This piece is the first in a series that will look at actions taken by some councilors over recent years that, when viewed collectively, display a disturbing downward spiral towards a council that serves the interests of its members, not of city residents.
Since 2024, the Worcester City Council has largely eliminated the role of residents in their own local legislature. The public participation portion of the meeting persists, although not without some discussion of further limiting it. However, the majority faction within the council insists on being in total control of what is and isn’t the business of the people of Worcester.
Soon after the Worcester Regional Research Bureau released its October 2025 report, which recommended that the City of Worcester create a civilian review board, City Manager Eric Batista told Talk of the Commonwealth with Hank Stolz that the report had little he wasn’t already familiar with. He said he studied the subject extensively while Assistant City Manager.
Yet here we are, nearly six months later, and no report has made it to the city council. That’s not the manager’s fault. The Mayor, currently Joe Petty, controls the council’s agenda. If he wanted it on the agenda, it’d be there.
A Harmless Resolution in Isolation
On the Worcester City Council agenda for Tuesday, April 14, the council will consider the following resolution:
“That the City Council of the City of Worcester does hereby recognize the Worcester Police Department’s (WPD) excellent work in several recent situations, where potentially serious dangers to the general public’s safety and wellbeing were averted. (Bergman)”
In isolation, there is nothing wrong with this. Based on the Worcester Police Department’s press releases, it worked with departments in surrounding municipalities to arrest 12 and avert planned street takeovers, arrested juveniles on gun and attempted robbery charges, and arrested one and charged two others related to the murder of Tafar Lewis, then-18 years old, in 2019.
Good. We like that.
It’s not the police department, in this case, that is enraging. Coming from this city council, the resolution is infuriating.
Keep in mind that on Feb. 24, just five meetings ago, the council spent over an hour praising the police department based on only crime stats, with Councilor Kate Toomey saying the department has performed “miracles.”
After the 2025 municipal election, the council majority led by Mayor Joe Petty includes Councilors Kate Toomey, Satya Mitra, Tony Economou, Moe Bergman, and Jose Rivera. Councilor Gary Rosen will show independence on some issues. Thus far, both Councilor John Fresolo and Rosen appear quite aligned with the majority on police issues.
Seven of the eight received the endorsement of the New England Police Benevolent Association Local 911, the union that represents patrol officers at the Worcester Police Department. That union endorsed Fresolo’s opponent in the election last year.
Councilors’ Positions on Police Reform
The positions of councilors on police reform roughly break down into three factions.
The Pro-Civilian Review Board Faction
- Councilor Khrystian King
- Councilor Luis Ojeda
- Councilor Rob Bilotta
These councilors support a civilian review board as a check and balance on police misconduct investigations. It’s not a position I share. They rarely work, in my view, and have perceived power that never actually materializes. The position is, at least, better than doing nothing and continuing a half-century trend of being willfully in denial of the problems in policing in Worcester.
The No Changes at All Faction
- Councilor Kate Toomey
- Councilor Moe Bergman
- Councilor Jose Rivera
This group falsely claims that the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission is “enough.” Meanwhile, as This Week in Worcester previously reported, the POST Commission’s position directly disputes this faction’s position. While Toomey is chairperson of the council’s Standing Committee on Public Safety, with Bergman and Economou as its members, the POST Commission has never appeared before that committee. To date, none of the committee members have introduced an order to the full council, which would be required to invite the POST Commission to a committee meeting.
Representatives of the POST Commission have appeared before the Human Rights Commission on two occasions. The Executive Director of the POST Commission, Enrique Zuniga, appeared before the Human Rights Commission on March 23.
He told the commission members that POST receives roughly 1,600 complaints per year and directly investigates around 100. That’s good enough for these councilors.
They also pretend that police officers investigating other police officers in the same department is a credible investigation. The WPD Bureau of Professional Standards has been a professional police misconduct and, sometimes, crime cover-up department as long as its existed.
A report by the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, “the city, in 2021, told POST that, of the 795 unnecessary force investigations it had ever conducted into its roughly 460 active officers at the time, it had upheld the allegations just two times.”
Bergman was first elected councilor in 2013. Toomey was first elected in 2005 and is in her 11th year as chair of the public safety committee. Neither has ever expressed concern that 99.75 percent of unnecessary force investigations led to no finding of responsibility.
The Too Cowardly to Take a Position Faction
Here are the positions of councilors who know only what they are against:
- Mayor Joe Petty: Against civilian review board, completely bereft of any other ideas he could support;
- Councilor Satya Mitra: Said during the 2025 campaign he would consider civilian review, no clarification since; unlikely to support;
- Councilor Gary Rosen: Against civilian review board, completely bereft of any other ideas but wants oversight of state road projects;
- Councilor Tony Economou: The DOJ report is “just words on paper,” against civilian review, completely bereft of any other ideas but wants to know the mix of the pothole filler;
- Councilor John Fresolo: Against civilian review board, completely bereft of any other ideas he could support.
Let’s be honest. There isn’t much difference between the No Changes and No Position factions.
For those from these factions reelected last year, Petty, Toomey, and Bergman, they took a week of press when immigration protestors interrupted the city council last year after Worcester Police officers supported the ICE operation on Eureka Street (city officials deny this, more on these lies later in the series), focusing on the curse words used in their protest.
When protestors shut down the Worcester City Council meeting after Mayor Petty “reinterpreted the rules” in under 48 hours to prevent a resolution on a ceasefire in the War in Gaza, despite the city council taking up 11 similar matters on international issues in the past, Toomey called the meeting “a riot.”
How brave of the trio to create that situation entirely of their own actions, then try to spin it as anything but self-inflicted.
Yet when a rally staged by police unions descended on city council, when some department employees insisted on screaming “prostitutes” at women in the room and demanding that their own experiences were a lie, all three sat there in silence wallowing in their fealty to police union special interest political power. They wholly and deliberately ignored what the DOJ said were contributing causes of abuse and misconduct it cited: a failure to hold officers accountable and supervisory structures so inadequate that the department has little visibility into what officers are doing on the street.
After the “not a riot” meeting, Toomey and Bergman played host to Chief of Police Paul Saucier promoting ridiculous conspiracy theories at a public safety committee meeting about interns at the Department of Justice and imposters cosplaying as cops as the origin of the sexual assault claims against some officers. If he had only called them crisis actors, the Alex Jones-like absurdity of it could have come full circle.
While this was, in my view, the worst day for Saucier on the job, I think he’s mostly done well in the role. The future of the chief of police position is not so rosy. We’ll get to that in a future piece in this series.
Based on their positions that everything is just wonderful at the police department, here is what we know the two anti-reform factions support:
- When a police officer physically attacks a pastor for saying things the officer didn’t like, in his own church in front of screaming, horrified parishioners, including children, promoting that officer is appropriate.
- When a group of multiple officers conspire to create a false story that an individual, who just happens to be black by the sheer luck of it, accelerated a car at multiple officers that the man wasn’t in (because they had yanked him out), the appropriate response is not to arrest them for lying on a police report (a crime) and conspiracy, but to promote one of them.
- When there is indisputable evidence that a Worcester Police detective told a very different story during a criminal trial than he told at the civil trial after the man spent 16 years in prison, that’s just fine. Put him back on the street to do it all over again.
- Teens bullied into confessions for crimes they didn’t commit, an autistic 10-year-old child with a broken arm, a man held for five months for a murder he couldn’t have committed, and on and on and on.
We know they have no objection to these horrific occurrences because they refuse to do anything about them. This is the police department they want. This is what they believe the people of this city deserve.
What they certainly do not support is the Constitution of the United States, which each councilor pledges to uphold at inauguration.
Across 276 city council meetings from 2018 through 2025, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution comes up twice, according to meeting minutes. Once, related to the WPD drone program, and the second related to property inspections as part of the city’s rental registry program.
The amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches or seizures by government officials, never comes up relative to individual rights and law enforcement in the city.
Let’s suspend reality for a moment and ignore the years of egregious conduct by some within the department. Look at the first 36 seconds of this traffic stop in January:
While I am not a lawyer, I can read. It appears, in my view, that evidence of two violations of law occurred during this stop.
Massachusetts has a higher standard for ordering drivers out of a car. Unlike the federal standard, which allows exit orders to be given “as a matter of course,” under Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, legal exit orders require an officer has a reasonable suspicion of danger to themselves or the public, or the officer has reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.
A traffic stop in Massachusetts requires reasonable suspicion of a crime or probable cause of a traffic violation.
The officer declared the stop results from “driving patterns that indicate illegal activity.” That is not reasonable, articulable, or particularized suspicion. That’s what some might call a fishing expedition.
I repeat, the city council has discussed protecting the Fourth Amendment rights of residents of this city in their interactions with police exactly zero times over seven years. Zero.
So yes, considering how comfortable the council majority is with doing absolutely nothing in the face of terrible violations of the rights of people in this city, this election-pandering resolution is infuriating virtue signaling.
Although the council heard this resolution after 11 PM during the council meeting on April 14, just five meetings after heaping effusive praise on the department, several councilors didn’t miss the chance to kiss the ring again. It’s not clout-chasing when they do it. Only residents who speak during public participation do that, of course.
Yet they just have no time to hear petitions from the plebs.
Remember, just last year, how important it was to “show up to work.” The record says otherwise.
That will be the subject of the next piece in this series.
