"Report on assault spreads blame to T police leadership" by Shelley Murphy, Kay Lazar and Evan Allen Globe Staff October 07, 2017
The ugly confrontation was caught on video: An MBTA police officer squirted pepper spray in a bystander’s face as she called 911 to report the officer’s harsh treatment of an intoxicated woman. The officer and her partner then knocked the bystander to the ground, beat her with a baton, and handcuffed her, leaving her bruised and bleeding from a gash in her shin.
Today, former transit police officer Jennifer Garvey is serving six months in jail for the March 2014 assault on Mary Holmes of Roxbury. But a scathing consultant’s report obtained by the Globe suggests transit police leadership shares some responsibility for Garvey’s conduct, raising troubling questions about how thoroughly the agency investigates allegations of brutality or trains officers to avoid it.
The consultant, New Hampshire-based Municipal Resources Inc., found that Garvey’s superiors ignored repeated warnings that Garvey was prone to using excessive force from the time she was hired in 2008, including 11 formal complaints about her conduct.
And, when Holmes and a witness accused Garvey of police brutality, her superiors quickly exonerated her, assigning an inexperienced officer who failed even to question Holmes before concluding there was no excessive force. Only after Holmes filed a lawsuit against Garvey did prosecutors seek an indictment of the officer on criminal charges.
The consultant’s report was also highly critical of several superior officers, including Lieutenant James Witzgall, who up until last week — when the Globe began making inquiries — was a program coordinator and instructor at the state agency that trains thousands of police officers on topics including the proper use of force.
State public safety officials placed Witzgall on administrative leave from the agency, called the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee, on Oct. 3.
Globe cost him his job?
Garvey, sometimes known by her maiden name, Amyot, is a highly decorated US Army National Guard veteran who completed tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, according to court filings, the 35-year-old was bypassed for a job at the Worcester Police Department and charged with assault and battery three years before she was offered the MBTA job. The 2005 case, which stemmed from a Provincetown bar fight, was continued without a finding, with a recommendation that she receive counseling.
Witzgall, who investigated Garvey’s background as part of the hiring process in 2008, told consultants he found Garvey an unsuitable candidate. He said he relayed his concerns to supervisors but was overruled because there was “a push to hire more females at the time,” according to the consultant’s report.
As a transit police officer, Garvey ran up 19 alerts from an early intervention program intended to identify at-risk employees. The alerts included complaints of assault, harassment, and rudeness that began when she was a new officer on probation. In 2011, a pizza delivery driver complained that she confronted him for double-parking, then squirted him with pepper spray and arrested him when he tried to call 911 to report she was rude and unprofessional, but Garvey was routinely exonerated.
Garvey was indicted in the assault on Holmes in December 2015. Eleven months before, Garvey had been charged with assaulting her wife inside their Wilmington home and pointing a gun at her. A lawyer representing Garvey in that case said she suffered from post traumatic stress disorder from her military service and needed help. The charge was later dismissed.
But, in July, a judge found Garvey guilty of assaulting Holmes and filing a false police report to cover up the assault.
WHAT?!!?
Philip Tracy, the Boston attorney who represented Garvey at her trial, said the judge’s decision to sentence her to just six months in jail, half the time prosecutors wanted, suggests he believed Garvey’s actions followed the training she received at the transit authority.
“She took the classes [the MBTA] gave her and followed the instructions, and I think the judge took that into account,” Tracy said.
The MBTA in June reached a settlement with Holmes in a federal civil suit, which accused the agency of violating her constitutional right to free speech and of using excessive force.
As part of the settlement, the MBTA agreed to enhance its systems and policies for monitoring officer behavior and to provide aggression management training. The agency also agreed to post on its website its standards of conduct for police, its use-of-force policies, and streamlined instructions that make it easier for people to file police complaints.
I suppose there is no silver bullet whatever they do.
Holmes remains deeply troubled by her encounter with transit police and especially by the agency’s investigation of that confrontation.
A single mother of two children, Holmes said she didn’t realize she was about to be arrested when Garvey lunged at her as she spoke on her cellphone that day in Roxbury. Injured from the assault, Holmes was initially arrested and spent the night in jail away from her children. Later, when she went to MBTA offices to file a complaint against Garvey, a desk sergeant, surrounded by other officers, tried to dissuade her. She was so traumatized by the ordeal, she said, she was afraid to leave her home for a year.
“Safety is an illusion,” Holmes said. “I don’t trust anybody.”
I know who I trust least.
--more--"
And here they are again, waving children at you while missing the message (and hoisting one in the bu$ine$$ $ection)!
(flip)
Might want to watch where you step:
"Beneath picturesque surface, a neighborhood at war; Paradise is subjective, of course, but a good case could be made for Old Rexhame Terrace" by Dugan Arnett, Globe Staff October 07, 2017
MARSHFIELD — It’s the kind of pastoral setting where even a hint of discord would be difficult to imagine.
On an autumn day in 2015, however, when two women encountered each other during their afternoon walks, this quiet spit of road would serve as the backdrop for an improbable — and allegedly violent — confrontation.
At first glance, they would seem unlikely combatants. Though they’d never met, save for a quick glance from a distance, Barbara Bennett, 68, and Kathy Lavrentios, 56, had plenty in common, but beneath the picturesque surface, conflict has long simmered here. For decades, an invisible boundary has sliced through the area, dividing a privileged few from the rest while sowing resentment that, in recent years, has regularly spilled into daily neighborhood life.
Now, as the two women came face-to-face, that resentment once again bubbled to the surface.
Lavrentios, who had only recently moved to the area, asked Bennett whether she was headed to the nearby beach. In response, Bennett — a longtime area resident who served as secretary of the Terrace neighborhood association — allegedly told Lavrentios to turn around.
You’re not allowed to be here, she said.
I have every right, Lavrentios countered.
For a moment, that appeared to be the end of it, as both women continued on their way. But suddenly, Lavrentios would later say, Bennett stopped, wheeled, and dropped the leashes of the two dogs she was walking, a pair of stocky pitbull mixes.
The dogs charged. Lavrentios crumpled to the ground. And amid the melee of teeth and fur that followed — as Lavrentios’s frantic screams for help went unheeded — Bennett allegedly stood calmly by, at one point uttering a chilling decree: You need to be taught a lesson.
This is the story, anyway, that Lavrentios told police. Not everyone here believes it.
Whatever happened on that secluded stretch of road, though, the folks who know this neighborhood best say there is a deeper reason behind it, one etched into the heart of this place and rooted in two centuries of its history.
A place of brooding beauty
Paradise is tucked between woods and the beach. Resplendent with natural riches, it was a place prized by the natives who once lived in the area and the settlers who overtook it.
“Eden” is how the historian Marcia Thomas once described it; even in the dead of winter, or the clutches of an unforgiving nor’easter, the place holds a kind of brooding beauty.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it has been a place long coveted by the wealthy and genteel.
That's when I stopped reading. That's who the Globe is of and for, and if I were one of that class I would enjoy sitting down to this story. I would be engrossed by it.
And so a feud that has already spanned generations marches on.
Walk the streets of Rexhame Terrace today, and you’ll find plenty of evidence it’s alive and well. The homes now outfitted with security cameras. The way residents half-joke, during neighborhood get-togethers, about selling off their property and getting out of Dodge.
And not so very long ago, a group of Terrace residents paid to have a large metal gate erected at the end of Kent Avenue, one of the roads deemed private, preventing anyone without a five-digit code from accessing the beach. Dubbed the “Hate Gate” by some, it has twice been ripped from its hinges.
Stationed on his front porch one recent afternoon, Ken O’Donoghue, 68, could only shake his head at the neighborhood’s current state of affairs.
A third-generation Terrace resident who spent his childhood summers swimming at the nearby beach, he’s had a front-row seat to the ongoing drama.
He’s watched as relations have deteriorated, seen the toll it’s taken on residents.
And at this point, he has determined, there is only one thing capable of putting an end to it all.
“Generations,” he says, “have to die off.”
Then you can auction off the stuff while sitting around telling stories.
--more--"
Maybe secession is the answer.
***********
Looks like Trump has a hostage crisis or two on his hands. I know Turkey's cozying up to Russia is the reason for the NYT swill from a reporter I greatly respected when I began blogging and who is now just another propagandist, but why Cameroon? Is a further U.S. presence required due to events in the region?
It's non-stop agenda-pushing with every page!
More Trump slaughter. Some change.
Yeah, the rest of the world is giving USrael the finger on that one.
How interesting. Alleged gunman shot dead and the event comes soon after the Saudi king met with Putin in Moscow.
Globe didn't want you seeing those?
***********
Of course, the signs of dictatorship are all around us:
More NYT rot, and who knew North Korea had a MIC, what with all the successful sanctions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!!?
The Gladio strategy of tension in England and France is a nice touch in the wake of Las Vegas. Pretty sure I'm on target there. No need to drop further agenda-pushing pieces on you, imho. You can see the end goal in sight through the smoke as we bump along.
You won't believe what they dug up during the search.
**********
They tried to spoil Putin's birthday with lame protests in the face of 86 percent approval, but I'm sure the present from Turkey was enough (Trump also gave him a gift).
Speaking of presents being left on doorsteps (my initial reactions was thank God it is only that).....
Are the Saints playing at home today?
Good thing Kestenbaum made it across the bridge before the fire crews arrived.
********
Well, the NYT just admitted who is at the bottom of the controlled opposition on the left as the movement -- if there ever was one -- is officially coopted by corporate interests that prefer we keep arguing with each other like little children (nothing about the harshly anti-Japanese editorial cartoons from the World War II years today?).
Speaking of left-wing donors to politics:
"A longtime Democratic donor, he hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in his Manhattan home last year. He employed Malia Obama, the older daughter of former president Barack Obama, as an intern this year and recently helped endow a faculty chair at Rutgers University in Gloria Steinem’s name. During the Sundance Film Festival in January, when Park City, Utah, held its version of the nationwide women’s marches, [he] joined the parade....."
Who he?
"Sure, we say the right things now. We don’t care as much as we say we do....."
The question being asked out here is why are not more actresses speaking out?
"But why now? Why not years ago? Harvey Weinstein has long been notorious, if not celebrated, and is a direct descendent of the studio heads from Hollywood’s storied past, almost every one of whom embraced the casting couch as a side benefit of doing business.
Somewhere in the past few years, the ground has started to tilt under people like Weinstein. Just a little, but each tectonic shift brings more dirt out from under the couch. The stories and traumas kept quiet for years — because who would believe the word of a nobody against a lionized man? — have begun to be vomited up against Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and others. The blame-the-victim game remains in full force but people are more willing to listen and believe. It’s a start......"
And that is where I will end it.
(Blog editor removes glasses)
