The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (27 page)

“Some things you can let go, but some things you can’t, and this was one of those things,” he said. “If you were pissing blood, I’d tell those guys, would you let it go?”

Throughout the three months Internal Affairs was investigating the beating, Mike continued to puzzle over Police Commissioner Paul Evans. The commissioner was less aggressive than he’d expected. “Initially he didn’t take it seriously enough,” Mike decided. The top cop’s generally silent posture, he thought, had created a vacuum where the downplaying of the beating that Craig Jones kept running into was able to gain traction. It was the fertile ground for rumors questioning the department’s commitment to hold the beaters accountable. Was Evans serious? Or should everyone sit tight and ride out a whitewash? One thing was certain. In his first year, the commissioner was proving himself as a master of policy statements. He issued a series of impressive and high-minded new directives aimed at improving the department’s tarnished image.

Less than two months after the beating, Evans in March promulgated a new order explicitly listing the duties of sergeants and patrol supervisors when force has been used by officers in their command. It amounted to a checklist of what the three sergeants at Woodruff Way—Isaac Thomas, David Murphy, and Daniel Dovidio—did
not
do following Mike’s injuries. The order was called “Special Order Number 95–16: Amendment to Rule 304, Use of Non-Lethal Force.” Its purpose was “to more clearly delineate what constitutes a full and complete Patrol Supervisor’s investigation in cases where the use of non-lethal force is used, or alleged to have been used, on a subject.” The new rule required that “prior to the end of the tour of duty,” the supervisor was to prepare a report that included reports from officers alleged to have used non-lethal force, reports from all police personnel at the scene, and reports from civilian witnesses.

Two days later, on March 17, Evans announced a second new directive called “Special Order Number 95–17: Identification of Plainclothes Officers.” Its purpose was “to minimize the potential risk to officers assigned to plainclothes duties by establishing policies and procedures that will aid in their being properly identified.” The rule, which had been in the works for months, established for the first time a hand signal officers working in plainclothes could employ to identify themselves to other officers—“in order to avert an unfortunate confrontation or tragedy.” The officer was to raise his arms over his head and cross them at the wrists, turn his palms forward, and spread out his fingers.

Then several months later came Evans’s new “Public Integrity Policy: Rule 113.” The nine-page, single-spaced directive addressed the need for the police department to “maintain the highest standards of honesty and integrity.” It noted that police departments throughout the country experience corruption. “Boston certainly has not been immune to those problems. Corruption, brutality, falsifying evidence, and bias cannot be tolerated among individuals sworn to uphold the law. Nor can hypocrisy, unfairness, deceit and discrimination be tolerated in an organization dedicated to the highest ideals of justice and the rule of law.”

The document contained eleven ethical canons. Canon nine, in particular, stipulated: “Police officers shall use only that amount of force reasonably necessary to achieve their lawful purpose. Excessive or unauthorized force is never justified and every officer not only has an affirmative duty to intervene to prevent such violence, but also to report any such instances that may come to their attention.”

The orders addressed flaws exposed in dramatic relief by the beating. To Mike, the words certainly looked good on paper, but what about their application? What about the lies and failure to cooperate during the Internal Affairs inquiry? Truth telling could have been a concern pursued in any number of directions—Dave Williams and Ian Daley, to name two. No one was looking at Sergeant Dan Dovidio. Even cohorts in Mike’s gang unit were vulnerable, given the fantasy about the ice-slip codified in reports that first night.

Beyond the lying, there were leads that seemed to be ignored. What about Richie Walker saying he saw a cop chasing Mike; Bobby Dwan saying he noticed a commotion by the fence involving a black cop and a white cop in uniform; Mike saying he was kicked by a white officer; gang unit officers saying Dave Williams and Ian Daley later said cops had beaten Mike; Craig Jones saying Dave Williams later had told him his partner had hit Mike; Ian Daley dramatically shutting down his interview, and Jimmy Burgio taking the Fifth? The burden of proof in an administrative inquiry was substantially less than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” required in criminal cases. Why were Burgio, Williams, and Daley still on the street? Mike wondered why they weren’t at least put on desk duty while the investigation into the beating continued.

“No one’s getting in trouble,” Mike said. The commissioner’s directives seemed like big talk, little action. The message cops could take from the absence of any real consequence was to hunker down: No one else is saying anything. I’m not saying anything.

“I was feeling more and more uncomfortable with the process,” Mike said.

By early spring, it didn’t take much to awaken Mike. He slept on edge, as if waiting for something to happen. It could be a telephone call; the crank calls had continued as February passed into March and March into April. Or it could be the nightmare in which he was helpless against police attacking his house and family. Or it could be something else. Mike was always wondering, what next?

The pounding at the front door therefore saw Mike bounding out of bed and hustling downstairs in his shorts and T-shirt. It was the middle of the night, and he didn’t want his boys or his sisters’ family downstairs waking up. Kimberly, however, was out of bed and right behind him.

Before Mike reached the landing he heard the loud crackle of police radios outside. He opened the door. Two uniformed officers stood on the stoop. Mike recognized one of them, but didn’t know his name. They were from the B–2 station in Roxbury.

The second officer, the one Mike did not recognize, spoke up. He said they’d been dispatched to the house on a 911 emergency call—a 911 call, the officer said, for a disturbance. “For a man being beaten.”

Man being beaten?
Mike couldn’t believe what he was hearing. You gotta be freakin’ kidding me, he thought.
Man being beaten?
The beating was January 25. Woodruff Way.

The two officers seemed poised, ready to barrel into Mike’s house.

Mike didn’t say a word. He filled the door frame. It was a silent standoff lasting a few seconds. The cop Mike had recognized then recognized him, and he turned to his partner.

“Let’s go,” the cop said. The second officer, confused, hesitated. The first kept going, heading toward the cruiser parked on the street. C’mon, he called back to his partner. To Mike he said, “Sorry.”

Mike shut the door firmly. Kimberly wanted to know what was going on. “Just go back in,” Mike said. Upstairs, he told her they had the wrong house. It was a mistake. Oh, was all Kimberly said. They got back into bed and tried to get some sleep.

Both knew Mike was lying. It was not a mistake but a new twist in the ongoing harassment—a phony 911 call, almost funny in a perverse way.

Mike understood that inside the department, there was no longer any question about where he stood. Everyone knew he was cooperating. He’d met with Internal Affairs and made it clear he wanted justice.

With that, it seemed to Mike the message behind the harassment was changing. It had gone from being a warning to lie low and not cooperate to a kind of punishment and payback for deciding to push the matter. The new message was: You’re not one of us.

Thoughts like that were taking their toll. Instead of feeling better three months after the beating, Mike was feeling worse. It was blowing his mind—he’d been beaten, he was the victim, and yet he was the outcast.

“What is it about me?”

He found himself obsessed with the question. “What is it about me that these people think that they can just do this? And just walk away, and never admit to anything or apologize.”

He was thinking in ways he never had before. He was never particularly race-conscious growing up, but he began thinking that being black was the only viable explanation for the abandonment that started at Woodruff Way. “They were able to leave me because they thought less of me because of what I am,” Mike said. “It wouldn’t have happened if I were white.”

The thoughts at times had a crippling effect. Mike retreated into himself. He became jumpy and fearful, and, on occasion, Kimberly found him alone, crying. But something else was at work too; at other times the thoughts worked Mike into a rage. “The more I relived what happened to me, the angrier I got,” he said, “and it wasn’t just the beating that angered me. It was the fact that they left…They just left me there like an animal to die, you know, on the side of the highway.”

While the Internal Affairs inquiry was winding down, Mike made a key decision. He contacted the Boston attorney who’d come to the house to talk about possible legal action. During the first visit, Mike hadn’t given Stephen Roach the time of day. But Mike now told Roach to go ahead—Roach could write the city to request a full copy of Mike’s medical records. It wasn’t as if Mike had committed to taking specific action, but he no longer knew whom to trust and he wanted to be ready. He saw no harm in letting Roach make a few preliminary requests for documents.

Mike also agreed to a second request from Roach. He agreed to meet with a psychiatrist. He didn’t believe in therapy, but the lawyer wanted a professional evaluation. Seeing a psychiatrist might also ease some of Kimberly’s concerns. Mike went twice to see an analyst named Dr. Jerome Rogoff—for ninety minutes on April 24 and for another sixty minutes on May 1. Rogoff was a forensic psychiatrist with a drawer full of credentials. He was a member of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law and had taught at Tufts Medical School and Harvard Medical School. He’d treated prison inmates and served as an expert witness in both civil and criminal cases.

Following the two sessions, Rogoff wrote Roach a report that ran six pages. It began with an outline of Mike’s life, saying that Mike grew up in Roxbury in a “stable, intact family.” He noted that his father died of cancer when he was sixteen, “at which point his severe and prolonged bereavement interfered with his performance at school.” By senior year at Wooster, the report said, he’d recovered and finished strong.

The main thrust of the report, however, was not Mike’s past. It was to determine Mike’s “current mental and emotional state.” Rogoff found Mike “guarded and suspicious,” which, noted the psychiatrist, was not typical for him. “He was always preternaturally calm under stress, which contributed to his effectiveness as a plainclothes policeman.” The psychiatrist listed other symptoms all too familiar to Mike and his family—“he has trouble sleeping,” “the content of the nightmares is of people trying to shoot him, to kill him, often while he is with his children,” and “he cries from time to time, especially when he thinks about how even those he thought of as his friends on the police force have deserted him.”

The diagnostics ran several pages. “Taken together, these symptoms describe a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with elements of clinical depression (Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood) added to it.”

Rogoff was clear about the cause of Mike’s troubles. “Both the timing and the content of these symptoms, coupled with the fact none of them existed before January 25, 1995, leave no question that they were caused directly by the incident of that night.”

It was discouraging stuff. And Rogoff wrote there was no specific treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. But he did end with a note of encouragement. “I was impressed with Michael Cox’s inner strength and integrity of character (personality), and thus I would hope that he would be able to put himself back together psychologically in a fairly short time.”

CHAPTER 12

Dave, I Know You Know Something

T
wo years before the beating of Mike Cox, a pair of leading experts on police practices were asking: “How can police, who can be exemplary heroes, beat people and then even be prepared to lie about it?” The paradox was the central question explored in their 1993 book,
Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force
. The two scholars were Jerome H. Skolnick, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and later New York University, and James J. Fyfe, a longtime New York City patrolman who left the force after earning his Ph.D. in criminal justice.

Using cases that included the ferocious beating of Rodney King on March 3, 1991, by Los Angeles police officers—captured on videotape and televised around the world—the authors said the answer was found in the proposition that “two principal features of the police role—danger and authority—combine to produce…a distinctive world view.” It’s an “us-versus-them” perspective, where the high-risk and often violent nature of the job creates a policing culture based on “internal solidarity, or brotherhood.”

The brotherhood, they wrote, controls behavior even when an officer crosses the line—such as in the beating of Rodney King. It almost doesn’t matter that police departments routinely issue policies on integrity and truth telling. (In Boston, it was Commissioner Paul Evans’s new “Public Integrity Policy: Rule 113.”) When it comes to survival on the street, the unwritten codes about sticking together are what matter, even if that means lying and a cover-up. The last thing a cop wants to do is testify against another cop. “The code decrees that cops protect other cops, no matter what, and that cops of high rank back up working street cops—no matter what,” wrote Skolnick and Fyfe.

Mike Cox did not need to read any book to understand the blue wall of silence. “It’s a large part of being a police officer in general and the culture of being a police officer—protecting one another.” In his analysis, the code’s logic began with the presumption that a cop was always right. “Whatever it is that he’s doing is assumed to be right. Because you’re assuming his actions are always right, you don’t look for any wrong.” In other words, there was never any misconduct for cops to talk about. It was why one of the officers on the witness stand in the Brighton 13 police brutality trial could unblinkingly testify he’d never seen a Boston cop doing anything wrong. In his six years on the force, Mike certainly understood the basis for the code—the need to be able to count on your cohorts, virtually without reservation. It was all about survival while working on the edge of life and death to uphold law and order.