criminal justice

Governors and mayors do not generally warm to the task of closely monitoring the police. Their reluctance is understandable, since police departments usually have a well-disciplined political action apparatus.

Mayor Martin Walsh has appointed four new members to the city’s Community Ombudsmen Oversight Panel, filling out its ranks two years after he pledged to revitalize the struggling board.

U.S. Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Barbara Lee probed the “State of Black America” during the Congressional Black Caucus’s first-ever visit to Massachusetts. Both representatives spoke with the Banner last Friday about Pressley’s decarceration initiative — the People’s Justice Guarantee — and advocated for the Ending PUSHOUT Act, legislation focused on keeping black girls in school and reducing unjust expulsions.

News in the decade that began with 2010 was dominated by major political and social shifts local and national that have fundamentally altered both Boston’s landscape and American culture.

William Barr aggravated the relationship when he reportedly stated at a recent meeting of police officers and prosecutors that “today, the American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and service that is given by our law enforcement officers, and they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves."

A coalition of civil rights groups sent an open letter to the City of Boston last week demanding that the Boston Police Department end its use of the controversial hair test to determine whether officers have used drugs.

Bloomberg’s apology is an admission that stop-and-frisk has failed. Black leaders who oppose the practice should present their protest from the perspective of an excessive violation of the Fourth Amendment rights to privacy.

A story in the New York Times reports that the district attorney in Brooklyn, New York has blacklisted seven police officers whose work is so flawed and so lacking credibility that their testimony is precluded from criminal cases. The story indicates that this is a common practice, but the names of the offending police officers are usually not publicized.

In 2017, Walsh said the COOP board would expand from three to five members and would take on more cases. Yet two years later, the board hasn’t even released data on cases it has reviewed over the last four years and has just two members, one of whom appears to be in violation the mayor’s executive order barring city officials from being employed in the cannabis business.

The state’s Supreme Judicial Court last week ruled that the Boston Police Department could not bypass a recruit for hiring based solely on a hair test that found traces of cocaine in recruit Michael Gannon’s hair.

After police released 800 pages of emails between Boston Police Sgt. Detective Gregory Gallagher, an officer who serves as the department’s liaison with ICE, and ICE agents, city councilors are questioning whether the department violated the city’s Trust Act, which bars BPD officers from holding people in their custody or turning them over to ICE agents based solely on their immigration status.

In January 2019, when a jury brought back a guilty verdict against former Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke in the murder of Laquan McDonald, there were loud cheers that justice had been done; namely a white cop finally tried and convicted of the murder of an unarmed black man.