On Brookline

How can you both “move on” from the Arthur Conquest matter and take seriously a panel that will advise you on a citizen complaint policy for the Brookline Police Department? Last night, that’s what all five of our selectmen said they were prepared to do. And good luck to the chumps “panel of experts” who have signed up for this useless exercise.

As usual, Arthur Conquest put it best when he asked how, in just a few short months, the Town of Brookline has gone from boasting of its award-winning civil rights program to assembling a panel of experts to help fix their award-winning civil rights program? What happened in the meantime? He did.

Last night, he called the panel an attempt at subterfuge, and he’s right.

This board of selectmen is a disgrace. Not because they won’t reopen Conquest’s appeal of the BPDs woeful internal investigation. Not because they sit in stony silence as residents present them with evidence of their abdication of the public trust. And not because they see themselves as part of the town hall team - “the best in the whole world.”

No, they’re just a plain disgrace. It’s to be understood - this is how people under siege behave. You can see it in the bogus act of a review panel and the focus on process, without addressing the facts before them.

And you can hear it in the arguments against re-opening Conquest’s appeal. What are they? I’ll put on the dunce cap to try and describe them. First, we hear that the Brookline Police Department is, “second-to-none.” And, as such, its officers are infallible.

(An aside: Selectman Robert Allen says that he has worked with a lot of police departments as a criminal defense lawyer and that, “Brookline is the best by far.” You think that might have anything to do with his brother being a lieutenant on the force and listed as “of counsel” to his law firm? And it was heartening to see Allen taking a break from preparing people with licensing business before his board to hear from some of the residents addressing the Conquest matter.)

Next, we have black officers on the force - two of whom were at town hall on May 24th - and they would never allow the treatment that Conquest received that evening. One of the black officers was offended by what was said to him by a resident and that kind of cancels things out, doesn’t it?

And as a clincher, the police take tens of thousands of calls and less than twenty complaints were filed in the past few years. This, according to the incoherent head of the police union (Bobby Murphy) is a record the private sector would kill for.  And that they do.

As in the case of the drug therapy VIOXX.  Company defense lawyers say that, “millions of these pills were taken and only a few people died, so what’s the problem?” (Juries say we’ll stick to the facts before us and award hundreds of millions in damages to the families of the victims.)

It’s clear to me why the selectmen and police chief want to move on. This episode lays bear one inescapable fact - that when you put the microscope to the BPD, you see some pretty shoddy police work.

Shoddy, as in police responding to a call with no information from dispatchers, as in an officer escalating the situation, as in the pursuit of a criminal charge based on an admittedly incomplete investigation, as in the nephew of the complaining witness as the charging officer, as in a failure to interview other witnesses on the scene, as in the issuance of a no trespass order based in revenge, as in a one-sided internal investigation, and as in an embarrassingly bumbling presentation by the chief when putting on his case against Conquest’s appeal.

If that’s second-to-none, we’re screwed.

Update: It seems to me that the recruiting of Martha Coakley’s assistant AGs to serve on this panel is akin to the warring parties in a divorce seeking initial counsel from the town’s best divorce lawyers, so that the other party can’t retain them. Our AGs should be involved in the Conquest matter alright, but from the other side of the table.