City Manager Eric Batista appeared on Talk of the Commonwealth with Hank Stolz on Monday and discussed the Worcester Regional Research Bureau (WRRB) report on a Civilian Review Board in Worcester. The full appearance is available.
During the interview, he mentioned that Chief of Police Paul Saucier is reaching out to community leaders to form his own “civilian review” group.
Read between the lines. The WRRB report moved none of Mayor Joe Petty’s majority coalition inside the city council, which includes Councilors Morris Bergman, Donna Colorio, Candy Mero Carlson, and Kate Toomey. George Russell has often been a swing vote, but has consistently voted with Petty’s coalition on police issues.
Russell did not file to run for re-election. Both candidates for the seat, John Fresolo and Rob Pezzella, said publicly they didn’t bother to read the U.S. Department of Justice pattern and practice investigation report. The candidate who wins the seat will unquestionably join the Preserve the Status Quo at All Costs caucus.
This is likely the lemon they’ll try to sell us as oversight: a hand-picked body, controlled internally at the police department.
The hedging has begun. This thing, in any meaningful way, is already dead, pending the election.
The propaganda campaign launched almost immediately.
On Friday, Oct. 18, four days after the WRRB released its report, MassLive reported that City Councilor Kate Toomey, the chair of the council’s public safety committee, said “this week she would review the report ‘thoroughly’ but said she doesn’t think the board is necessary.”
From the same MassLive article:
“I maintain that the state’s POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) program has worked well, in addition to our own BOPS (Bureau of Professional Standards), Diversity Equity and Inclusion Department Human Rights Commission, random body camera audits, policy review committee and accreditation process providing transparency in a number of different ways,” Toomey said. “I have not supported a local civilian review board in the past and do not think it is necessary with all that has been enacted over the past few years.”
Let’s look at these entities one by one.
City Entities Some Claim Provide Oversight of the WPD
Police Officer Standards and Training Commission (POST)
POST is a state-level agency that certifies and decertifies police officers. It is a product of police reform by the state signed into law by Governor Charlie Baker in early 2021.
The WRRB report explicitly says that POST was never intended to replace local oversight.
While the Human Rights Commission has invited POST to its meetings, the public safety committee, of which Toomey is the chair, has not.
Councilor Toomey could invite representatives of POST to appear at a public safety meeting virtually and ask them if their agency is intended to replace local oversight. She won’t, because she already knows the answer.
This is just a lie. A flat-out lie. Others will repeat this nonsense during the process of pretending to debate a citizen review board. When they do, you then know who is willing to lie to you. Never vote for them again.
Bureau of Professional Standards
BOPS, the internal investigation unit inside the police department, has a long history of cover-ups and outright lies. No organization, public or private, has ever successfully investigated itself. Expecting anyone to investigate a co-worker they may have worked with for decades is just plain stupid.
It’s never worked. Ever. Anywhere.
Public Safety Committee
Toomey has never, in 10 years of leading the public safety committee, requested a single report from the BOPS unit. Millions in judgements and settlements for civil rights violations by police, and she’s never even shown an interest in looking into it.
She says that the committee can take up only items referred by the full council. While that’s technically true, she could ask for such reports in a chairperson’s order, which then goes back to the full council and would almost certainly be approved. Not doing that is a deliberate choice, because her primary constituents, the police unions, don’t want that.
She just doesn’t want to. The violation of the constitutional and civil rights of people who are her constituents doesn’t rise to a level of importance for her.
One of the many pushes for a civilian review board came in 2015. In expressing his opposition, Mayor Petty said there were other venues for oversight to happen. One of those he mentioned was the public safety committee. The following year, Petty appointed Toomey to chair that committee. Despite the committee doing absolutely nothing that could be even remotely considered oversight, he’s reappointed her there for a decade.
The other entity Petty mentioned in 2015:
The Human Rights Commission
The Human Rights Commission (HRC) has a rich history of independence and fighting to maintain the rights provided to it in the ordinance that created it. That commission sued the city twice in the 1970s after the administration attempted to prevent it from conducting oversight of the police department.
Yes, the fight to enable impunity at the police department goes back over 50 years.
Under a reorganization of city agencies (I’m not sure if it was in 2015, or CM Batista’s reorganization soon after his appointment, as the old versions of the ordinances are not available publicly) a change made wholly undermined the independence of the commission. Now, the use of its subpoena power requires the approval of the city solicitor. That position reports directly to the city manager.
Mayor Petty voted to approve the reorganization that ended any substantive independence of the Human Rights Commission.
City Manager Batista spent over two years undermining the HRC. One of his two most recent appointments includes a close, personal friend of teen doxing police officer Anthony Petrone, who until recently served as the vice president of the union that represents police officials. Petrone loves to say that officers convicted of felonies should be fired, fully knowing that when they do, the department simply doesn’t investigate and doesn’t forward charges.
The department did exactly that in 2016, when the current president of the patrol officer’s union enabled the brother of one of the men in his unit to escape legal detention in the investigation of a gun crime in 2016. The city covered it up. He was never even investigated internally.
After claiming the HRC and public safety committee were the proper venues for police oversight, Petty actively undermined both.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Department
This is an executive agency that reports to the city manager, just as the police department does. That’s management, not oversight. This is another version of an organization policing itself. It doesn’t work; it has never worked; it won’t work now.
Fighting to do Nothing
The council continued its cowardice, ensuring that nothing about this topic appears on its final agenda before the election, despite Mayor Petty saying during the mayoral debate that he put in an order for a report from the city manager on the report. The only thing sacrosanct to the Status Quo Caucus is re-election.
A report on the report, the most government phrase ever uttered.
Why not just ask the manager in the meeting what he thinks of the report? That doesn’t fit into their strategy of dragging their feet for as long as possible to wear out public interest. They run this playbook on just about everything.
For nearly a decade, the Worcester Police Department held no officer accountable for the unreasonable use of force. Zero. As This Week in Worcester previously reported, the department sustained use of force violations in October 2023 and July 2024.
One of two things has to be true: the recent use of force violations show the department is getting worse, or corruption prevented use of force violations for a decade.
The department is not getting worse. The difference is that Chief of Police Paul Saucier believes in holding officers accountable. That’s a vast departure from the vast majority decades prior.
Where was Mayor Petty and his coalition inside the council for those two decades?
Taking every opportunity to praise the police department when in front of a television camera and refusing to lift a finger to create any change in a department where discipline was coming apart at the seams.
The reason the mayor and his coalition refuse to lift a finger is obvious. They have a very comfortable arrangement with the police unions in Worcester.
- Refuse to lift a finger to do anything at the police department. Maintain the status quo.
- Receive police union support and, this year, the New England PBA Local 911, the patrol officers union, issued formal endorsements.
- The worst actors within the police department continue to be enabled to do almost anything they want.
- Residents pick up the tab for the inevitable civil rights litigation that results from maintaining the status quo.
What a brilliant scheme to fund campaign support through tax dollars. A Trump-level con job. It also happens to be about as corrupt as possible without physically putting cash in their pockets.
Here is a simple challenge for Mayor Petty. You have a television in the city council chambers. During a meeting of the city council, play the Rizzuti video, listen to his grandchildren scream, then inform residents that the internal investigation cleared that officer of any wrongdoing, and Pastor Rizzuti was charged with crimes.
Then tell us there is no problem to deal with at the police department.
Then read the section of Federal Judge Hillman’s decision in the city’s appeal of the jury verdict in the Cosenza case. It’s very succinct:
“At the criminal trial Hazelhurst testified that when he was in the bedroom on August 16, 2000, he was looking to see if anything was out of place, ‘especially a pair of men’s shorts or pants’ and that he ‘did not see those gym shorts. (emphasis added). At the civil trial, he testified he did a ‘cursory’ search, that he was just “looking around, ‘and that he relied on an earlier Bureau of Criminal Identification (“BCI”) search to identify anything noteworthy. But the BCI investigator who processed the scene testified that she did not process that sort of evidence; she took fingerprints and photographs.”
That was the whole case. That’s how the prosecution overcame DNA evidence.
Then tell us that officer did nothing wrong by lying under oath.
The “Preserve the Status Quo at Any Cost Caucus,” the Petty majority, will defend the worst actors at the police department to their last breath, and they don’t care about the harm it causes.
That includes most Worcester Police officers who want to do the job the right way. What this group of self-proclaimed pro-police councilors do isn’t supporting the police; it’s supporting a small group of degenerates and thugs who enjoy hurting people.
Nothing is too far for them to try to secure their return to the city council chambers, which they treat as their personal country club.
If they give the people of this city who aren’t prominent donors, developers, and police union officials anything on police oversight, they will ensure it is as useless as they were while standing idle as the city manager rendered the Human Rights Commission into a shell of itself.
While Chief Saucier is a vast improvement, every day he stays in the job over three years, when his pension vests, is a gift. If you think they might do something smart like bring in leadership from outside the city and break the good old boy network inside the department, think again. The unions don’t want that, and the Status Quo Caucus follows the orders they receive diligently.
Here is the worst-kept secret in Worcester government: They have already chosen the next chief and have already told that person they are next.
It will be an absolute nightmare.
Welcome to the Big Town of Worcester. It’s a big club. You ain’t in it.
