The history of American law enforcement includes a frustrating, repetitive series of unsatisfactory solutions imposed, grudgingly, by courts and lawmakers when law enforcement refuses to clean up its own act. We might be approaching that point again, this time on the issue of excessive force.
If early 20th century law enforcement, up to the highest federal levels, had made decent good-faith efforts to discourage its officers from violating Fourth Amendment rights, the courts likely wouldn't have kept stretching the “fruit of the poisoned tree” doctrine to its maddening extreme. Ditto with rulings relating to coercive interrogations, denial of representation, reading of rights, disclosure of exculpatory material, and use of unproven (or disproven) science.
Warnings go unheeded, and the same officials repeat the same sins, with backing from above rather than punishment, until the courts — or, on rare occasions, lawmakers — reluctantly bring down the hammer.
Excessive force remains an area with relatively little intervention — and the result became shockingly evident in the failure to indict in the State Island chokehold case this week, on the heels of a similar situation in Ferguson, among others.
The reticence of law enforcement officials to handle this problem on its own could hardly be more obvious in the recent cases. Prosecutors, even when pressured to consider criminal charges, bend over backward for the officers, in sharp contrast to procedure with other defendants. Departments selectively release information unfavorable to the victim and favorable to the accused officers. Apparent lies and manipulation of the crime scene or evidence by other officers is not investigated, let alone disciplined.
Boston has a problematic recent history of its own in this regard, from the infamous beating of Officer Michael Cox in 1995 and subsequent cover-up, to an officer allegedly punching Salem State student David Meredith in the face during last week's Ferguson protests. A few notable instances:
• In 1994, 75-year-old retired minister Accelynne Williams suffered a fatal heart attack during a struggle with police when a BPD SWAT team mistakenly raided the wrong apartment. No charges were brought against anyone involved in the incident; two years later, the city paid more than $1 million to Williams' widow to settle her lawsuit.
• Cox was severely beaten in 1995 by fellow officers who mistook him for a fleeing suspect. The department did not discipline the officers, or others who participated in a subsequent cover-up. The only officer criminally charged — for lying, not the beating — later had his conviction overturned.
• A police officer fatally shot Emerson College student Victoria Snelgrove with a pepper-spray pellet gun during celebration of the Red Sox World Series victory in 2004. A subsequent investigation found that officers and their supervisor used the weapons in clear violation of training and protocols; the report also depicted attempts to lie and cover up what happened. None of the officers was disciplined or criminally charged. The city eventually paid $5 million to settle a civil lawsuit from Snelgrove's parents.
• The city agreed to pay $1.4 million to settle a lawsuit stemming from a March 2009 incident in which Officer David C. Williams allegedly choked Michael O'Brien and threw him to the ground, nearly killing him. Commissioner Ed Davis fired Williams, in the first use of Davis' “zero-tolerance” policy for lying, but Williams won his job back in arbitration.
• In October 2010, an onlooker videotaped a plainclothes BPD officer punching and kicking a 16-year-old suspect for several minutes on the Roxbury Community College campus. The department and DA ruled it a justified use of force to subdue the teenager.
Officer-involved shootings in Boston are invariably deemed justified by the district attorney. Criminal prosecution of law enforcement officials is exceedingly rare, and the city fights tooth and nail to defend against civil lawsuits (although I am told that this attitude seems to be softening under Mayor Marty Walsh.) The complaint process against police officers is notoriously bad; the city's civilian review process, finally implemented by Tom Menino after years of resistance, is toothless and understaffed. The department rarely punishes officers for use of force, and those rare occasions are often reversed in arbitration.
To be sure, the problem is nothing like it was before the 1992 St. Clair Commission report described BPD officers essentially beating civilians with impunity.
But that mayor-appointed commission, and the resulting improvements, came despite law enforcement, not from it. Mayor Ray Flynn created the commission under severe public pressure following the egregious mistreatment of black citizens during the 1989 Charles Stuart investigation.
The current national outrage might similarly force changes imposed upon law enforcement from outside. Those outside, blanket solutions, like those curbing other abuses, will likely cause unwanted and unnecessary difficulties for the vast numbers of law enforcement professionals trying to do their best in very difficult circumstances.
It would be far better for law enforcement agencies to make their own good-faith efforts to deal with the problem. But history, both old and very new, tells us not to count on that.
