https://www.proquest.com/bostonglobe/docview/2866624759/248D839D314B46D0PQ/56?accountid=30652
The commission is reliant on what police departments report about the
type of misconduct and the details of each case. That's led to
multiple errors and omissions, including: five cities and towns whose
data didn't mesh with the system and accidentally got left out,
multiple duplicate complaints, and some allegations that were
unsustained or overturned, which the commission removed two weeks
after its August rollout in what its executive director called a
"correction."
Espinoza-Madrigal highlighted one case that he said illustrated
concerns about racial bias. In a federal lawsuit his organization
filed last year, a Black 20-year-old man from Somerville alleged that
four white Arlington police officers violated his rights when they
detained him in February 2021 while they were looking for a
trespassing suspect who was white.
Two of the officers appear in the database, both for "Failure to
respond to an incident according to established procedure," which is
characterized as "Other Misconduct."
Arlington Police Chief Julie Flaherty, who didn't respond to a request
for comment last week, has said that an investigation found issues
with how officers handled the incident, but an investigator hired by
the department said no evidence of racial profiling was found.
Other instances that have made the news include the State Police
firing an unidentified state trooper who was on probation in 2020
after he called a driver unspecified racial slurs during an off-duty
confrontation. The State Police have no incidents listed as bias in
the database, however, and 652 of the agency's 676 individual
sustained allegations are characterized as "Other Misconduct."
In 2022, Woburn Officer John Donnelly resigned after the department
became aware that he had helped plan the violent 2017 "Unite the
Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., an event that included neo-Nazi
groups and claimed the life of a counterprotester. He shows up in the
database, but only for "Other Misconduct" and "conduct unbecoming."
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