Hub youths say police harassment is constant

Yawu Miller

For teenagers who live in the Villa Victoria housing development, getting stopped by the police can be a daily occurrence. It happens whether teens are in a group or by themselves. Whether they’ve congregated on a corner or they’re cutting through a side street.

“In the beginning, I felt disrespected and violated,” said one teen, who, like most interviewed by the Banner, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “But it usually happens three or four times a week. One day, I got caught up three times in the same area.”

Like in many areas in the city, the teens in the Villa say officers question them, frisk them, verbally abuse them, threaten them and sometimes use violence.

“I basically get stopped every day,” said another Villa resident. “They ask you questions, ‘what’s your name? What’s your address? What school do you go to?’ They search you. They know us all. But they do it all the time. And they always ask us the same questions.”

In interviews with the Banner, teens and youth workers described what they said is a widespread practice of stopping and frisking youth who are often guilty of nothing more than sitting on their own front stoop. The teenagers interviewed by the Banner live in the South End, Roxbury, Dorchester and Jamaica Plain. They all described similar patterns of police behavior including foul language, threats, questioning and physical coercion.

“If you are a male and are of color, it’s likely you will be stopped and searched,” said Stanley Pollack, executive director of Teen Empowerment, an organization that works with teenagers, many of whom have had run-ins with the police.

One of Angelo Pina’s recent run-ins with the law happened on a basketball court in Ronan Park, when an officer drove his cruiser onto the black top and patted him down. As the officer fired off questions, the soft-spoken Jeremiah Burke student answered.

“I guess he didn’t hear me,” Pina recalls. “He said ‘these are pretty simple f—- questions. Answer me or I’ll smack you.’”

After the officer called Pina’s mother and told her he was in the park looking for drugs, Pina told the officer he was harassing him.

“He opened the back door of his cruiser and said ‘you know what? You’re under arrest.’”

For Pina, who was ultimately not arrested, this incident was by no means his first brush with the Boston Police Department. That would have been in 8th grade when officers made a practice of regularly patting down Pina and his classmates on a Dorchester street corner while they were en route to school.

“They would drive up to us and tell everyone ‘post up on the wall,’” Pina said. “They would pat us down then say, ‘keep it moving.’”

The police procedures Pina was introduced to back then, while widespread, are at variance with common notions of the 4th Amendment and departmental policy.

“Officers are only supposed to pat people down if they have a reasonable suspicion based on specific and articulable facts that the individual has committed, is committing or is about to commit offenses and that officer has a good-faith reason to believe that the individual is armed and dangerous,” said Ken King, a clinical instructor with the Suffolk University Law School’s Juvenile Justice Center.

Police department spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll also said officers must have a pretext to stop a suspect.

“We do not condone unconstitutional searches at all,” she said.

But according to the accounts given by youths interviewed by the Banner, the law as practiced by the Boston Police is often different from the law as represented in amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

“I know the law,” said one Villa teen, who said he had his head slammed against a police cruiser after he accidentally belched during questioning by an ill-tempered officer. “But this has been going on for a long time.”

King, who represents youths in court, says the practice of stopping youths without pretext is widespread.

“I think it’s happening a lot,” he says. “I think a lot of kids are preyed upon.”

King advises youths to take a middle path.

“Make it clear that you do not consent to a search, but do not physically resist,” he says. “If they physically resist, they’re looking at assault and battery charges.”

With arrests come CORI records that can make it all the more difficult to obtain jobs or entrance into universities. An arrest record, even if it’s for an offense that was thrown out at arraignment, is accessible by employers, schools, government agencies and even newspapers.

That’s what Derrick Patterson now faces, after police snagged him and a friend on robbery charges.

“The police lied,” he said. “They said me and my friend fit the description of the suspects. They stopped me just because I was wearing a hoodie.”

When Patterson’s attorney brought him the police report at his arraignment, he saw that the suspects were 4’10” and 5’1”. Patterson is 5’7” and his friend was 5’10”.

Patterson’s supervisor at Teen Empowerment, Craig McClay, notes that his arrest record will follow him for his whole life, unless he hires a lawyer to get it expunged — a process that can take years.

“I think their records should be automatically expunged,” McClay said. “These things shouldn’t follow you for the rest of your life.”

Because black and Latino youths are more likely to be stopped than are white youths, their involvement with the criminal justice system is greater, juvenile justice advocates say. While minorities make up 24 percent of the state’s youth population, they make up 62 percent of those sentenced to juvenile detention facilities.

The stop-and-frisk tactics the teens say police are currently using are by no means new.

In 1989, when then-Area B commander William Celester announced a policy of stopping and patting down known gang members on sight, the practice ignited a firestorm of controversy and sparked an investigation by then-Attorney General James Shannon.

The stop-and-frisk tactics used by police during the Charles Stuart incident investigation in Mission Hill — also in 1989 — have left bitter memories in the black community that are still lingering. Just a month ago former Police Commissioner Francis “Mickey” Roache apologized for the conduct of his officers during the investigation.

McClay, who was in high school during the Stuart case, recalls being stopped three times in one hour while walking along Warren Street in Roxbury.

“It made me have a lot of resentful feelings toward police,” he said.

More recently, in 2001, police officer Jovan Lacet filed a complaint against then-Area C11 Captain Robert Dunford, alleging he ordered patrol officers to randomly search teenagers in Wainwright Park.

Despite the long history of community opposition to the practice, youth advocates say the problem persists in every Boston neighborhood with a sizeable population of blacks, Latinos or Cape Verdeans.

“The kids say, ‘why are we always being stopped by them? Why are we always being searched by them?’” says Filipe Teixeira, who witnessed the violent arrest of an 18-year-old by a group of Municipal Police on Friday. “The kids here are being stopped on a daily basis.”

The end result, McClay says, is a rising tide of bitterness toward police.

“It demoralizes youths,” he said. “It makes them angry. I think they start to accept an inferior position in life.”