DOJ report details rape and assault by Worcester police department
Where I grew up in Worcester and surrounding towns, we didn't call the police. If you called the cops, you'd just have more problems. But I remember them screaming at my grandmother when she asked to see a warrant. I remember being 8 and following a cop around my apartment as he tried to get me to open dresser drawers and cupboards. I didn't know why he wanted me to do it, but I could tell by how he was acting that it was wrong. So, I didn't.
What I did do was learn that the police ask you to do bad things.
When I was 21, right around the time I graduated college, I went out with some friends. My former roommate, also 21, had a thing for cops and brought along a Worcester cop she had been flirting with. Throughout the night, he got creepier and creepier. I, who was not drinking, stuck to her like glue because I was afraid he would rape her.
When a bunch of us decided to go a diner, the cop said he’d drive my friend so they could have “alone time.” I jumped in the backseat and rode with them even though he was clearly too drunk to drive.
I could tell he was angry, especially when she “spilled” his open beer bottle onto the floor in the backseat because she knew I was uncomfortable with drinking and driving. Grudgingly, he drove us to the diner, where our friend group stuffed her in the middle of the crowd so he couldn’t just get her into his car while we weren’t looking.
We spent about 45 very awkward minutes pretending everything was normal (directly pissing off a cop is dangerous), he left in a very angry state. When we got back to her place, the door to her apartment had been kicked open. I stayed up all night with a baseball bat in case he came back.
I told this story to my students years later. A few weeks after that, a girl came up and told me that her Massachusetts State Police boyfriend made a joke about hitting her (and raised his hand as to mime doing it), and she broke up with him as soon as she got out of the car.
Police are supposed to be public servants. Instead, in many places, they’re public terrors.
This isn’t to say all cops are bastards, but it is to say that the new Department of Justice Report on the Worcester Police Department does not surprise me one bit. Nor do the sycophants and apologists claiming it’s a “woke hit job.”
The report details a host of problems from training, recruiting, excessive use of force, DEI issues, racial bias, civil rights infractions, reporting issues, sexual misconduct, and rape.
The DOJ and other news sources have reported on the video footage of residents of Worcester, especially Black and Hispanic residents, being subject to excessive force, being unlawfully searched or detained, and being derided and mistreated.
If you have non-white friends in the city, this isn’t a surprise. I was lecturing on civil forfeiture, and a young Black student started telling the class about how this happened to his grandmother because her neighbor was selling drugs. He detailed his law-abiding grandmother’s harassment at the hands of the police in a way my suburban kids were not prepared for. These conversations are not uncommon.
Rapists and Rape Apologists
As a reproductive and women’s health scholar, I was disgusted but not surprised by Worcester PD's sexual harassment, assault, and rape of sex workers. But what surprised me the most was the blatant and gratuitous reports of sexual assault and rape of homeless women. The reports to the DOJ are staggering:
We also heard multiple credible accounts that WPD officers have sexually assaulted women under threat of arrest, demanded sex acts in exchange for police assistance, in violation of their constitutional rights, and engaged in other concerning sexual encounters. These assaults and other unlawful conduct raise serious concerns, particularly in light of the significant power imbalance between officers and the vulnerable women they have targeted. This misconduct is inappropriate, and WPD must do more to respond to allegations of sexual misconduct within its ranks and eliminate the departmental culture that devalues and disregards women.
Some of the vulnerable women were homeless, and they were repeatedly targeted, assaulted, and raped by the Worcester police department (the prevalence of this implicates not just one officer but an entire department that catastrophically failed in its job to protect the community). The DOJ report (pg 22) details that Worcester has known for over a decade about these kinds of assaults and rapes, and the city and police department have done nothing.
That’s not a bad apple, that’s a tree which is rotten root and branch.
Other sources go into the gory details of the assault, the numbers on racial disparities in policing, the use of excessive force, and more. But what the DOJ recommends at the end is: training.
Apparently, those darling little scamps at Worcester PD just didn’t know that threatening homeless women with arrest or “making life on the street more difficult” is wrong. They need a PowerPoint presentation to tell them they shouldn’t rape women while on the clock…these are taxpayer-funded rapes after all how could they not have known they should have been using their paid time for something else? Apparently, all the crime in Worcester has been solved, so they needed to make some up to say employed. A few handouts and a non-threatening white woman who teaches DEI should sort this all out over a paid weekend at a training facility. (Sarcasm, in case you couldn't tell.)
The irony of people calling the DOJ report a “woke hit job” is that its recommendations are a toothless farce. They spend 40 pages detailing horrific crimes and then throw their hands up as though there’s nothing to be done.
Of course, the other issue on training is that Worcester PD leadership has trained outside of the US with a police force known for excessive force and violating human rights.
Training and Mindset
When I teach the criminal justice section of my legal studies courses, we start with Chip Huth’s video on how his unit went from being the most complained against to having no complaints in six years. For him, it was mindset. Though, I argue his actual superpower was the humility to see a problem that he was complicit in and the integrity to change his own behavior. Huth notes that community relationships matter but that police (re)training requires different recruitment tactics, different procedures, and money.
The next article we talk about is the prevalence of US police departments spending American tax payer money to train in Israel. Rather than putting money into the kind of training Huth recommends where we learn to do community policing and see people as people “not problems,” the US continues to fund a regime known for excessive use of violence.
Police training in Israel is incompatible with US policing. Israeli police have been credibly accused (even before the genocide) of excessive force and human rights violations. In addition, in a time when our police are woefully lacking in training in American Constitutional law (to the point where some sheriffs believe they are the Constitutional authority), sending our police to train in a country that does not share out Rights of the Accused guarantees just makes matters worse. The Constitutional issues abound.
Can you guess where one of the recent Worcester police chiefs went for some extra training? Yup.
Worcester deserves better.
Worcester deserves a police force it can trust. Then again, we also deserve a government that takes these things seriously. I won't hold my breath that we'll get either.
The immediate response from a number of Worcester residents and politicians is to claim this is a “woke hit job” by the DOJ before Trump’s team takes over. But the fact that so many of us who have had interactions with the Worcester police weren’t surprised by the report shows that there’s something a lot more rotten in the state of Massachusetts than we’re willing to admit.
