Home Page

 

 

 

 

 

ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES

 

July 21, 2005

Yawu Miller

What began as a seemingly ordinary traffic stop became a costly ordeal for Wole Awogboro last year when his friend was pulled over, allegedly for driving with a suspended license.

While the driver was talking to the officers, two plainclothes officers arrived and initiated a conversation with Awogboro and the other back seat passenger.

“He said, ‘who the f—- are you,” Awogboro recalls of the officer on his side of the car. “I said, ‘I don’t have to talk to you.’ He said ‘get the f—- out of the car.’ I said, ‘we’re just passengers.’”

Awogboro says the officer then opened the rear door, grabbed him by his shirt collar and yanked him from the car. With each fist clenching either side of Awogboro’s shirt collar, the officer repeatedly slammed him against the car’s door frame.

“He was punching me in the jaw each time he smashed me against the door frame,” Awogboro said.

The officer then went through his pockets, taking $120, as other officers arrived at the scene.

“He kept saying ‘f—- that dude,’ and he got in my face, but I remained calm,” Awogboro said. “The other officers just let this guy assault me.

“I asked for badge numbers,” Awogboro said. “They said ‘get out of here or we’ll arrest you.’”
The officers later left without issuing a citation. Awogboro, a behavioral specialist with the Department of Social Services, says the officer who assaulted him kept $120 he took from his pocket.

Not reacting to the officers may have been the smartest course of action, according to NAACP Boston Branch President Leonard Alkins.

“In many instances what you find is that someone might challenge an officer then get arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer when all they did was question an officer,” he said.

Alkins and other activists contacted by the Banner said police use of excessive force is not rare, but it often goes unreported.

“We get calls, but we don’t get the follow-up,” Alkins said, explaining the NAACP requires those making allegations of police abuse to file a written report with the police. “It’s a question of people not filing official complaints.”

Officer John Boyle, a spokesman for the police, said the department takes allegations of abuse seriously.

“We take all allegations of police abuse seriously,” he told the Banner. “Because of that, we have Internal Affairs. People can make complaints at Boston Police headquarters or at any district station.”

Awogboro says he had difficulty filing a complaint. At first, he says, officers at Area B declined to take his complaint, directing him to Internal Affairs.

He then called an acquaintance who works at the station to take his report and was able to identify the officer who assaulted him from a photograph.

But his complaint has not moved forward since then, he says.

“The last time I called Internal Affairs in January, they said my case is on hold,” he said.

Alkins said police officers routinely discourage complainants from filing formal complaints, but said the paperwork is absolutely necessary.

“If you want to eradicate a problem, you have to stand up and be counted,” he said.

Most often, activists say, police use excessive force against people who are criminally involved.

“I tell them it’s par for the course,” said True-See Allah, who works with the Nation of Islam to help criminally-involved youth straighten out. “But it’s not right. You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.”

In the rare instances where allegations of police brutality do make headlines, it’s usually due to a rare piece of incontrovertible evidence, like the video tape of the beating of Rodney King, or because of unusual persistence on the part of a victim, like Boston Police officer Michael Cox, who was able to enlist the support of the U.S. Attorney’s office in making a case against fellow officers who mistook him for a suspect while he was working in plain clothes.

Those instances are rare.

“It usually happens under the cloak of darkness or in seclusion,” Alkins said. “When there are witnesses, they don’t want to get involved.”

Dozens of witnesses were watching on Evans Street July 4 when a group of Boston police officers reportedly beat a group of six girls and one 16-year-old male. While both the Boston Globe and Boston Herald reported on the arrest of two of the alleged beating victims, neither reported in any detail on the allegations of police violence.

Lisa Thurau Gray, managing director of the Suffolk University Juvenile Justice Center, says she was disturbed by the victims’ allegations.

“I’ve listened to four of the victims and I am very concerned about what appears to be a very violent and aggressive response to no provocation and I am concerned by the use of racist and sexist terms against the women,” she said.

“If we expect the Boston miracle to work, Boston residents need to feel safe with Boston police officers,” she added, referring to the much-touted community partnerships with police. “This kind of incident corrodes their trust badly.”

While July 4 incident received scant notice, the stories of countless teenagers in the Bowdoin Street area will likely never come to light, according to Domingos DaRosa who maintains that police assaults are all too common, whether or not kids are criminally involved.

“I could line this street up with kids who’ve been assaulted by police,” he said, standing on Westville Street outside the Marshall Community Center where he works.

DaRosa still carries the Polaroid photographs, the scars and the damaged shoulder he says he sustained during a 1997 beating he says police administered in a lot behind the Area B station.

DaRosa says he was walking home one night when an acquaintance he knew from high school drove by and offered him a ride. He got in the car and rode for a few blocks.

“I didn’t know it was stolen until a cop turned on his lights behind us and the guy didn’t stop,” DaRosa says.

The friend eventually did stop, then exited the car, running. DaRosa did the same.

“I was running, then I stopped,” DaRosa recalls. “I thought, ‘why am I running. I haven’t done anything wrong.’”

“I said ‘I didn’t do nothing,’” he recalls. “The cop hit me in the back of the head with his billy club. Then I turned around and he hit me in my mouth with his walkie talkie.”

DaRosa, who when was 19 years old and 5’2”, but weighed 180 pounds, punched the police officer, beating him to the ground. He threw the officer’s walkie talkie in a bush, then fled.

The officers eventually found him, covered in blood and hiding in a backyard.

“They were laughing at the officer I beat up,” DaRosa says. “They said, ‘how are you going to let a kid beat you up. One cop said, ‘don’t worry about it. Put him in my car.”

DaRosa, who was handcuffed, was put in the officer’s car, then driven to a parking lot behind the B2 station where he says a group of seven officers beat him for what he estimates was 15 minutes.

DaRosa says he remembers the officers pulling him from the car, then beating him with their batons and fists and stomping him with their feet.

“I remember lying in a fetal position with my arms over my face. And what good did it do,” he says, holding up a Polaroid of a bruise in the shape of a footprint on his ribs.

DaRosa says he sustained fractures in his arm and damage to his rotator cuff, lacerations on his face and lips.

“I was covered in blood. My eyes were swollen. I had footprints on my face and all over my body.”

DaRosa, who plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of assault and battery on a public servant, was given one year of probation.

When DaRosa went to file a complaint at the Area B station, he was given conflicting instructions.

“They said I had to report it with the sergeant on the 11-7 shift,” he said. “I got there at 1 a.m. and they said I had to see the sergeant on the morning shift. The superintendent in the morning told me again to see the sergeant at night. The night sergeant told me to go to internal affairs. At internal affairs, they told me they couldn’t do anything without a police report.”

DaRosa’s sister’s ex-boyfriend worked at the station and was eventually able to assist him in filing a complaint. But DaRosa was unable to procure a copy of his medical record from Boston Medical Center. Officials there said they had no record of treating him, although he clearly remembers being taken there.

Police also refused to turn over a copy of his mug shot from the night of the beating.

When he took the case to Roxbury District Court, he says a magistrate rejected his case, saying he had too little evidence and he had waited too long to bring the case forward.

The beating left the 19-year-old DaRosa angry with police, an anger that he says has subsided over the years as he’s poured his energy into working with youth. But the physical effects of the beating are still with him, he says.

“To this day I can’t feel the finger tips in my left hand,” he told the Banner. “If I put any pressure on my shoulder, my arm goes numb. I can’t lift weights. I’m left-handed, and my left arm is no good.”

Back to Lead Story Archives

Home Page