before it became public knowledge.
Now, though, for sure...
The city council camping ordinance was held by Khrystian King, but still, dozens of speakers showed up to give the city the business about it, including several members of the unhoused community. Toomey attended remotely, with no camera on, and didn’t speak much. Her roll call votes sounded especially maudlin. She abstained as she said she would from votes concerning the police.
At the end of the meeting, District 3 City Councilor John Fresolo got up “under suspension,” a feature of the tail end of council meetings in which councilors bring up things that didn’t make the agenda proper, and read a lengthy statement. You can watch the whole thing below, it’s a trip. And it concerns a character that’s perhaps as much of a through-line over these past few weeks as Toomey: one Anthony Petrone, a WPD sergeant and local power broker, whom Kate Toomey is on video trying to call after totaling her car after an event that Petrone was almost certainly also at, given he was an advisor of sorts to Waddell.
Fresolo begins by explaining that he voted incorrectly on the civilian review board the week prior. He said he thought “file” meant to delay the vote to another meeting, not throw it in the trash (an honest mistake for a first-time councilor). And then he explained why he believes a civilian review board is necessary, by way of an unsettling story about Anthony Petrone.
Fresolo hinted at some sort of story involving a corrupt officer on Sept. 8, and apparently in the intervening week Petrone had confirmed it was about him via a Facebook post, so Fresolo decided to tell the whole thing publicly, since “sergeant Anthony Petroni has come forward publicly and said he’s the person I was talking about.”
Here’s the meat of said story:
My daughter was home that day. She was in our driveway cleaning her car. When the unmarked cruiser pulled up on our block she saw him and he saw her, in her words their eyes locked. She watched him take the picture and she called me right away to tell me what had just happened.
When internal affairs looked into this, my daughter spoke with them and told them everything she saw, in the end they found there wasn’t enough to act on. No discipline, not so much as a note in his file that a complaint had ever been made, so let me be very clear: My daughter and I did not wake up that morning looking for a fight with anyone. We didn’t go looking for this. It pulled into my driveway. ... I didn’t create it and my daughter didn’t either. It was created by the decision he made to drive a department vehicle to my home, on the clock, and take that picture.
I’m sorry, but that is brazen. And that is exactly why it belongs in this debate. If a city councilor somewhere with a microphone and a seat at this table can have his home photographed by an on-duty officer, have an eyewitness give a first-hand account to internal affairs, and watch the whole thing end up with nothing on paper, what is the ordinary resident supposed to expect when they file a complaint?
It’s not a question about one sergeant it’s a question whether the system we have works it matters for residents and it matters for the good officers too who deserve a process the public trust when it clears them.
Fresolo deserves credit for inserting Petrone’s name into the record and articulating, in public, an instance where he’s behaved as he behaves. Petrone has been allowed to broker so much power with so little accountability for a long time. If you remember the sprinkler ordinance fracas last fall, you may remember I put forward the theory that Petrone instructed Toomey and Mero-Carlson to axe it. I think the theory has aged quite well if you ask me.
That Fresolo used the council floor to bring the Petrone issue to light is a significant step and one likely, we can hope, to have a ripple effect.
And that’s a fitting place to end our timeline.
What to make of it all? I’ve spent six years doing my best to articulate the quiet reality that Worcester is run more like a gang than the democratic institution it is on paper—that the way it’s supposed to work is a smokescreen for the way it actually works—and this September so far has been one news item after another that confirm the observation in an exaggerated fashion that borders on the cartoonish.
Fresolo owning up to the mistake (and props to him, sincerely) changes nothing materially. But it does change the math in a significant way. A 7-4 vote is a different animal than an 8-3 vote. A 7-4 dynamic is corrected by removing just two of the seven.
Two councilors. That’s it! Get rid of two cranks. They may feel immovable because they’ve been there forever and the last election went, you know, how it went. But they are not. Far from it.
Luckily, one is extremely vulnerable and luckier still he is among the rudest and most obstinately opposed to anything that carries a whiff of “left.” Moe Bergman is on the council by a fingernail. A first-time challenger whose profile has only increased in the intervening months came within a margin so slim there was a whole recount. Half the battle right there. And he makes our case for us just about every week.
And another is currently embroiled in what should be a career ending scandal—what would be so in a normal place. With any luck, Kate Toomey has the poor judgement to run again, dragging the rest of her block down with her as the public happily finds a new opportunity to refocus on how she was let off on an obvious and dangerous DUI, and perhaps they’ll focus, then, on where she was coming from, and who she was with, and how they all let her drive.
And if that’s not enough, District 1 and District 5, Economou and Rivera, are also among the seven that need flipping.
Like Kamara, Linhares put up a stellar showing for a first timer. And Economou has used his time in office to uhhhh talk about how Worcester is the only city with neighborhood parks. And sound a little... you know... while doing it. (Allegedly; I heard someone else say one time; in a speculative and also fictional sense. Watch the clip though. )
In District 5, Rivera’s unprecedented 30 percent vote increase from 2023 to 2025 may be difficult to maintain if Duffy and Petrone and Murray find they have bigger fish to fry, or else find themselves bored by a district race with no assault and battery on police charge thrown into the mix. This, then, leaving Rivera to campaign on his own merit, defending his own record, using words in sentences successively arranged to articulate ideas. All of which he may find difficult. That’s what we call a vulnerable incumbent right there.
If the civilian review board vote doesn’t capture the attention of voters, in those two districts especially, where engagement skews higher and sentiments more liberal, then the homelessness criminalization pitch Batista dropped into the mix surely will, as was evident on Tuesday, the dozens of commenters who stilled turned out despite a well publicized delay, and the many resonant, well articulated claims that the proposal is both anathema to “who we are here” and also straight out of the Project 2025 handbook, in other words “pretty Trumpy.”
Since city hall is high school, that 7-4 split on the civilian review board thing will undoubtedly be the same vote on the camping fines proposal. It’ll either go that way or the mayor will, behind the scenes, orchestrate a rug pull. Batista will walk it back. And that will make the manager look weak to the goons who put the idea in his ear. And that will in turn make Petty look like he’s unsure of his chosen man. And since that’s the only job he has that matters, in turn his only real legacy, might the seven term incumbent find it’s a good time to hang up the cleats? Before that sentiment is allowed to mature in the polity? Hm, Joe?
And then, in that event, we arrive at a really fun question: who do they have on the bench?
Oh baby Worcester’s getting fun again!
But the fun isn’t over. The camping fine proposal is back on the agenda Tuesday and we need another strong showing to underscore how unpopular this proposal is with the public.
Here’s the agenda and here’s the report on the proposal. Meeting’s at 6:30 p.m., City Hall third floor.
Also on the agenda is this hilariously obtuse order from Toomey’s second fiddle on public safety:
9/22/26 Council Agenda: Order 10d. Request City Manager request Police Chief provide increased traffic enforcement on Harrington Way to address speeding concerns in the area. (Bergman)
TY to reader Steve Hart for flagging that one. What a world. In his words, “you can’t make this stuff up.”
Ahead of the council meeting, the Carpenters Union will be holding a demonstration outside city hall, calling on the city to do something about Optline, a contractor working in the city that loooooves to call ICE on workers who try to get their overtime pay. Optline was at one time banned from working on taxpayer funded projects but has since been un-banned, in keeping with the way everything else is moving around here.
And on Wednesday there’s a journalism panel on public safety reporting at the library, which should prove interesting given everything going on of late. Here’s the event page. Two homies on the bill: Chris Faraone from BINJ and John Keough from TWIW.
Ok that’s all for me for today.
Again please consider helping this outlet stay afloat. This only exists because you make it so. There’s been a lot written about the Toomey situation but ask yourself if any of it looked remotely like what you just read! We don’t try to “beat the competition” to getting the same story up quicker we try to offer a way in to really understanding how it all fits together.
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Recording a podcast episode tonight! Look out for it tomorrow.
New Boy Harsher record is very sick. Jeans is the standout jam. They’re from Western Mass btw pretty cool.
Still no word on the WPD involvement in the Solomon case…or is that filed?