Tag: Boston Police Department

The BPD officer who helped win a Muzzle Award gets off with a slap on the wrist

Video of Boston Police Sgt. Clifton McHale bragging about driving his cruiser into protesters was at the heart of our lead GBH News Muzzle Award for 2021. The Muzzle was giving to the Boston and Worcester police departments for their violent suppression of Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Incredibly, McHale is being let off with a slap at the wrist and has returned to duty. Eoin Higgins, who obtained bodycam footage of McHale and other officers in the original story for The Appeal last December, broke the news of McHale’s unconscionably short suspension of eight to 10 days on Thursday for his newsletter, The Flashpoint.

“It makes you wonder what a Boston Police officer has to do to get fired,” attorney Carl Williams, who originally provided the bodycam footage to Higgins, was quoted as saying. “How in an unprecedented time of calls for police accountability can this be happening?”

In the video, McHale can be seen and heard excitedly telling a fellow officer about his exploits:

Dude, dude, dude, I fuckin’ drove down Tremont — there was an unmarked state police cruiser they were all gathered around. So then I had a fucker keep coming, fucking running, I’m fucking hitting people with the car, did you hear me, I was like, “get the fuck—”

But when McHale realizes he’s being caught on tape, he tries to back down:

Oh, no no no no no, what I’m saying is, though, that they were in front, like, I didn’t hit anybody, like, just driving, that’s all.

This is not the first time that McHale has crossed the line. Laura Crimaldi reports in The Boston Globe that McHale served a one-year suspension for a 2005 incident “after an internal investigation concluded he had engaged in ‘inappropriate sexual relations with [a] highly intoxicated woman.'” As Globe columnist Adrian Walker writes, “Clifton McHale still carries a badge, and that fact shouldn’t sit well with anyone in Boston.”

Despite his boasting, apparently McHale didn’t actually drive his cruiser into anyone. But that doesn’t mean he should have gotten off with such a light penalty. In fact, he should have been fired.

Acting Mayor Kim Janey denounced McHale’s light punishment. And whoever wins the mayoral election, Michelle Wu or Annissa Essaibi George, is going to have her hands full in attempting to reform the Boston Police Department.

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Free speech took a back seat to public safety at Saturday’s demonstrations

It’s now clear why no one could hear the right-wing speakers on the Boston Common on Saturday. The police kept demonstrators 75 yards away, and the speakers didn’t have any amplification. I’m not sure whether that was a police decision or a result of their own poor planning. (And I doubt it would have made a difference.)

The police had a huge dilemma on their hands. Even though the vast majority of the 40,000 counter-protesters were peaceful, there could have been some real trouble from a few hotheads if they had been allowed any closer. There were only a few dozen right-wingers.

I’m not sure how this could have been handled differently. Someone suggested that a pool reporter should have been allowed in, and that certainly would have been better than nothing. It didn’t help that BPD Commissioner Bill Evans issued a statement in which he sounded glad that the speakers were not able to get their message out:

We had a job to do; we did a great job. I’m not going to listen to people who come in here and want to talk about hate. And you know what, if they didn’t get in, that’s a good thing ’cause their message isn’t what we want to hear.

Let’s not kid ourselves. There was real potential for violence far beyond the skirmishes that actually took place. The Boston Police did a good job of protecting public safety. But free speech took a back seat on Saturday, and I imagine we’re going to be hearing more about that in the days to come.

Update: First Amendment Rob Bertsche has similar thoughts.

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Cartoon in Globe about police shootings sparks controversy

Mike Luckovich's cartoon as it appeared in Monday's Boston Globe. Photo by WGBH News.
Mike Luckovich’s cartoon as it appeared in Monday’s Boston Globe. Photo by WGBH News.

Update: The Globe has published a collection of letters in opposition to the cartoon.

Officials with the Boston Police Department are upset over a tough cartoon about police shootings of black men that appeared on the opinion pages of Monday’s Boston Globe. But the Globe’s editorial-page editor is standing by it. And the president of the local NAACP defends the cartoon as a satirical comment on a tragic reality.

The cartoon, by Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose work is nationally syndicated, depicts a white police officer. In one frame, labeled “For White People,” he is seen holding a piece of paper that says “Miranda Rights.” In the other, “For Black People,” a piece of paper says “Last Rites.”

Read the rest at WGBHNews.org.

Misplaced priorities at the Boston Police Dept.

Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn

Last October the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU revealed that the Boston Police Department had been spying on left-wing activists such as the late Howard Zinn.

The police were working with the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), a so-called fusion center through which the authorities could coordinate with the FBI and other agencies to find out who might be plotting a terrorist attack. Zinn, a peace activist, an elderly professor and World War II hero, was clearly someone to keep a close eye on.

Of course, we now know that at the same time the police were wasting their resources on Zinn, they were ignorant of what the FBI knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Among those putting two and two together in the last few weeks were Michael Isikoff of NBC News;  Boston journalist Chris Faraone, who produced this for DigBoston; and Jamaica Plain Gazette editor John Ruch, who wrote an analysis.

Although it would be a stretch well beyond the facts to suggest that if the police hadn’t been watching left-wing and Occupy protesters they might have caught Tsarnaev, the BPD was certainly looking in all the wrong places. The police did a good and courageous job of reacting to the Boston Marathon bombings. The issue is how they spent their time and resources in trying to prevent a terrorist attack.

Spying on the antiwar left makes no more sense today than it did in the 1960s and ’70s. Police Commissioner Ed Davis needs to take a break from giving commencement speeches in order to answer a few questions.

And while I’m on the subject of questionable law-enforcement practices, I sure hope we find out what actually happened in Florida last week. Don’t you?

City settles with man arrested for video-recording police

Andrew Phelps of the Nieman Journalism Lab has posted a useful round-up following the ACLU’s announcement that the city of Boston will pay $170,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a man who was arrested while attempting to video-record police activity.

The suit was filed by Simon Glik, a lawyer, after he was arrested while recording the arrest of a teenager on the Boston Common in October 2007. The settlement follows a ruling last fall by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit that Glik was “exercising clearly established First Amendment rights.”

The Boston Police Department has since reversed its stance that such video-recording violated the state’s wiretapping law. Said Glik’s lawyer, Daniel Milton:

It is important that citizens be able to record police acting in public so that the police can be held accountable for their actions. As we see all around the country and world, images captured from people’s cellphones can have a remarkably important effect on public debate of public information. It is ultimately a tool of democracy.

As media observer Dan Gillmor noted on Twitter, “It’s not the city of Boston that will pay for violating 1st Amendment; it’s the taxpayers. Good result anyway.”

Here’s the full text of the ACLU press release:

BOSTON — Simon Glik, a Boston attorney wrongly arrested and prosecuted for using his cell phone to record police officers forcefully arresting a man on the Boston Common, has reached a settlement with the City of Boston on his civil rights claims. The settlement requires the City to pay Glik $170,000 for his damages and legal fees.

Mr. Glik was forced to defend himself against criminal charges of illegal wiretapping, aiding the escape of a prisoner, and disturbing the peace. After a judge threw out those charges, Glik filed a civil rights suit against the city and the arresting officers in federal court in Boston, aided by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Boston attorneys Howard Friedman and David Milton. This settlement resolves that case.

The settlement follows a landmark ruling last August by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, declaring that the First Amendment protects the right to record police carrying out their duties in a public place, Glik v. Cunniffe 655 F.3d 78 (2011). The First Circuit’s ruling is binding only in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico, but its persuasive reasoning has been cited by courts and lawyers nationwide facing the recurrent issue of police arresting people for filming them.

The Massachusetts wiretap statute prohibits only secret recording of audio. The First Circuit in Glik’s case affirmed that an arrest under the statute for openly recording the police would violate not only the First Amendment right to gather information but also the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against false arrests.

“The law had been clear for years that openly recording a video is not a crime. It’s sad that it takes so much for police to learn the laws they were supposed to know in the first place. I hope Boston police officers will never again arrest someone for openly recording their public actions,” said Glik.

“The court’s opinion made clear that people cannot be arrested simply for documenting the actions of police officers in public. With this issue squarely resolved against it, it made sense for the City to settle the case rather than continuing to waste taxpayer money defending it,” said David Milton, one of the attorneys for Glik.

As part of the settlement, Glik agreed to withdraw his appeal to the Community Ombudsman Oversight Panel. He had complained about the Internal Affairs Division’s investigation of his complaint and the way they treated him. IAD officers made fun of Glik for filing the complaint, telling him his only remedy was filing a civil lawsuit. After the City spent years in court defending the officers’ arrest of Glik as constitutional and reasonable, IAD reversed course after the First Circuit ruling and disciplined two of the officers for using “unreasonable judgment” in arresting Glik.

After Glik filed suit, the City of Boston appeared to change its policy of letting police officers arrest and charge people with illegal wiretapping for recording them with cameras or cellphones in plain sight. The City developed a training video based on facts similar to the Glik case, instructing police officers not to arrest people who openly record what they are doing in public.

“The First Amendment includes the freedom to observe and document the conduct of government officials, which is crucial to a democracy and a free society. We hope that police departments across the country will draw the right conclusions from this case,” said Sarah Wunsch, ACLU of Massachusetts staff attorney.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.