Mayor for a New America (18 page)

“Although Menino appears to have made up his mind days ago, he reportedly has confided in no one, not even his wife,” Chris Black wrote in the
Boston Sunday Globe
, three days after the Anderson funeral. I know how seriously I took the decision. But did I keep it from Angela, and how would Chris know? That evening I called Evans and ordered him to be at my house in Readville in a half hour. He made it in less time. When I said he could drop the “acting,” he beamed.

“I think we will be a good team,” I told reporters. We were.

Under Paul Evans the BPD implemented a new crime prevention strategy that had the law enforcement community and the White House hailing the “Boston miracle” as a national model. That helped to restore the sunken reputation of the nation's oldest police department. Evans, I promised the city, would initiate “a lot of changes in the way policemen do their work.” Critics worried that his longevity in the department made him an unlikely candidate to change it, but I saw it the other way: As a committed BPD lifer, he'd have greater credibility to press for reform than an outsider. “Paul Evans will not be status quo,” I said.

In the Boston Police Department the status quo was unacceptable.

 

Police recruits get the first taste of the inefficient institution they are about to enter when they take a six week course at the Police Academy, an abandoned school in Hyde Park outfitted with furniture fit for fifth graders. . . . The most modern piece of equipment is a machine intended to simulate situations in which an officer may fire his handgun. But the commission discovered that the gun used is a revolver that the department abandoned a few years ago in favor of a newer model. Like much else in the department, the intention is good, the execution faulty.

 

—from a 1992 Boston Globe editorial, “A Blueprint to Improve the Police,” on the findings of the St. Clair Commission

 

When Paul took over, the department was in crisis, beset by mismanagement at the top and misconduct in the ranks.

Its highest officers owed their jobs to cronyism. Ray Flynn had named his best friend police commissioner: Francis “Mickey” Roache was a sergeant when Flynn elevated him. Five members of Roache's command staff held the civil service rank of “patrolman.” Three deputy superintendents were former Flynn drivers. The perception that the mayor ran the department undermined Roache's authority among the rank and file. And as even Flynn conceded, Roache was a poor administrator.

“A lot of people are taking shots at Mickey Roache, but I don't think Ray Flynn sees him as a burden,” I said as a city councilor in 1991. “Loyalty matters too much to the mayor.”

Flynn stood by his friend even as judges, prosecutors, and the media assailed the department's handling of two notorious murder cases.

The first was the shooting of Detective Sherman Griffiths in a 1988 drug raid. A member of the department's elite Drug Control Unit, Griffiths was swinging a sledgehammer against the door of a Dorchester apartment when the drug dealer inside fired through it. Superior Court judge Charles M. Grabau dismissed the murder charge against the alleged shooter because the evidence was “tainted” by “egregious” police misconduct. The detectives had no “probable cause” for conducting the search. They acted under a warrant based on the testimony of an informant they had invented. “John” had helped them obtain over fifty other warrants.

Because of the illegality of the raid and blunders in the murder investigation, Officer Sherman Griffiths's killer was never prosecuted.

The use of dubious informants was widespread. The
Globe
revealed that forty of forty-four search warrants issued to another detective cited the same informant. This guy got around. He infiltrated drug operations in Allston, Brighton, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, and Roxbury, “variously befriending dealers who were white, black, Hispanic, and, in one case, Cuban.” Altogether, the Drug Control Unit relied on only twelve informants for more than two hundred warrants.

“It's like someone in your business making up a quote,” a cop explained to a reporter. “Everybody knows it's done all the time.”

The second case became a national sensation. A white couple, Carol and Charles Stuart, had just left a birthing class at a Boston hospital. They were driving through Roxbury, en route to their suburban home, when a black man forced his way into their car at a stoplight, ordered them to go to a Mission Hill housing development, and, after robbing them, shot Carol dead and wounded Charles. That was the story Charles Stuart gave police.

Bowing to protests from the African American community, the police had recently curtailed their stop-and-frisk policy. With charges of police brutality still in the air, Deputy Superintendent Paul Evans urged caution in the search for the shooter.

But frenzied media coverage of the murder of a mother and unborn child pressured City Hall to order every available detective to find the killer. One hundred officers swarmed over the Mission Main development, stopping and frisking and grilling young black men.

After Stuart identified Willie Bennett, a Mission Main resident with a criminal record, as the perpetrator, several detectives ran amok. They planted what appeared to be drugs on would-be witnesses to coerce them to testify against Bennett and threatened other witnesses with beatings and prison sentences. Predictably, they furnished false information to obtain two search warrants.

On this manufactured evidence, the Suffolk County district attorney was set to indict Bennett for first-degree murder when Charles Stuart jumped off the Tobin Bridge and the world learned that he was the murderer.

After a fifteen-month investigation into possible civil rights violations by the police, U.S. Attorney Wayne A. Budd found “strong evidence of serious misconduct,” but was unable to prove that the police were “intentionally trying to deprive Bennett and the witnesses of their civil rights by building a case against Bennett while knowing he was not the killer.”

Budd, an African American appointed by President George H. W. Bush, spoke for the city when he said, “The whole case has been tragic, including the fact that a community of color was falsely blamed for this crime.”

Budd's inquiry ran into a “blue wall” of silence around the Bennett investigation. Shielding wrongdoing was a chronic problem in the BPD. The blue wall shielded cops who got rough making arrests. In several news-making instances it protected cops who killed fleeing or, so eyewitnesses claimed, unarmed suspects.

The citizen's only recourse against police brutality was to appeal to the Internal Affairs Division. But the blue wall extended to Internal Affairs, which found for the accused policeman 98 percent of the time.

Responding to a drumbeat of revelations, Mayor Flynn convened a blue-ribbon commission to “review the basic management and supervision systems and practices of the Boston Police Department.” The chairman was James D. St. Clair, a senior figure of the Boston Bar and President Richard M. Nixon's lawyer during Watergate.

The headline recommendation of St. Clair's 150-page report was that Commissioner Roache must go: “Despite nearly seven years at the helm, Commissioner Roache has failed to develop and articulate a shared vision or strategic plan to guide the department's operations.”

The police would not police themselves: “Officers with a long rec­ord of alleged misconduct, including some with histories of alleged physical abuse of citizens, remain on the street largely unidentified and unsupervised.”

To lessen the distrust between police and public, the commission proposed a new strategy of policing. A strategy that “would thrust Boston into the forefront of American police departments.” I charged the search committee for the new police commissioner to send me candidates committed to this strategy.

“Neighborhood policing” stirred my memories of “the Deacon.” I had a vision of cops on the beat stopping to help grandmothers up stairs, of cops taking bullies aside and asking how they'd feel if the bigger kids pushed
them
around, of cops exchanging summer evening greetings with folks sitting on their front porches.

Paul Evans remembered two Deacons, Gene Dumas and John Kelly, from his South Boston youth: “Those cops knew everybody and everybody knew them. . . . Everybody talked to them, and everybody trusted them.” When neighbors complained about Evans and his friends playing football on the street, “Dumas and Kelly would take the football, and if their order to play in the park were obeyed, the football would be returned.” Order. Obeyed. Those were the days.

Was my vision an attack of nostalgia for the Hyde Park of the 50s? Or was community policing another back-to-the-future moment, a chance for Boston's twenty-first-century kids to grow up with a measure of the security that Paul and I took for granted as kids? As a former officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, I believe in preserving the past for the future. I believe that about the public goods of the city as well as its public face. About society as well as architecture. Progress is not abandoning the past but recovering its richness and spreading the wealth to new circumstances and new people.

 

Repudiating his own commission (“I know more about the neighborhoods than Mr. St. Clair”), Flynn appointed Roache to another five-year term but, acknowledging his management shortcomings, named Bill Bratton, then head of security for the transit authority (the “T”), “superintendent in chief.”

The St. Clair Commission issued thirty-six separate recommendations in areas ranging from internal affairs to information technology. Bratton moved to implement thirty-one of them, including neighborhood policing, beginning a pilot program in Dorchester.

The two-headed BPD divided into two camps: one for Roache and the status quo; one for Bratton and change. Paul Evans sided with the reformers. Roache stopped speaking to him. Bratton got more drastic treatment: Commissioner Roache barricaded the door connecting his office with the superintendent in chief's.

After Roache resigned to run for mayor, Boston had Bratton's attention for only a few weeks when New York came calling. Paul Evans inherited a divided and drifting department. My mandate to him was to close the breach that the Stuart case had opened between the police and the African American community.

 

The “new day” [will be] the one where Menino's police forces do not confuse a vomiting senior citizen with Jaws.

 

—Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson commenting on a tragic police shooting

 

The Reverend Accelynne Williams had made pancakes for breakfast and some of the mix spilled on the kitchen table of his Dorchester apartment. The seventy-five-year-old retired Methodist minister from Antigua, a leader of the resistance against drugs in the Caribbean, was sitting at the table when his front door flew off its hinges and thirteen battering-ram-bearing, shotgun-wielding, shield-carrying members of a SWAT team burst in. A cop screamed, “White substance on the table. Get him!” and the black-helmeted wave rolled forward. Williams fled to his bedroom and locked the door. His age and frailty did not suggest to the SWAT team that perhaps they had invaded the wrong apartment. Shattering the bedroom door with the battering ram, they rushed in. They found Reverend Williams “in a crouch position” in the corner, handcuffed him, and threw him to the floor. He began to vomit and soon died of a heart attack.

“I hope you've had a great day,” Paul Evans said when he called me with the news. “Because it's about to turn terrible.”

At a press conference that afternoon, Paul characterized what happened in the apartment as “a struggle.” Then he had the decency to add, “I'm not going to say it was an intense struggle.”

Neighborhood policing was off to a bad start.

Sherman Griffiths's shooting cast a shadow over Reverend Williams's death. Before Griffiths, the procedure was to shout “Police, open the door!” But Griffiths's warning shout cost him his life. So the procedure was changed. No warning, and instead of detectives, a SWAT team to take the door. Charles Stuart's damnable lie and the heavy-handed dragnet for the black killer cast a deeper shadow. “This leads everyone back to Stuart,” said Bruce Wall, a Dorchester minister, meaning the SWAT team's scaring Williams to death. “It's still raw.”

That's why, addressing an NAACP banquet that night, I apologized for this senseless tragedy, and why I urged Paul Evans, less than twenty-four hours after his first defensive statement, to strike a healing note.

First he called Reverend Williams's widow, Mary, for a painful conversation. Some of his advisers thought he should make no public statement until after the incident was investigated. Any admission of responsibility might expose the city to a lawsuit. (It did: We reached an agreement with Mary Williams for $1 million, the biggest settlement in Boston history.) Then he appeared before the cameras and, for the 1,900 men and women of the Boston Police Department, he apologized to the black community.

A confidential informant with a good track record, Evans said, was certain “there were drugs and guns at that location.” Reverend Williams's apartment was on the second floor. The warrant specified the third floor. The floor plan confused the SWAT team. “There was a tragic mistake.”

After watching Evans on television, a black political consultant remarked, “I said, ‘This is different.' For the Police Commissioner to say, ‘I'm sorry,' is an extraordinary thing.” Because Evans quickly recovered from his stumble, said the Reverend Charles Stith, a prominent South End pastor, “people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“This is the first time I've seen a mayor and a police commissioner come out and apologize,” said Reverend Wall.