The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (10 page)

Then in late October 1989, a horrific crime in Boston captured the nation’s attention—and, by the time it was over, showcased how the Boston police and the media had fallen prey to racial stereotypes in the worst way. In the early evening, a suburban couple leaving a birthing class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, one of Boston’s premier hospitals, was shot in Roxbury while in their car. The husband, Charles Stuart, suffered gunshot wounds but survived. His wife, Carol, died within twenty-four hours, and their son, born by emergency Caesarean section, died seventeen days later. Charles Stuart claimed a black man had robbed and shot them. Within days, Boston police stormed through a nearby housing project, turning it upside down and hunting for William Bennett, the black man homicide detectives insisted was the killer. The media coverage was unrelenting and swept the country. But the storyline turned out to be all wrong—in fact, it was a perverse and deadly hoax perpetrated by Charles Stuart. Nearly ten weeks after the sensational murders, it was revealed Stuart was the triggerman who shot and killed his wife. Charles Stuart committed suicide on January 3, 1990, by jumping off the Tobin Bridge into the Mystic River. Leaders of the minority community claimed Boston police were unable to see past racial blinders and had violated blacks’ civil rights during its reckless manhunt in Roxbury. The finger-pointing, lawsuits, and repercussions lasted for months and months.

Later in 1990, a nineteen-year-old man was shot and killed by two Boston police officers after he’d shot four times at the officers. The teenager became the first of five people shot and killed by police during the next twelve months. Police practices soon came under in-depth press scrutiny, when in the spring of 1991 the
Boston Globe
published a four-part series about the Boston police titled “Bungling the Basics.” Police officials were outraged and produced a point-by-point rebuttal. The city’s mayor, Raymond L. Flynn, meanwhile announced in May the formation of a blue-ribbon committee to review the newspaper’s findings. Flynn persuaded one of the country’s best-known attorneys to chair the committee—James D. St. Clair, who in the 1970s had served as special counsel to President Richard M. Nixon during Watergate. In his thank-you letter to St. Clair for accepting the post, Flynn seemed to tip his hand—that he’d be happy to secure a clean bill of health for the police department. He noted in his letter that “Police Commissioner Roache has raised questions about the accuracy of the information contained in the article and the conclusions drawn by the reporter.”

But if Mayor Flynn was looking for a whitewash, he didn’t get one. Ten months later, on January 14, 1992, the “St. Clair Commission” submitted its findings to Flynn in a blistering 150-page report, concluding the police department’s workings were deeply flawed and that Police Commissioner Mickey Roache was an utter failure who should step down.

“I’ve always believed if you have a talented team and it’s not winning games, you fire the manager,” St. Clair told the
Boston Globe
about the panel’s recommendation that Flynn fire Roache
.
“This team has talent, but it’s not winning any games.”

The panel had interviewed hundreds of residents and more than eighty police officers. “We found poor morale among the police force and a growing impatience in the community,” wrote the panel. “It is clear to us that most officers with whom we spoke and many segments of the community have lost confidence in Commissioner Roache and his command staff’s ability to lead and manage the department.”

The special commission pointed to the department’s inability to police its own as a singular failure of wide-ranging impact that put residents in danger, fueled mistrust residents felt about police, and tarnished the department’s reputation. “The failure to monitor and evaluate the performance of police officers—particularly those with established patterns of alleged misconduct—is a major deficiency,” it said.

The panel conducted a painstaking audit of the department’s Internal Affairs Division. The division’s work, the panel found, featured, “shoddy, half-hearted investigations, lengthy delays and inadequate record-keeping and documentation.” The panel discovered that less than 6 percent of all complaints of police misconduct filed by citizens were sustained as valid during the two-year period of 1989 and 1990. “This statistic strains the imagination,” the panel said. “It assumes that more than 9 out of 10 citizens who complain of police misconduct are mistaken or are lying.” The panel also found that a group of officers had gone largely unpunished even though they were repeat offenders and responsible for a “disturbing pattern of violence towards citizens.” In short, the department was brushing off police wrongdoing, not rooting it out. For the rank-and-file officers, the reality was that misconduct was no big deal—it rarely got them in trouble. Internal investigators either booted the investigation or did not look into the allegations at all.

In addition to calling for Commissioner Roache’s removal, the St. Clair Commission recommended an overhaul of the Internal Affairs Division to include developing an “early warning system” to identify those officers with multiple misconduct complaints so that they could be targeted for retraining and even counseling.

The St. Clair Commission’s findings were big news. It put Mayor Flynn back on his heels. In response, he said the department would implement many of the suggested reforms. For example, the department adopted a so-called Early Intervention System (EIS) to identify wayward officers. Initially, EIS required more than twenty complaints against an officer to trigger a review of the officer’s conduct. The high threshold seemed a joke, more a throwback to the past than a reflection of forward-looking reform, and soon enough the threshold was lowered to three complaints within a two-year period.

But Flynn stood by Roache, the commissioner he’d appointed. Flynn and Roache were boyhood friends who’d grown up together in Southie. “Mickey Roache may not have done very well in the area of management,” Flynn told reporters at a press conference. “But I give Mickey Roache an A-plus in the area of integrity and in the area of bringing people together racially.” Roache hung on to his job for another year. When Flynn was appointed to be American ambassador to the Vatican in 1993, Roach resigned to run for mayor, and Bill Bratton stepped into the commissioner’s seat.

Robert “Smut” Brown didn’t have to read the St. Clair report to know the black community in Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods deeply mistrusted the Boston police. Smut knew firsthand the kinds of abuses covered in the official report in clinical fashion. More than once, he said, cops had “done me wrong.” Following one high-profile killing, he was leaving the Rose Club and about to get into his car when two officers snapped him up. “They cuffed me and put me in the car and rode me around, asking questions.” He’d heard similar stories up and down the street. The alienation was embedded in the daily life of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan.

Black teens—some gangbangers, some not—had been complaining regularly to Boston and state officials about Boston police roughing them up. One girl, a seventeen-year-old tenth grader, said a police officer stopped her while she was walking down the street and asked her name. Why? she asked. The officer patted her down. When her two friends protested, the officer turned on them and patted them down too. In early 1990, a twenty-year-old black man said he was parked outside one of the city high schools waiting to pick up a friend when two officers walked up and began searching his car. He questioned the officers and said the officers told him to “Shut the fuck up.” Young blacks said officers stopped them without reason—ordering them to drop their pants in public or to open their mouths for inspections or to place themselves spread-eagle against a wall.

For their part, Boston police were scrambling to combat the frightening rise in violent crime fueled by rampant drug use, especially crack cocaine. The 95 homicides in 1988 skyrocketed to 152 by 1990, with taped-off crime scenes becoming as frequent as sunup and sunset. Street gangs flourished, and some police commanders admitted openly that officers on the frontlines in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan were aggressively going after known gang members and anyone else associating with them. One captain in Roxbury was quoted in the
Boston Herald
in 1989 saying, “People are going to say we’re violating their constitutional rights, but we’re not too concerned about that…If we have to violate their rights—if that’s what it takes—then that’s what we’re going to do.”

The captain later called the remark a “psychological ploy” and insisted officers were not randomly harassing blacks or trampling on their rights. Police Commissioner Roache, soon after the captain’s public comments, even issued a May 23, 1989, memorandum describing the department’s “profound responsibility” to honor and protect citizens’ rights under the U.S. Constitution and Massachusetts law.

Certain Superior Court judges were not convinced. One judge threw out two criminal cases after ruling Boston police had violated constitutional protections against unwarranted searches and pat downs. The famous U.S. Supreme Court case controlling these circumstances was a 1968 case known as
Terry v. Ohio.
In it, the nation’s highest court ruled police cannot stop and frisk someone on a hunch, but must have a “reasonable suspicion” the person was engaged in or about to engage in criminal activity. In Boston, Superior Court Judge Cortland Mathers found that Boston police were violating so-called
Terry
principles by practicing a policy that “all known gang members and their associates (whether known to be gang members or not) would be searched on sight.” The policy, the judge ruled, was tantamount to “a proclamation of martial law in Roxbury” against street gangs and other young blacks.

Judge Mathers was also unimpressed by Commissioner Roache’s memo seeking to reassure the public that police were not running roughshod over people’s rights. In a scathing rejection, Mathers said, “The Court finds a tacit understanding exists in the Boston Police Department that constitutionally impermissible searches will not only be countenanced but applauded in the Roxbury area.” The police brass continued to disagree and defend the department in a war of words with their critics.

Newspaper headlines were one thing, the street was another. Smut Brown and others like him lived in a world where they believed Boston police would do anything to get them—lie, cheat, set you up. There was anecdotal evidence to draw on—instances where some officers didn’t care about the truth and the law, only the conviction.

In one 1989 court case, an officer testified he watched a drug deal go down. But the officer would have needed X-ray vision for his testimony to have been true—he was standing on the other side of a two-story building when the alleged drug deal occurred. In a gun case, another officer testified he saw a gun stashed on a second-floor landing—and, again, this was superhuman. The officer would have had to be 30 feet tall for the eyewitness testimony to be true.

The police perjury had a name: “testilying.” The fabrications might be rooted in good intentions—to convict the guilty. The officers wanted to arm prosecutors with the strongest, cleanest testimony possible, so they’d massage evidence against the accused to make the case seem better than, in fact, it was. They might honestly believe they had a criminal in their sights, and they wanted to make sure he didn’t get away, even if it meant lying. They perverted the law to enforce the law. The ends justified the means.

It was nonetheless a message of injustice—and word about the bad cases got around. The worst examples were when the police department’s freewheeling ways with the truth ended not with getting the right guy—even if by questionable means—but in a wrongful conviction. This happened in one of the biggest murder cases of the time. On an August night in 1988, a twelve-year-old girl named Tiffany Moore was perched on a blue mailbox on Humboldt Avenue, long the focal point in Roxbury’s drug world and nicknamed “heroin alley.” The broad street was scarred by burned-out homes, empty lots, and broken-down cars. Cash, clothes, and cocaine dominated its culture.

Tiffany was sitting on the mailbox swinging her legs, talking with friends. Then, from behind, two or three young men wearing Halloween masks ran across a small lot and began firing into the group. Minutes later, the 911 call to the Boston police captured the horror: “Oh, God! Oh, the little girl on the ground, shot.” Blood poured from three bullet wounds. One—to Tiffany’s head—was the wound a medical examiner termed “incompatible with life.”

Tiffany Moore became an instant symbol of the drug-fueled lawlessness rocking the city. The girl was the youngest victim ever in the city’s street gang wars, and her killing made the news around the country. She was collateral damage—the unintended victim of one street gang—Castlegate—seeking vengeance against the Humboldt Street gang, whose members were among the group of kids mingling on the street corner. City leaders sought to calm a public crying out for an arrest and panicked by the soaring murder rate. Some in the community even called for the deployment of the National Guard in Roxbury. Promising results, police launched a massive search.

Two tense weeks later, justice was apparently in hand. Shawn Drumgold, a twenty-two-year-old only a few months out of prison, and a second man were charged with killing Tiffany Moore. Police and prosecutors told reporters Drumgold was a “drug dealer and member of the Castlegate gang” and that “many, many witnesses” told them Drumgold was the shooter. The big problem with the statements was accuracy: They were false. Drumgold was no innocent—a street-corner drug dealer who had shot and been shot at, he surely fit the profile of a possible suspect. But Drumgold was a freelance drug dealer unaffiliated with any gang. Homicide detectives knew this; police kept books listing street gang members and anyone associated with a gang. It was all part of the beefed-up effort to combat the gang violence. Drumgold was not listed in the Castlegate book—or in any gang listing. Even some of the officers assigned to the streets of Roxbury were taken aback when homicide detectives picked up Drumgold as their man. “Shawn was dealing in peace, not bothering either gang,” said one officer based in Roxbury.