
Officers from the Boston Police Department rode the streets of Dorchester last year. JESSICA RINALDI/GLOBE STAFF/FILE
Ruling keeps lawsuit against officers alive
By Milton J. Valencia and Jan Ransom Globe staff, March 23, 2016, 7:28 p.m.
A federal judge has questioned the city’s record of investigating allegations that Boston police officers used excessive force, issuing a ruling that keeps alive a lawsuit claiming the city has allowed police misconduct to go unpunished.
The judge’s criticism came in a lawsuit brought by a Boston man, Nicholas Cox, who said he was beaten by two police officers who thought they saw him participating in a drug deal near Orchard Park in 2010. Both officers have a history of complaints against them, though Boston police records show in some cases the city did not investigate seemingly obvious misconduct.
“Put simply, a very large amount of smoke could reasonably compel the inference that there must be at least a small amount of fire,” US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV said in a ruling unsealed March 11 that allows Cox’s suit to move forward. “This is such a case.”
The judge’s ruling comes as police departments across the country are facing criticism for misconduct and shootings of unarmed individuals.
Boston police have generally won praise from civic leaders. However, a Globe survey earlier this year found that a dozen officers faced 20 or more complaints over the past 20 years, and that internal affairs investigations sometimes languished for years.
The judge noted in his ruling that Boston police internal affairs investigations rarely sustain complaints: Of the 698 complaints alleging improper use of force from 2001 to 2011, only 18 were sustained, and many remained open for years without resolution.
Saylor’s ruling allows the lawsuit to continue so that the claims of police abuse could eventually be heard by a jury. The judge rejected the city’s request to remove it from the lawsuit as a defendant.
“A reasonable jury could . . . conclude that the city did not take appropriate action in response, and indeed on some occasions did not even conduct a meaningful investigation,” the judge said.
The mayor’s office and the Boston Police Department declined to comment on Cox’s suit because it is pending. The unions representing the officers named in the lawsuit did not return calls seeking comment.
The ruling supported one of Cox’s key claims: that the City of Boston could be held liable for its failure to supervise and discipline the two officers, which, as Cox’s lawyers had alleged, “created an atmosphere in which the officers believed they could violate an arrestee’s civil rights with impunity.”
“The decision points to [the] fact that when individual police officers repeatedly engage excessive force, the internal structures of the police departments which allow this behavior to continue should be called into question,” Tumposky & Associates, P.C., one of the lawyers involved in the suit.