Activists set up citizens’ hotline for incidents of police abuse

Yawu Miller

While Mayor Thomas Menino is reportedly mulling a proposal to create a civilian review board for the Boston Police Department, civil rights activists aren’t waiting for his answer.

At a youth violence meeting held Saturday, black elected officials announced a civilian complaint hotline aimed at compiling information about police abuse.

City Councilor Chuck Turner said the hotline was formed in response to widespread reports of police abuse of teenagers in the community.

“Based on reports we hear from youth and in the newspapers in the community, it appears to be growing in frequency,” he said. “What it does is strengthen the attitude that’s already in the community that police are a hostile force.”

The hotline, which will be staffed by law student volunteers, will be run out of Suffolk University Law School’s Juvenile Justice Center. The students will enter the information from the calls they receive into a database that will track where, when and how the alleged incidents are occurring.

Youth workers, teenagers and adults interviewed by the Banner in recent weeks say police have been randomly stopping, frisking and searching black and Latino teenagers. Activists in the Bromley Heath housing development say teenagers there are sometimes strip-searched in the hallways of the apartment buildings.

Youth workers say the stop-and-frisk tactics currently employed by the police have intensified in recent years as the number of shootings in the city has increased. There were 75 homicides in Boston last year. In the last six months there has been an average of one shooting every day, according to an analysis by the Boston Phoenix.

Lisa Thurau-Gray, director of Suffolk University Law School’s Juvenile Justice Center, says the reports of unconstitutional searches are coming primarily from Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan and South End.

“What we’re hearing is that kids are standing on sidewalks, either by themselves or in small groups and that the police will come by, jump out of their cars and yell ‘empty your pockets, up against the wall,’” she said.

“They’re reporting that they’re being laid down on the sidewalk with their hands behind their backs and frisked on the ground. From the kids’ perspective, community policing does not exist. They feel like they’re under siege.”

At Saturday’s meeting, Thurau-Gray distributed 200 posters displaying the hotline phone number — (617) 305-3203. By Monday, phone calls were already coming in.

Thurau-Gray said the Juvenile Justice center will keep record of the data garnered from the calls to the hotline and will be able to release reports.

“We expect to release a report every six months,” she said.

Turner said the most important thing is that teens know that they are being heard and that adults in the community know what they are going through.

“The police should know that they’re not operating undercover and people should know that the adults in the community support their right to be free from police harassment,” he said.

City Councilor Felix Arroyo said the hotline is an important means for protecting the constitutional rights of youths.

“We need to publicize this line,” Arroyo said. “We need to make sure it’s attended at all times.”