WORCESTER – An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) into the Worcester Police Department (WPD) announced over two years ago, on Nov. 15, 2022, has concluded.
The report’s executive summary says:
“DOJ has reasonable cause to believe that WPD and the City engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law. First, WPD uses excessive force. Second, WPD engages in outrageous government conduct by permitting undercover officers to participate in sexual contact with women suspected of being involved in the commercial sex trade.”
The private attorney representing the city in the matter, former federal prosecutor Brian Kelly, released a statement to the Worcester Telegram and Gazette early Monday morning, slamming the report as “unfair, inaccurate and biased.” Kelly added that the report “unfairly smears the entire Worcester police force by claiming there is a pattern or practice by the WPD to engage in excessive use of force and sexual harassment of prostitutes.”
“Instead of identifying individual officers who could – and should – be prosecuted if these serious allegations were true, DOJ has prepared a report by civil lawyers with no prosecutorial experience which makes incredibly broad allegations but fails to identify a single corrupt officer,” according to Kelly.
Kelly also calls for the DOJ to prosecute the officers involved in the incidents discussed in the report. That’s not a power this investigation has. The investigation is also prohibited from identifying individual officers.
None of us should be surprised. Multiple city administrations and iterations of the city council have wholesale ignored decades of Worcester residents asking, pleading, and begging to take issues within the police department seriously. Their words are acknowledged, promises are made, never fulfilled, and nothing ever happens.
Judging by the city’s first volley of response to the report, it appears we are heading down the same path. Smear, demean, ignore, repeat.
The tired playbook being rolled out, starting with Kelly’s statement, will continue. The city will claim to be the victim, smear the investigation, smear the investigators, claim it has implemented fixes for everything in the report, and ignore it.
From the day the DOJ announced the investigation, the city’s strategy appeared clearly at the city council meeting that same night. A normal reaction would be shock and embarrassment. There are about 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. In 20 years, the DOJ launched just 78 of these investigations. The investigation of WPD included it as one of the just 0.44 percent of law enforcement agencies in the country subject to a pattern and practice investigation by DOJ.
That is an exclusive club that is embarrassing to be part of.
Yet there was no lamenting during the city council meeting that night. Instead, Councilor At-Large Kate Toomey, who also chairs the Public Service Committee of the Worcester City Council, commented how unhappy she was that the federal government didn’t notify the city council first.
How very predictable. How very gutless. Someone start a pool on which public official will use the phrase “deep state” first.
The moment DOJ announced this investigation publicly, anyone with any sense, or who wasn’t fooling themselves, knew it was going to be bad for WPD. See the This Week in Worcester overview of the excessive force section of the report.
In a report published in January 2023, the Worcester Regional Research Bureau (WRRB) found that since the law that enabled patterns and practices investigations by the DOJ passed in 1994, it launched 78 investigations, with nine still ongoing at the time of the report. Of the 69 concluded investigation, 10 closed without an outcome, 14.5 percent.
Many aspects of the federal government fall short on efficiency. The Department of Justice is not one of them. Within its criminal investigations, research shows that in 2022, of the 71,954 defendants in criminal cases, 290 went to trial and received acquittal, just 0.4 percent. Most of those cases ended with pleas, as 1.9 percent, 1,379 defendants, received convictions at trial. Of those cases that went to trial, DOJ had a conviction rate of about 83 percent. Of its total criminal cases, it achieved a conviction rate of 99.6 percent.
In other words, when the DOJ says your name, that’s usually your backside.
Somehow, an investigation into the Worcester Police Department was going to come up just rosy? Of course it wasn’t. If it were, the DOJ never would have been here or they would have wrapped the investigation prior to 25 months later. According to the WRRB report, the average time from the start of a pattern and practice investigation to the announcement of DOJ’s finding was 26 months.
For two years, city officials have said that we must wait for the investigation to conclude. As we arrive at the inevitable conclusion, the city launches an attack, through its lawyer, on the DOJ. Disgusting.
At the bottom of page four of the report, it says:
“To its credit, the City and WPD have undertaken some reforms since this investigation began. For example, WPD recently created a Policy Review Committee that solicits public feedback on WPD policies, and in February 2023, WPD adopted body-worn cameras for officers department-wide. These reforms are promising, though it will take more for WPD to repair its relationship with the community and to address the problems uncovered in this investigation.”
If the statement of the city’s private attorney’s is an indication of the city’s strategy, the message is clear. The city manager’s office doesn’t care about repairing that relationship. The political cost of doing anything the police department, or either of the two police unions in the city doesn’t like, just isn’t worth it, apparently.
The city manager has moved to end any oversight of the police department. City council has no oversight powers allocated to it in the city’s charter. The city manager has refused to provide data to the Human Rights Commission, the only external oversight of police department, for two years.
On multiple occasions in the DOJ report, the investigators found instances of finding officers making statements about incident using force later contradicted by evidence, including video evidence. On multiple occasions in the report, incidents found to be the use of excessive force concluded with the officer never being held accountable after an internal investigation.
The city manager’s steadfast, multi-year campaign to ensure no scrutiny of the police department sends a clear message to those that are bad actors within the police department: We have your back. Do your worst. We don’t do firing bad cops who break the law in this city.
No, not all cops in the Worcester Police Department are bad. Everyone in any group is never bad. Some of them are. Nothing is done about it. Nothing will be done about it. The city manager hasn’t even issued a statement. It’s unbelievable.
So again, here is another constituent asking, pleading, and begging.
Mr. City Manager, stop this right now. For two years, city officials have pretended they would take this issue seriously once the DOJ completed its report. Having your lawyer smear the report isn’t it.
Call a press conference for the first time in the three years you have been in the job. Step to a microphone. Acknowledge that there are problems in the Worcester Police Department. Express horror at the findings of the report. Assure the residents of the city that the status quo isn’t acceptable, that the city has begun to fix the problems, but a lot of work remains.
Most importantly, declare you are going to fix the problems and that Interim Chief Saucier is the right person to lead the department through this period of reform. Then, god forbid, take questions.
Finally, release a plan to fix it, follow it, and do it.
You know, lead.
