The polite and naive owner of a large rabid dog

He could jump that thing if he really wanted to

What’s up what’s up what’s up. Kept it to one tight piece about WPD today. It was a deceptive amount of work to get it together and I’m deep in burnout territory. So I’ll dispense with the usual niceties!

The WPD takeover of the council chambers—the bad apples—does this council have any power?—odds and ends

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The polite and naive owner of a large rabid dog

Square jawed, broad shouldered, six-foot-something, his head was buzzed in the fashion of a marine. If he were wearing fatigues and not a thin blue line t-shirt, you could swap him for the actor who played Stephen ‘Godfather’ Ferrando in Generation Kill without notice.

Ferrando-from-WPD was a few feet away from me on the third floor of city hall Tuesday night. Amid the sweaty throng of cops, the cop wives, and the otherwise cop-adjacent, peppered with protestors of their sexual violence, Ferrando stood in the entryway between the hall and the fenced-off pen for the public within the council chamber. A prime position, giving him vantage over the public speakers, the gallery full of cops above him and the hallway filled with cops behind. The last of the speakers they’d assembled took the podium: Alyssa Duffy, wife of Thomas Duffy, the president of New England Police Benevolent Association Local 911. They brought the wives out. This was something new entirely.

I tried to peer around Ferrando, to hear what she was saying, but I couldn’t. I only caught what intermittently came through my headphones from the livestream, stressed as it was by the hundreds of people outside the council chambers doing the same. While I couldn’t catch anything she said, I did catch the thunderous applause. And then I noticed Ferrando’s cool execution of a subtle call, and this mass of Law Enforcement Community respond to it in a lockstep unison.

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Before the meeting I was outside city hall with members of Project Priceless. They had special red sweatshirts made that listed their demands. I put one on. Tammy, who you’ll remember from my last story on Project Priceless—the one who was positively skipping out of the East Brookfield Courthouse because their letter campaign had actually worked—was so fired up to speak. She was excited. I gave her a hug and said you got this. Hoping to stake out a good position, I broke from the group and made my way upstairs with no idea what to expect. It was 6:25 p.m. The chorus of voices rippling down the stairwell chilled me as I climbed upward. My heart rate elevated. Easily hundreds, mostly men by the sound of it. Aw fuck, I thought as I rounded the second floor, it’s gunna be the whole police department.

It was the whole entire police department. At least 200 cops. There was no way into the chamber, nor the gallery. They’d already filled both.

The cable access stream does not do justice to the vibe in that building. (I watched nearly the whole meeting again Wednesday, lucky me). It was a terrifying energy to walk into. I was afraid—for my friends I knew were in the room, for myself, but mostly for Tammy.

The members of Project Priceless, all of them unhoused women and survivors of the sex trade, were about to walk up the same stairs I did, into the same sea of cops. They were going to speak out about the WPD’s systemic rape and sexual exploitation, as outlined in the DOJ’s report, and do it in a room in which they were severely outnumbered.

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On the agenda Tuesday were competing petitions: one from three police union officials demanding the council demand the DOJ to publicly release “the full investigatory report.” It’s in keeping with their main line of criticism: that the 41-page report released by the DOJ last week detailing patterns of excessive force and sexual violence is just a “summary.” On the other side were four petitions submitted by Project Priceless outlining their demands for the council: acknowledge and apologize, empower the self-organized work of unhoused women, provide reparations, criminalize sexual exploiters, and commit to abolition. (More here: How they respond will say everything)

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Alyssa Duffy spoke for “fellow police wives” as she delivered the demand of her husband’s police union: “We are asking the council to demand the DOJ release their full report with the authors and each and every so-called credible source.”

She was the last of a procession of police officers to make this same demand. In context, it’s obvious the “so-called credible” sources are the women accusing police officers of rape and other sexual exploitations. The most salacious contents of the Department of Justice’s report, it was the near-uniform focus of public comments. So in the abstract we have here the wife of a powerful police official demanding that the names of prostituted women be released to her, her husband, and all the other hundreds of men in attendance Tuesday who are uniquely sanctioned by the state to commit acts of violence, and have developed elaborate methods to obscure that violence from their public image.

In other words, she asked the council to throw vulnerable women into her den of lions. Her closing note:

“Our children will continue to look up to their fathers, their heroes, and the men and women of our police family, and know they are the ones keeping our city safe. We ask that you stand with them as well.”

Careful readers may be able to find the threat in that comment. Hint: it lies in the word keeping.

It was after this last line that WPD Ferrando gave the call. It was about 7:40 p.m., an hour into the meeting. The call was wordless. He put his hand in the air, finger pointed to the ceiling, twirled it in a circle. ‘Move out.’ And so they did, all the hundreds of cops in the room. I watched from behind Ferrando, shoulder to sweaty shoulder with off-duty cops, as the packed gallery above us rose in unison, and began to file out.

Watching, it struck me in a new way that I was looking at something immutable. A culture that simply cannot be reformed. With militant supply chain efficiency they’d stuffed the city council chamber Tuesday night for a predetermined time, as higher ups and respected members of their most cowboy outfits spoke in stark terms about the “disgraceful” Department of Justice report. How it was all lies. A total fiction. And then just one hand signal from Ferrando and, with the same efficiency, they exited.

As a procession of off-duty cops filed down the narrow stairwell from the fourth to the third floor, a group of activists with Project Priceless yelled out to shame them. The cops sneered back wordlessly, separated from the crowd by the on-duty cops and their union reps. The last man out, Rick Cipro, president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officials Local 504, came back to make sure his comrade Anthony Petrone, vice president of the same union, had gotten the message. “Is Anthony still in here?” he asked an on duty cop by the entryway to the chamber. The cop shook his head. It was go time. Leave no man behind.

As they filed out, the meeting was just beginning. Public comment wasn’t finished. More than three hours of it remained. Alyssa Duffy was only 28 of 60 public speakers. (Besides one Facebook Crank, the remaining 32 speakers were critical of the police). The council hadn’t yet said a word one way or the other about the petition filed by their union reps. Leaving when they did suggested they didn’t much care what the council did with it.

Perhaps they already knew what the council would do—Cipro and Councilor Kate Toomey are texting buddies, after all. And these things are typically pre-decided in the mayor’s office. Perhaps they didn’t know what would happen, and that’d be worse. Because, regardless, they acted like they owned the place—owned the council, the manager, the protestors, the truth. They were not nervous about the outcome of the meeting. If they can act that way without even knowing what the council will do...

I’ve chosen to home in on the crowd over the actual content of the meeting for a few reasons. This stuff hasn’t made it into any other coverage, and you couldn’t see it watching at home. But it’s also more important than anything anyone said that night, in that the police showed us how they could capture the council chambers in a coordinated fashion, with ease and efficiency. The militaristic discipline on display was more threatening than any rhetorical statement made. Really, it’s how they made their statement. The speakers were just window dressing. (An uncomfortable truth: This is a disciplined approach we’d do well to learn from.) The showing, in retrospect, had nothing to do with persuading. It was a reminder.

In all my time covering local government, I’d never seen such a display. But I’ve also never seen a police department face a meaningful challenge. Watching last-man-out Rick Cipro disappear down the stairwell, away from the crowd shouting at him, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was among the scariest couple hours of my life. That was the point, obviously. To scare. Not me of course, I don’t matter. They were there to scare anyone who dared tell the truth about their own experience with the WPD, especially the women. They were there to scare any councilor who might try to take the side of the accusers. Mission accomplished, I’d say. But it was a pyrrhic victory.

In the effort to intimidate a select dozen or so people—all of them previously aware of the true and scary nature of the police—they also exposed that reality to hundreds.

You have to wonder how many people got their first glimpse of it that night. Who’d never been on the wrong side of riot squad shields, never tasted tear gas, never been jumped out on by plainclothes officers baiting them to act out. Never been put in a cell by a lie. You have to wonder who saw for the first time that ‘protect and serve’ is not, in fact, the guiding principle of the modern police department. Here they were in the city council chambers, historically the dominion of a select group of people who rightfully believe the cops protect them, and the mood in the air was 1:1 with the handful of riot squad situations I’ve personally witnessed. Like walking past a yard with an angry dog in it and he’s barking at you and baring his teeth and you’re looking at the chain link fence separating you and the dog and you’re thinking he could jump that thing if he really wanted.

If anyone did it for ‘em, it would have been Thomas Duffy, first of the police union officials to speak, and the most overtly hostile:

“Over the course of recent years, society has disparaged the profession of police in this country to an alarming level. We have local elected officials and some in our community who prioritize disparaging the great men and women and the police department on a routine basis.”

He went on for some four minutes—double the allowed time. He grew more visibly angry as Mayor Joe Petty peppered him with polite murmurs about the time limit.

Duffy: I can assure you, as president of this local, we will be watching the response of the members of this council.

Petty: Can—

Duffy: We all know that there are some who have an anti-police agenda obsessed

Petty: Ok—

Duffy: with anything they can do to try to label us as racist, and will use this basis report to try to further divide

Petty: Thank you.

Duffy: Our police from citizens for

Petty: Thank y—

Duffy: what they perceive will be their own political gain.

Petty: Can you wrap up your—

Duffy: Yes, sir. One minute. We flatly reject those individuals and call on the voters to stay with us.

And on like that. When he finished, the applause was thunderous, going on for another minute itself. The whole thing is worth a watch.

The next speaker was from Racism Free WPS, a group of students and former students organizing around systemic issues of racism and sexual abuse in the school district. Her name was Nia Guzman, and she was there with other Racism-Free WPS members in solidarity with Project Priceless—the group of unhoused women and survivors of the sex trade the entire police department had shown up to counter-protest. I do not think I could have taken the mic, amid that thunderous roar of support for the very problem she was about to indict. It was an act of tremendous courage. Guzman spoke eloquently:

“The Worcester Police Department have been allowed to rape without repercussion¹. The 40-page investigatory document details, documents, reveals horror story after horror story of Worcester police officers entrapping homeless women and forcing them to commit sex acts under the intimidation of the badge. These men raped while in uniform in their police cruisers that tax money pays for by the way, these men raped under the full protection of their brothers in the force.”

The universe aligned in such a way that as she was saying this, her microphone picked up evidence of it. Even with the heavily noise-gated microphone you could hear a second round of cheering for Duffy in the hallway. All the overflow of off-duty cops who couldn’t fit in the room. I was there. I saw it. The handshakes and the grins and the backslaps. He denied all allegations—the entire thing in his words “baseless”—and to his men he was a hero for it. Celebrated as if he’d just sunk a buzzer-beater. This, of course, you can’t see on the camera. You can only hear it, as a dull roar that swells, momentarily interrupting Nia. She continued:

“Clearly, there is an ethos of violence that runs deep in the department. So who can you possibly call to protect you? The stakes have never been higher for women in the city. All women in the city of Worcester should listen to this. We implore our community to stand united with project priceless and form a front against the violent class-based misogyny in our city.”

Her speech inspired a different round of cheers from a different group of people. Mayor Joe Petty swiftly condemned it. He banged the gavel and said he wants people “treated with respect.” He did not bang the gavel on the cheers from the police, even when they were so loud as to interrupt Guzman. Later in the meeting, we’d find out that he personally co-signed the initial statement the city released: the one written by a lawyer who’s seeking Trump’s nomination for local US Attorney, and obviously using Worcester in the process. (I go over that in this post from last week.) But you need only look at this short moment from Tuesday to see which side Petty’s on. He will back the boys in blue. He will not fight for real change.

I’m a little afraid to include this next part to be honest with you². But here goes…

The Bad Apples

In the search for this ethos of violence—what we like to call “the bad apples”—you could do worse than to start with Thomas Duffy himself. He’s a longtime member of the gang unit (the plainclothes division that, along with the vice squad, comprise our ‘specialized units.’) His name comes up frequently in the myriad civil suits filed against the department for various abuses of power. Here’s a few:

—In 2020, Duffy and Officer Brendon Tivnan (who also spoke Tuesday) went viral when they pulled two Black kids out of their car, on the stated grounds they “look like someone we’re looking for.” “You look like someone who has a warrant.” Before Duffy pulls the guy in the passenger seat out of the car, the guy looks at the camera and says “hey, listen, I’m about to get attacked.” Duffy and Tivnan open up the car door, and Tivnan opens the front pocket of the man’s hoodie, searching it. “You searching me with no warrant?” the man says. “You don’t need a warrant to search someone,” Tivnan says.

About 15 minutes into the interaction one of the officers brags about how much money he makes. “You make $3,000 a week?” the man in the sweatshirt responds. “And you have time to do this?” Later, he says “y’all are the ones need warrants.” There is no record of the incident save for the livestream video. “The City of Worcester and the Worcester Police Department do not require police officers to maintain records of stops that do not amount to an arrest or citation,” another lawsuit around the same time alleges.

—In 2020, Duffy, along with Tivnan, Trevis Coleman (another cop who spoke Tuesday), and others in the gang unit, pulled two men from a car, throwing them to the ground. The car, idling, began to pull away once the driver’s foot was no longer on the brakes. It crashed into a light pole after allegedly striking several officers. The two men were arrested and charged with various crimes. All charges were dropped a year later. A judge wrote, “I don't even think there was even remotely close to enough evidence that there was reasonable suspicion to believe that that car was involved in drug activity,” according a civil suit. In several of the reports officers filed, they said the man was driving his car when it hit the light pole and the officers. Video footage showed otherwise. Internal investigators chalked the disparity between that claim and available video footage as a “matter of perception.” Former Chief Steven Sargent cleared the officers of any wrongdoing.

—In 2016, Duffy allegedly framed an innocent man for a shooting in order to let a relative of a former gang unit colleague escape the scene.

—In 2010, Duffy was involved in the Kenny Brooks case. A squad of gang unit officers beat the man. Here’s a chunk from a report written by an officer at the time: “As Kenneth Brooks Jr. was exiting his vehicle he fell to the ground with the undersigned officer and Officer Duffy landing on top of him ... an EA responded to the scene and treated Kenneth Brooks Jr. for some minor injuries he had received from falling to the ground during his arrest." In a letter to the city, Brooks said the cops beat him then posed for a photo. Police officers said Brooks had corner cut baggies of crack on his person. Those baggies they said were logged into evidence. Box 6. Come trial time the baggies were not in Box 6. (Apologies for the vague language, I do have to be careful here. But like… just watch The Shield.)

—In 2008, Duffy was party to a no-knock raid over a suspected 2.5 grams of heroin that resulted in a man getting strip searched and pistol whipped in the head repeatedly, but wasn’t arrested. (Muniz v. City of Worcester, et al.) The man got $40,000 in a settlement and no officer involved was disciplined.

—In 2010, Duffy was driving down Hamilton Street, off duty, at 3 a.m., when he crashed his car into another, seriously injuring the driver. Duffy’s father, a state police official, was shortly on scene after the crash. Duffy was not given a field sobriety test, but the other driver, a dancer at a nearby stripclub, was. She was found by WPD officers to be at fault. A later investigation showed that Duffy was driving between 50 and 60 miles an hour, not 20 mph as he earlier claimed. The road’s speed limit is 30 mph. The dancer was driving a maximum 19 mph as she pulled onto the road. She subsequently underwent at least 10 reconstructive surgeries. Duffy’s connections in the Worcester DA’s office pushed the case to Essex County. The DA there concluded “no charges against either party are warranted.”

Take a look at how the WPD responded to the Telegram at the time:

In a sharply worded written statement critical of the Telegram & Gazette's reporting, Worcester police said the Essex DA's findings support the department's initial conclusions that Ms. Higgins was at fault.

“Unlike the Telegram & Gazette, the Essex County District Attorney and the Worcester Police Department conduct thorough, factual, and unbiased investigations before making a determination of fact and submitting written reports of findings,” the unsigned statement said.

The WPD is now employing the same line, almost verbatim, against the Department of Justice.

For instance, Petrone told the council Tuesday night the report “fails to provide clear evidence or credible investigative findings to substantiate these claims.”

And then there’s Cipro: “This investigation was supposed to be conducted through an objective and thorough examination. However, we must question if this was, in fact, done.”

This is a rhetorical club, not a scalpel. They want to discredit the entire thing. They’re not going to give an inch. So neither should we.

Of all the speakers in support of Project Priceless on Tuesday, I think Sathi Patel, a coordinator for the group, laid down the best template for how to speak about this issue unflinchingly:

“I know that this council has the power to stand with these women, so it's time to choose. Stand with the women fighting for their survival or for the systems and the men that exploit, abuse, and break them on the daily.”

Reminding the council we expect them to have power and to wield it over the police!

Does this council have the power?

On the council, we saw clearly who is and who isn’t going to stand with these women. And it’s familiar: Haxhiaj, King, and Nguyen spoke clearly about their position in support of the women and critical of the police. Russell, surprisingly, said he wanted heads to roll. Always the wild card.

Toomey, Mero-Carlson, Ojeda, and Bergman only spoke to condemn King for calling Toomey an “impotent” chairwoman of the public safety committee. Like that was the real issue. They’re just not serious people. And besides, King was right. Regular readers don’t need to hear me go off about it again. Instead, take a look at this picture of Toomey as she’s made to listen to critics of the police department.

In fact King did more accountability of the WPD in that one justified dig than Toomey has with a decade of subcommittee chairmanship.

Donna Colorio said nothing at all, sitting there all night in a daze.

When it was his turn, Petty went long to say little, as is tradition:

“I'd like to begin by acknowledging the serious accusations made in the report. I also think it's important to acknowledge those who have been impacted by this report and those who have been impacted by the findings.”

Okay!

Jenny Pacillo, seen hugging Rick Cipro before the meeting, walked the same vague line as Petty.

So right now we’re looking at a 7-4 or 8-3 vote to do as little about this DOJ report as they can get away with. The trick is moving the bar for “what they can get away with.” The more heat they feel, the more hesitant they’ll be to endorse the approach they and their cop friends both really want, which is to ignore the thing outright.

It’s Batista who showed us how to most garishly walk a fence, and ultimately has the most power to do something here, good or bad. He did the ‘on the one hand / on the other’ routine we saw in his statements last week.

“I do acknowledge and I want to recognize the fact that there are survivors in this space that came tonight, that spoke valiantly of their experiences ... that is something that's unacceptable at all levels, at any space for people to experience the things that they experience.”

Then, later…

“However, I cannot, as an administrator and also as a leader, that I have employees who spoke here tonight. I can also not discount their feelings, their emotions, their sentiments as employees who also want justice.”

Hmmmm seems we’re working with two different definitions of justice here.

“We all want justice and that's extremely... that's been the message here tonight,” Batista said.

I don’t think there’s a single person who watched that meeting would agree that was the message of the night. Batista apologized for his authorization of the outside attorney’s dismissive statement. Pressured by King, he conceded that Petty also approved it. But he didn’t mention that its contents were nearly identical to statements made by the police chief and union heads—in the same meeting! You’re their boss and you’re apologizing for the thing they were actively saying out loud at you in the same meeting.

His remarks did not inspire confidence he’s going to reverse a decade of entrenched opposition to civilian review boards when he puts his proposal on the table.

Batista giving his statement Tuesday.

The polite and naive owner of a large rabid dog. That’s the best way to think about Eric Batista in this situation. The dog is mad. And we’re all on the other side of the fence, eyeing it. Rationally, we know the dog has an owner. And owners put leashes on their dogs. Right? But, come to think of it… have we ever seen this particular owner try to leash this particular dog? Does he even own a leash?

Walking back to my car Tuesday I noticed city hall was surrounded by empty cop cars with their lights on, static blue. Just idling there. It was 11:30 p.m. The cops had all left hours ago. As I walked past a pair of those cruisers, I became acutely aware of the fact I was alone. That the area was otherwise deserted. I drove home as carefully as I could.

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Odds and ends

Man I’m tired. I’ve been busting ass these past couple weeks please consider a subscription so I feel like it was worth it when I get the “new paid subscriber” alert in my email.

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Send a tip on Ko-Fi

Cool new camo hats in the merch store there’s like 10 (?) left.

There was a whole other meeting with the DOJ on Wednesday night. I just can’t bring myself to get into that now in any depth. It was very well attended—they said maybe the best ever attendance for such a thing. After the miserable council meeting Tuesday, I found it heartening. It suggested that a lot of people really want to see the police department cease to be so awful. It is not the small handful of dismissable activists that the “inner circle” would like it to be.

Will save my notebook dump for the next post. Focus right now I’m thinking will be the much maligned Human Rights Commission and what it suggests about the HRC. Podcast recording later today. Will get that up ASAP.

Had the pleasure of meeting Daniel DiMassa, a reader and professor at WPI, at the punk rock flea market the other day. He just had a big, interesting op-ed published in Inside Higher Ed synthesizing AI, pro-Palestine activism and the oppressive tactics of university administrators. “This Is What We’ll Do When You Mess With Us.”

The institutionalization of these damages is well underway. There may be pockets of the curriculum where the adoption of AI makes sense, but it has begun to erode liberal education in ways that are far more thoroughgoing than many faculty yet know. Rather than think seriously about how and where to resist its incursion, however, universities have zeroed in on civic engagement as a more pressing threat, marshaling deans, lawyers, police and marketing teams toward eliminating or bogging it down in a morass of policy. Even on those campuses that haven’t witnessed spectacles of violence, administrations have almost certainly updated their codes of conduct, events policies, advertising policies, external speaker policies and marketing materials. The arrival of the Trump administration will lead meek administrators to intensify these authoritarian measures.

Great stuff.

In the little-used “chat” feature of this newsletter I started a thread asking for everyone’s favorite Worcester Sucks stories of the year so let’s see if we can ? Or just leave em in the comments here.

My piece on Maura Healey’s shelter cuts made Luke O’Neil’s Best of Hell World 2024 list earlier this week! Like a leg lamp all the way from Italy this is a major award. There’s a ton of really amazing work on there from a roster of writers I’m honored to be among.

Oh! Harley’s Funhouse, the drag show I opened the door for at Ralph’s when I was the booking guy there, won best show!! Pretty neat.

harleys.funhouse

A post shared by @harleys.funhouse

And lastly this post was written by Mr. Bear actually that’s why it’s so good. Obviously.

Ok talk soon!

1. I pulled out one such story, describing it in great detail, in the last post: “B & Officer 1

2. Apropos of nothing at all: I have no upcoming travel plans. I have no past history of mental health episodes. I do not drive with illicit drugs in my car, nor do I walk around the city with any scheduled narcotics on my person.