The WPD has its own SCORPION unit
The WPD has its own SCORPION unit
Let's be clear about it
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An innocent man was murdered for the crime of being afraid of his murderers. The five officers responsible were indicted and fired and condemned by the entire liberal media and political apparatus while these people simultaneously wring their hands and say what can we do (translation: we’re not going to do anything). Meanwhile the video footage soaks the whole media landscape like a constantly recurring and immovable effigy to The Way Things Are— a booming voice from behind a curtain going “Behold. Do not avert your eyes. This is your reality. Act accordingly.”
And locally we see the same feckless hand wringing as we see everywhere else from our city manager and police chief in canned and meaningless statements, and I couldn’t help but dunk on them for it.
And here’s a bit from how the chief’s statement actually reads:
The brutality that I saw in the video released yesterday, sickened me and has left me heartbroken. The failure of these officers to intervene is a disgrace to our profession and it impacts all who wear the badge. It angers me to see these officers betray their oath. Incidents like this will create further distrust and anger directed toward police across the nation.
...
I will always be looking for ways to improve whether it be policy reforms, new technology or better training techniques. As your police chief, I am devoted to making the Worcester Police Department the best it can be. I recognize that more can be done and more will be done.
Each of our officers has taken an Oath to protect you. You can count on us. We will always be there for you and it is our job to make every citizen feel safe. Our officers take pride in their work and we are committed to serving this great City of Worcester with compassion, integrity and professionalism.
Please. As I’ll get to, these words are quite hollow given the actions of the person saying them. And of course the Telegram reported both statements verbatim without context or pushing back on it at all.
And I don’t have anything of worth to share on this murder among murders besides that there was a vigil yesterday in Worcester and it was nice. About 100 people showed up, Councilor Khrystian King spoke among others and there are more demonstrations in the works I hear.
I guess I just want to say that everyone talking about the race of these officers whether in good faith or bad is missing the point by a mile. The five that were charged with murder or the newer sixth one who was white or the seventh one who hasn’t yet been identified. I don’t think I have the temerity today to get into that today in any serious way. A cop is a cop is a cop is a cop. If you know that already you don’t need me to explain it and if you don’t know that by now I don’t think you ever will.
What I do want to talk about however because it is very germane to Worcester is the structure of the Memphis Police Department and the certain type of officers who carried out this murder. Just about every department in America of a certain size has them on their payroll. “Elite” squads, right up there with SWAT Teams, are the real life embodiment of the Punisher Logo, our modern day totenkopf. They’re tasked with guns and drugs and gangs, and they’re deputized by the state to carry out all sorts of things that toe the line of legality and often cross it. They wear plain clothes, they drive unmarked cars, they use the premise of routine vehicle stops to carry out raids on the unsuspecting “thugs” in the popular imaginary. Stop and frisk by another name. These are the guys tasked with showing the sort of results that political leaders then tout as progress. “Guns off the streets.” Look at all these arrests we’re making. That’s progress. That’s what we want our cops doing.
Memphis has one of these and it’s called SCORPION. Worcester has one of these and it’s called the Gang Unit. Baltimore had one of these back before Black Lives Matter Round 1 and the behavior of that particular outfit was so nightmarish and criminal that it got its own HBO show.
But let’s start with the Memphis unit. SCORPION stands for Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods, and before five of them murdered someone on Jan. 7, it was composed of 30 officers who were tasked with targeting “violent offenders” in “areas beset by high crime.”
Shortly after the murder the department deactivated the SCORPIONs then officially disbanded the unit yesterday. In a statement that betrays she hasn’t really learned anything, Memphis Police Chief CJ Davis said “the heinous actions of a few” dishonored the unit. Originally, Davis said she has no plans to disband the unit, saying “the whole idea that the Scorpion unit is a bad unit, I just have a problem with that.” She said that just a few days ago, on Friday. Then she disbanded the unit on Saturday so... something tells me that line of reasoning wasn’t landing so well with the general public.
But you can’t really blame Davis for trying to hang onto the unit when you consider her position as a political post and the political stake she had once planted in these SCORPIONs.
The unit was formed in October, 2021, and in the initial announcement, the MPD said the four SCORPION teams will “focus on restoring peace in neighborhoods” and “reducing violent crime in hot spots across the city.” Grimly ironic to read that now, gotta say. Turns out they did the very opposite of that. It was the department’s stated answer for the “high numbers of car jackings, assaults and homicides” in the city.
Some more grim irony for ya:
"It's important to us that each member of the community feels they can go to the grocery store or live in their house without their house being shot or shooting frequently occurring on the streets and on the roadways,” said MPD Assistant Chief Sean Jones at the time.
A detail that’s really stuck with me about Tyre Nichol’s death is it happened about 200 feet from his mother’s house. Taken next to Jones’ comments it’s making me stare into the void a little bit. So let’s keep moving.
CJ Davis came into the Memphis Police Chief role in June 2021, just a few months before the SCORPIONs came into being. As the first ever Black woman to serve in that position, she brought with her a promise of reform and the SCORPION unit was bewilderingly a part of that. Davis, still in an interview last week, clung to that idea.
“These teams have worked really hard, and they’re under a cloud now,” Davis said in an interview with The Washington Post. “People want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Per WaPo, the SCORPION units made hundreds of arrests, seized over 250 weapons and $100,000 in cash. Over its tenure, it generated 2,000 arrests and recovered 800 illegal guns.
The unit was lauded by the city’s mayor in his 2022 state of the city address as a “crime suppression unit.” A credit to the work of the new chief. Progress.
“We had great success. They did good work,” Davis told WaPo. “This group, we believe, went off the rails that night.”
Just a few bad apples as we’ve heard and continue to hear. A small percentage of bad ones amid mostly good ones. The praise lauded on this unit and its perception as an antidote to the city’s “crime” problems doesn’t leave any room for how they go about the business of actually doing the things that look good on paper for the political class. It’s all about the numbers. Look at all those guns! Look at all those bad guys in jail! Do not however look at how we got them because if you do then it might be a little easier to see how these “bad apples” emerge and a little more difficult to consider if there were ever any good ones to begin with.
SCORPION is just one unit in a long history of similar “elite” units in police departments around the country going back at least to the 1970s. From Radley Balko, an expert on militarized policing, in the New York Times:
The SCORPION program has all the markings of similar “elite” police teams around the country, assembled for the broad purpose of fighting crime, which operate with far more leeway and less oversight than do regular police officers. Some of these units have touted impressive records of arrests and gun confiscations, though those statistics don’t always correlate with a decrease in crime. But they all rest on the idea that to be effective, police officers need less oversight. That is a fundamental misconception. In city after city, these units have proven that putting officers in street clothes and unmarked cars, then giving them less supervision, an open mandate and an intimidating name shatters the community trust that police forces require to keep people safe.
One of the early pioneers was Detroit, with the STRESS unit (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) back in the early 1970s. They ended up being rogue cops, killing some 22 people before it was disbanded. There was Los Angeles’s CRASH (Community Resources against Street Hoodlums) in the 1990s, where more than 70 officers were “implicated in planting guns and drug evidence, selling narcotics themselves and shooting and beating people without provocation, per Balko. Chicago had SOS. NYPD had the Street Crimes Unit which an investigation by the Intercept in 2018 found it was responsible for 30 percent of fatal shootings in the department, despite having only 6 percent of staff in its ranks. Mayor Eric Adams just restarted that unit after they were disbanded in 2020, apparently. Then there was Baltimore, where eight of these officers in the “Gun Trace Task Force” were tried for running a drug ring under the guise of “elite” policing, the events of which have been palpably fictionalized in David Simon’s “We Own This City” mini-series. Even nearby Springfield has run into its share of trouble with such a unit. The Department of Justice saw cause to investigate the city due to its narcotics bureau and how its officers routinely beat people up and lied about it.
I touched on Springfield and Baltimore and We Own This City in a piece for Welcome to Hell World back when the Worcester DOJ investigation was announced.
So that brings us back to Worcester, where the DOJ is currently investigating the department don’t you forget, and where one of these “elite” units does indeed exist. Two actually. The “Gang Unit” and the “Vice Squad.”
You’d be forgiven for not knowing they exist. A Google search of “Worcester Police Gang Unit” will lead you to a smattering of arrest press releases and a puff piece about how the gang unit is “reaching teens through music” because those are the two ways the local press is allowed to write about the cops. Either you’re reporting what they say verbatim or you’re doing a propaganda.
You won’t easily find any of the news articles detailing the problems with other such “elite” units in other cities. But the lack of press attention does not mean there’s nothing there.
In April 2018, local defense attorney Hector Piniero sent a letter to the relevant authorities—a 749-page letter—demanding an investigation into Worcester cops who “habitually engage in deception and misconduct in their arrests,” according to a 2018 article from Brad Petrishen at the Telegram, who has covered this stuff like white on rice. Those officers are of the “gang- and drug unit” variety aka the Gang Unit and Vice Squad. According to an organizational chart attached to the department’s most recent budget, the two units, Gang and Vice, are under the “investigations” division of the department, alongside regular detectives and a few other subdivisions. The Gang Unit is comprised of one sergeant and eight officers. The Vice Squad is a bit larger, at two lieutenants, two sergeants and 19 officers.
Piniero, in his letter, “charges that officers in drug investigations lie, fabricate evidence, file malicious charges and suppress exculpatory evidence,” the article reads.
I got my hands on a cover letter for this extensive call for investigation. It is not ambiguous who Piniero is talking about here. In this document we really see Worcester cops in the same types of “elite” units engaging in the same type of behavior as SCORPION and all the others. The cover letter details 12 specific instances in which cops engaged in the aforementioned “deception and misconduct.” Eight involve the Vice Squad. Six involve the Gang Unit. Two overlap, involving both. Every incident involves either the Gang Unit or the Vice Squad.
Without getting into the nuances of every case, here’s the issues identified in each of the 12 examples.
Example #1: “WPD Vice squad officers fabricated the circumstances of a suspect' s
arrest in order to link him to possession of contraband (guns and drugs), but a surveillance video of the location revealed police lied.”
Example #2: “Lying, false police reports, searching an apartment without a warrant, staging of
evidence, missing money police recovered in a drug raid, warrantless search and lack of probable cause, failing to document that weapons were drawn and pointed at Mr. Ortiz from the outside of the building and allegedly using monies confiscated by police to buy lunch for police personnel.”
This is again the Vice Squad.
Example #3: “Lying, untruthful reports, excessive force with injuries, warrantless strip search, names of injured parties missing from police narrative reports, submitting a false report, missing money, use of racial epithets and taunting and failing to submit necessary police reports.”
Vice Squad and Gang Unit.
Example #4: “Lying, false police reports, searching an apartment without a warrant and lying that they were conducting a "protective sweep" while searching his apartment almost a mile away from where he was arrested. He also alleges an illegal/warrantless strip and cavity search and that police made of fun of him during the strip and cavity search.”
Vice Squad.
Example #5: “Lying, false police reports, excessive force, and malicious prosecution. Beating of two individuals while handcuffed, not preparing police required police reports until years later.”
Gang Unit.
Example #6: “Lying, false police reports, excessive force assault with a deadly weapon and ethnic bias and prejudice towards ethnic minorities.”
Gang Unit and Vice Squad!
I think you get the idea. Put the whole 35-page cover letter on Google Drive if you want to read the rest.
This wasn’t an isolated complaint either. These things keep coming.
Back in December, defense attorney Joseph Hennessy filed a civil rights racial profiling case against Gang Unit officers in federal court. From the complaint:
Officer Thomas B. Duffy and other named Defendants of the City of Worcester acted recklessly, on nothing more than a hunch and brutalized two young men because of their race. After realizing their mistake, Worcester City Police officers, Chief Steven Sargent, Edward Augustus and the City of Worcester failed to correct the wrong and allowed the two plaintiffs to be falsely prosecuted until the Worcester County District Attorney’s Office took the correct action by dismissing the action against the two plaintiffs.
The case is Fofona v. City of Worcester et al. and related to a 2020 incident and could well add to the absurd number of settlements filed against the WPD resulting in millions of dollars of taxpayer money going to pay off people found to be wronged by the department.
Here’s one of those instances from just this week! Police Capt. Michael McKiernan was transferred from his job as head of the Investigations Division after losing a $272,500 lawsuit against a man who accused McKiernan of lying in such a way that it landed him in prison for three years for a crime he did not commit. Both the Gang Unit and the Vice Squad report to the head of the investigations unit, in case the pattern here wasn’t already obvious. The wrongfully jailed man’s name is Carlos Alvarez and his story rhymes with the story of Dana Gaul, who you may remember from the recent City Council meeting that saw his wife show up and demand the Council do something about all this. Of course the council hasn’t and we’re on year eight of trying to make sure the cops have body cameras.
Piniero’s letter and all these lawsuits illustrate a pattern. Excessive force, lying, fabricating evidence and maliciousness that’s in keeping with other such units around the country, including the one in Memphis that’s currently under the gun due to the whole murder thing. Seems to be the only way this sort of policing gets looked at with any seriousness. Someone has to die. And then after a couple months everyone sort of forgets about it and we go back to giving the cops as much money as possible on every level of government.
Worcester has not had the sort of high profile and video-taped instance of wanton police violence which spurs the all-too-familiar cycle of apathy to outrage to hand wringing to tepid reform proposals back to apathy. Thankfully. But it’s not because Worcester is different—it’s just that our department hasn’t drawn the short straw yet. The WPD is doing everything that all the other departments are doing. The Gang Unit/Vice Squad is the same thing as SCORPION, employing the same sort of tactics toward the same end. It’s a dice roll that this happened in Memphis and not in some other city. That could have been us.
One of the most interesting and misunderstood observations in The Discourse the past couple days is that the Tyre Nichols video doesn’t depict especially garish police behavior but rather the behavior that’s par for the course.
“But not much.” It’s possible you could read that as a sort of defense of the behavior. That’s just what cops do. A lot of people did. The tweet’s comments are full of people saying things like “how could you say that this is so awful.” But they’re missing the point Robert Evans is trying to make here. The grotesquerie on display in the videos is awful and terrifying and unjust and subhuman. It is all those things. It is also routine. Something that could happen on any given day in any American city and garner no attention whatsoever. That Nichols died as a result of this specific instance of routine police violence is the only reason it now dominates the conversation. The only reason the SCORPION units were disbanded. The only reason why politicians from President Joe Biden to Worcester City Manager Eric Batista are issuing high-minded statements on morality and justice and the need for reform. It’s the death that is the problem because the death can be seen and it looks bad and we don’t like to look bad.
By way of the “bad apple” narrative, the underlying forces of inequity, coercion, immiseration, repressive violence and the roll of the dice that put Tyre Nichols in the situation to become Tyre Nichols (TM) have become obfuscated and suppressed as an opinion among opinions. Meanwhile most of the media ecosystem coalesces around a narrative “both sides” can agree on: The five officers who killed Nichols. An easily-digestible villain. People love a good heel! By a similar roll of the dice as Nichols, these five officers became The Five Officers (TM). There were at least 30 SCORPION officers doing the same thing these five guys did every day. And there’s a SCORPION in every city in America. But there’s no path in the “bad apples” framework to think about it that way. These five officers have to be different somehow, or the whole thing unravels.
So we squint at these run-of-the-mill cops to find the thing that makes them the exception to the rule. There isn’t any difference but since the narrative requires one, we get to pontificate and do little character studies. And then we argue about all the different character studies people come up with. This running dialogue has become so abstracted from reality it’s basically just a TV show; it’s fun and easy to argue about, and that makes it good for business. All of a sudden this is no longer a Tyre Nichols story, it’s a Tucker Carlson story. But before we get to the end result of the discourse smoothing machine, we gawk at a snuff film played on repeat on the TV every day, knowing intuitively it’s just a matter of time until the next one and we play this game all over again. A lot of consultants make a lot of money and the networks get their money and the Democratic Party absorbs and neuters righteous outrage as they’re there to do.
Of course the necessary societal conditions which allowed for this murder and all the others to happen go unaddressed. None of the necessary changes are made. At best, we get the sort of tepid reforms “everyone can agree on”, like body cameras which have only served to make the spectacle of immovable oppression all the more vivid.
Every day we continue to roll the dice in every city in America, and the existence of “elite” units deputized to increase the odds in favor of civilian casualties remains a well-funded bipartisan consensus.
Every time there’s a bad roll, we’re made to go through the same discursive cycle. Outrage is initially expressed within the confines defined by the police themselves, and anything outside those confines is cracked down on gleefully and violently with the full support of the state. The people who go outside the confines are then quickly made into villains in the story. The big blob of media eventually absorbs all the leftover rage and guides it toward nonsense narratives. “Tucker Carlson said WHAT?!” or “Antifa is the one who kills.” Couple months go by and we forget what we were mad about in the first place. Plus what was I going to really do about it anyway? And then we all go back to rolling the dice every time we interact with a police officer and our dice are still varyingly weighted based on the color of skin and how much money our families have and what neighborhoods we live in. The people with the least legitimacy assigned to what they say are the people most likely to be abused by law enforcement. The people who matter live in places where they can’t see it happening and consume media which only occasionally includes dispatches from the place where the violence happens. Arrests are made and DAs get their sentences, and both are measured more by volume than by quality. New prisons get constructed and the mayors who play along get re-elected, and a certain kind of cop with a certain kind of motivation gets to join the special ops units where they take the proverbial muzzle off and descend on the neighborhoods “where the crime happens”. And like the bandit gangs who won the west for the United States way back in the Blood Meridian days, they rack up as many scalps as they can as fast as possible.
Back then the volume of scalps was the metric of success. Every scalp meant less resistance to the state project of westward expansion, and the state assigned value to them accordingly. It would have been grim work if those Plains natives were considered equally human, so a proto-criminal class designation was in order. That’s how we justified genocide here in America. Cowboys and Indians.
Now, for these “elite” police units, the metric isn’t scalps—it’s arrests and seizures. The only thing the state wants to see is good numbers, and it’s easy to say more arrests and less shootings mean “crime equals down” and almost everyone with any influence is happy to leave that logic uninterrogated because they have skin in the game and it’s good advertising and good advertising means property values go up. The people who own the land and the buildings get richer and that’s really all anyone’s doing at City Hall. It isn’t the “Free Real Estate” that drove westward expansion per se but it’s pretty close. “Free Real Estate Value,” maybe.
It’s not a coincidence that Memphis created SCORPION during a moment when “crime on the rise” was an especially dominant media narrative. Of course, there’s an implicit trade when you give a group of cops an especially long leash: there’s a lot less oversight. But it’s a risk the political classes of cities around the country have taken in order to demonstrate they have an antidote to “crime.” Since the political class doesn’t live in the neighborhoods where the “crime” happens, they never personally see what these elite squads do. They’re never made to feel the climate created by the tactics they tacitly sanction. They’ll never read about it in the local paper. The paper only reports arrests and indictments as described by the cops. Until the cops murder someone, of course, then it’s a “deadly arrest”. The perspective of the victim’s family is then warranted, and the mayor and the police chief express shock and disappointment and promise to investigate thoroughly. Memphis set a new precedent where the offending cops get punished in short order, but as I wrote at the top of this post, the police chief still defended her sweet sweet SCORPIONs until public pressure made it impossible.
So in Worcester we have the sort of “elite” police units which are granted the blessing of being especially aggressive, deceitful and violent in the same way as other such units around the country. Remarkably so. As I sketched earlier, these sort of units are reliable sources of scandal, criminal activity and police brutality. As we saw in Memphis, their behavior can prove brutally monstrous. Cops killing civilians with their bare hands.
Worcester has not had a Tyre Nichols or Freddie Grey or George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, or a national news-making scandal like the Baltimore gun trace Task Force. But our police department is not remarkable in the way it operates. It has the sort of units from which major problems reliably stem and it gets sued a lot. And loses. A lot. And the findings of those lawsuits are not pretty. Like the allegations detailed in Piniero’s call for investigation, and the dozens of current lawsuits and the millions in recent payouts... Let’s just say the Department of Justice has chosen to investigate this city for a reason. The reason may not yet be clear but there are plenty of good reasons to choose from.
While both Batista and Chief Sargent offered their canned condolences and condemnations in the wake of the most recent killing, they do not appear willing to take a look inward. And they’re facing no significant pressure to do so. Calls in recent years from the community for things like a civilian review board and a budget reduction have been fiercely opposed by the entrenched political class in control of the city. The one vehicle available to the City Council to apply pressure has been rendered useless by the fact that it’s chaired by Kate Toomey, a woman who has steadfastly refused to do anything with her afforded power.
From predictive policing to drones, to the callous destruction of homeless encampments, to the announcement of the DOJ investigation and all the lawsuits lost and the millions of dollars paid out, Sargent and his underlings have demonstrated they don’t consider themselves beholden to anyone, and the City Council has gone out of their way to prove him right. The cops get what they want and do what they want. Sargent gets to say multiple times he’s never seen any racism in the WPD and he faces no consequences, so now he gets to say this about Memphis.
Our officers work hard each day to build relationships and strengthen trust. At the center of our work is our community policing philosophy which has helped us make great strides in connecting with those we serve. Our Neighborhood Meetings, our Youth Athletic Programs and our outreach efforts have all provided opportunities for us to interact with our residents and form lasting bonds. This atrocious incident may make it harder to build upon this foundation that we have created. But together, as a community, we can get through these difficult times.
Meanwhile he oversees squads of police officers who serve the same purpose as the SCORPION unit he condemns here. But when Piniero released his call in 2018 for an investigation of the Gang Unit and Vice Squad, Sargent sang a very different tune.
“Today you might have become aware of the latest round of unsubstantiated allegations about police behavior from those who earn their living by making these allegations. I ask all of you to ignore the naysayers and continue to do your jobs in the way in which you have been trained,” Sargent wrote in a letter posted to the department’s Facebook page at the time.
Of course many of those allegations have been substantiated by the courts in the years since. Sargent feels no compunction saying “the brutality that I saw in the video released yesterday, (sic) sickened me and left me heartbroken”, but when it comes to allegations of brutality by his own officers, it comes from “those who earn their living by making these allegations” and are “unsubstantiated.”
And like every other time he faced no consequences, no one looked into Piniero’s allegations. Maybe the DOJ will, but it’ll be years before we know that.
So we have the sort of units that Memphis disbanded after they murdered someone in “global news-making” fashion and there’s no reasonable expectation that it’ll change. They’ll keep doing things that get the city sued in the service of “results” which don’t reflect the real material safety of the city, as much as its perception of the city administration’s effectiveness. The arrest numbers and the totals of cash seized and guns confiscated look good on paper, especially when the local press dutifully throws the numbers on page one. And there’s no effort to connect the lawsuits to the ways in which we get our “results”.
The thing about arrest numbers taken on their own as either good or bad, up or down, is there’s no accounting whether the arrests are solid, or what those arrests do to the communities who are made to fill the hole of a person who is no longer there. There’s no consideration for that in our criminal justice system. We have an absolute sicko’s impulse in America to reflexively consider everyone a free radical. An atom floating around on its own accord with its own morality and choices. And we judge each atom on how their choices stack up to what we think they ought to be choosing—“what would I do in that situation.” We are incapable or unwilling to consider that communities play a greater role than the individual in determining how the individual’s life’s going to go. So of course we’re not going to consider the long-term effects of making a lot of arrests in our poorest and most diverse neighborhoods and how that keeps people immiserated or how there might be a different way of going about it. Criminals are criminals who make their own criminal choices, and our job is to put them in jail. End of story. Cowboys shoot the Indians. Simple.
And of course that’s not just the cops way of thinking. That’s your average news consumer and voter and average dumb city councilor too, so when leaders say they’re making more arrests and “crime is down”, it tends to track pretty well. It’s good for property values and in that way, everyone who matters is kept happy. As long as you never see or hear from the communities where the cops go to extract these good-looking numbers, it’s all gravy baby. It’s free political legitimacy! And there just happen to be a lot of criminals in those neighborhoods! It’s unexplainable and has nothing to do with the way we choose to police. It’s not like sustained oppression of certain neighborhoods and communities over decades creates conditions that make crime an inevitability that we need more money every year to fight, and in fighting it we also maintain the inevitability of more of it. That’s just more arrests and City Hall loves seeing those arrest numbers. More arrests equals more money for us.
~/~
I feel like I’m going insane. This is an insane situation. It takes a lot of effort to cut through the noise and see just how insane it is. Please consider throwing some bones my way so I can continue to spend the time it takes to do this.
There’s a city council meeting tonight. They’re going to be talking about body cameras. Little reason to expect any progress will be made. I’m tired and depressed. I’ll be streaming it with Worcestery City Council 3000 as always. Come tune in! Starts at 6:15ish.
Mike Benedetti’s newsletter as always does a good job previewing what we’re going to see at the meeting.
Police Report Requests: Councilor King would like the Manager to give the Council reports on the WPD “Equity Audit” and how things are going with body cameras. Presumably there will be some discussion of police matters at this meeting.
Ok that’s all for now because I have Car Stuff to deal with today because someone sawed off a hunk of mine and it is now illegal to drive and sounds like a rocket ship.
Fun!
So like, it hasn't made the news but Worcester cops have killed a fair number of people even just lately.
There was the poor guy with the fake bomb threat in 2021 who was shot while his mom was on the phone with cops pleading to be patched they to her son.
There were several people from reckless car chases as Chris Robarge explained really well
Going back a little further they killed someone with a taser at pennywise a few years ago.
I'm quite sure I'm missing some even from just recent years.
Please check out this video and share it if you can. Come to the Off the Rails show on Feb 18 and I will buy your ticket.
https://youtu.be/J8irW8SNzlM