Boston has paid out more than $20 million on police misconduct settlements since 2000.
By Edward Mason and Tom Mashberg:
Since 2000, Boston has spent more than $20 million on police settlements and court-imposed fines. Another 43 cases are pending or under judicial review, including a $14 million jury award to Shawn Drumgold of Roxbury in 2009 after a detective violated his civil rights.
Boston, launched its own Early Intervention System (EIS) in 1992, allowed the program to founder starting around 2000 and let it grind to a halt in 2005. For years, misconduct-prone officers ended up off the radar and on their own. Boston’s police brass abandoned a crucial tool used by departments nationally to oversee the men and women who patrol city streets with guns and badges.
The loss of the intervention system may have contributed to a decade-long spike in complaints against officers and a costly increase in verdicts and settlements in misconduct cases, according to a review of 10 years of Boston Police data and city legal records obtained through public information requests.
Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska professor who wrote a history of early intervention systems for the Department of Justice, says Boston needs to start over. “This police department needs an independent, outside review of its early intervention system,” he says. “They need to formalize it and put it in writing. Any organization should be able to monitor the performance of its employees. And this is especially true in policing.”
Commissioner Edward Davis rejects the notion that the department has problems with its EIS. Nonetheless, he and his personnel chiefs say they are developing a comprehensive system to keep tabs on officers. As part of that effort, they are spending $19 million to upgrade a 15-year-old computer system so that multiple databases can be tapped to track officer behavior. The newly designed system, expected in the fall, will alert BPD brass to more than just misconduct complaints filed by civilians or the department’s Internal Affairs Division. It will be linked into department databases that track officers’ personnel records and reports filed when force is used to subdue a prisoner.
Currently, says Daniel P. Linskey, the Boston Police Department’s superintendent-in-chief, managers must hunt through multiple databases to piece together a full profile of an at-risk or misbehavior-prone officer. “Our goal is to capture this in one-stop shopping so I can get a report on my desk so I can see who is showing up in more than one category,” Linskey says.
But it’s not clear the new information Linskey wants will be a part of EIS. The department has no written material outlining the future of the program or what kinds of behavioral problems will count toward an EIS referral. Davis says he intends to rely primarily on formal complaints when assessing officers, something critics say is too limited.
In the meantime, the department makes do the best it can. Asked about problem cops like Cofield, Linskey is candid: “Do we have people falling through the cracks? Absolutely.”
Boston’s Early Intervention System was launched in 1992 at the urging of the St. Clair Commission, a reform panel created after the botched Carol DiMaiti Stuart murder probe. In October 1989, Stuart’s husband, Charles, told police a black man shot him and killed his pregnant wife as they left a childbirth class. A massive manhunt in predominantly black neighborhoods led to the wrongful arrest of Willie Bennett for a crime Charles Stuart committed. When Stuart’s lies unraveled, he jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge. The case tarnished the reputation of the nation’s oldest police force, leading to a top-to-bottom review of the department.
The St. Clair Commission’s work coincided with revelations that the department’s Internal Affairs Division inflated data to show that 22 percent of civilian complaints against officers were upheld, when in fact just 12 percent were sustained, the same level that are being sustained today.
The St. Clair Commission said the process for examining civilian complaints was undermined by “shoddy, half-hearted investigations, lengthy delays, and inadequate documentation and record-keeping.” It rebuked the department for years of weak oversight and poor discipline of problem cops. And it described the department’s technology for tracking the performance of officers and complaints against them as “inadequate and inferior to most other urban police departments.”
The Boston Police Department’s early embrace of its EIS program, it seems hard to believe it was allowed to lapse. But it appears to have fallen through the cracks during a series of transitions between Davis’s predecessors, Paul Evans, Kathleen O’Toole, and Albert Goslin.
Department records indicate Boston’s Early Intervention System at the outset significantly reduced the number of complaint-prone officers. From 1992 to 1997, when EIS was fully functioning under commissioners Francis “Mickey” Roache, William Bratton, and Evans, the number of officers referred to the program annually for generating repeat complaints fell from 78 to 6, according to a review of Boston Police Department annual reports. After 1997, statistics are omitted from the reports and information is more sketchy. Between 1998 and 2005, for example, there are five years when all references to having an EIS program disappear.
Beginning in 2000, the Internal Affairs Division, which oversees the Early Intervention System, appears to have twice switched the software it used to track complaints. Justice Department records show that in 2003 Evans sought and received a $450,000 federal grant that included funds to upgrade the computerized tracking of officers. It is unclear what improvements were made after Evans left in 2003 for a position in the British Home Office. In 2005, the year the program shut down, an obscure reference in a city budget document says 48 officers were identified by EIS as needing intervention. Davis became commissioner in December 2006, but says EIS stopped working in 2005.
With funding from the George Polk Foundation, we sought to examine the years when EIS was moribund. Using computer spreadsheets, we reviewed more than 1,000 complaints filed against officers between January 1, 2005, and April 30, 2009. After applying the department’s own criteria—two complaints against an officer in a one-year period or three complaints in a two-year period—the review found that 163 officers could have been flagged for referral to EIS over the four-year period.
A review of police data shows 23 officers with as many as 13 misconduct complaints and as few as five between January 2005 and April 2009, when the EIS was down. In the two years after EIS restarted, 15 of those officers generated fresh complaints.
Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, says Boston’s EIS needs to be both more expansive and open to public scrutiny. “The culture of a police department is significantly affected by whether you have a functioning early-warning system that is taken seriously,” she says. “It is a tool that sends a message that they really care about identifying problem officers before they hurt or kill someone.”
Wunsch also said neglecting EIS as a tool for preventing misconduct gives lawyers an issue to raise when they sue over rogue police behavior. “The lack of an effective system to track officers in trouble early on can be evidence to show the city is deliberately indifferent to the violations of individuals’ constitutional rights, and that may cause liability for the city,” she says.
www.commonwealthmagazine.org/News-and-Features/Features/2013/Winter/003-Police-misconduct.aspx