BOSTON – Before dawn on a January morning in 1995, the phone rang at the home of Michael A. Cox Sr., a Boston police officer. His wife replied, still dazed. He had been injured. When two of her classmates took her to the emergency room, she asked what had happened.
His answer: he slipped on a piece of ice and hit his head.
That was a lie. Officer Cox, who is Black and was in plainclothes, had been mistaken for a murder suspect after a high-speed chase, and a group of his comrades had brutally beat him, kicking him in the face. his face and hitting his head with hard objects. When they realized who he was, they left him there, unconscious and bleeding.
But the events of that night were swallowed up by a code of silence, the unwritten law that assumed police officers would protect each other from liability.
Officer Cox spent four solitary years fighting his department in court before any of his assailants were disciplined. Eventually, the city paid him $ 1.25 million in damages and legal fees. Meanwhile, he was shunned. His tires were cut. He received threatening phone calls.
So it was extraordinary to see him introduced, last week, as the new Boston police commissioner.
Mr. Cox, 57, rarely talks about the beating, which caused kidney damage, a concussion and the lasting consequences of the trauma. But he did so before the entire city, describing it as “no different from the incidents that have happened across the country to black and brown people in general.”
“After this incident happened, I had a choice: leave it or stay, and I chose to stay, because I believe in policing in a community-friendly way,” he said. “And I know the men and women I work with also believe in the same thing.”
The selection of Mr. Cox as police commissioner is instrumental in Mayor Michelle Wu, who was elected last year with a mandate to push for change in the city’s entrenched and insular centers of power.
None of them are more impenetrable than the Boston Police Department, which has a history of covering up rapes and obstructing investigations.
Last year, it emerged that Patrick M. Rose, a former police union president, had risen in rank for more than two decades, although an internal investigation concluded that he had probably sexually abused a 12-year-old boy. . Finally, Mr. Rose was charged with 30 counts of child abuse.
That same year, Dennis White, a newly appointed police commissioner, was fired two days after his term after The Boston Globe uncovered 20-year-old domestic abuse allegations. A city investigation described the widespread obstruction of the investigation. A retired officer said he received five phone calls from colleagues who discouraged him from cooperating.
Mr. Cox’s selection, who served in Boston police for 30 years before becoming chief of police in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2019, caught many in Boston by surprise.
“Did I say, Michael Cox, that Michael Cox?” said Kay Gibbs, 81, a longtime political aide, and described her initial reaction as “ecstatic.”
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“It’s, as you say, poetic justice,” said William E. Dickerson II, senior pastor of the Greater Love Tabernacle, which was part of the search committee that recommended candidates for the job. “We won’t define ourselves for our past,” he said. “But we won’t ignore our past either. Because it’s inextricably linked to who we are.”
Others lingered on the irony that Mr. Cox would be the head of an organization that, for a time, made him an outcast.
“When you take on the department the way he did,” “you isolate yourself, no one wants to be around you,” said Detective Larry Ellison, the former president of the Association of Enforcement Agents. Massachusetts Minority Law.
“Now, he will have more friends than he can count on,” he said. “Some of the same people will tell you they were supporting him when they really weren’t.”
A test of faith
That night in 1995, a column of police cars screamed into a dead-end street in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood, chasing suspects in a homicide. Mr. Cox, who was in the main car, jumped and chased one of the suspects as he jumped over a fence.
He had reached the fence when he heard a loud bang on the head from behind.
He then lay on the ground, trying to protect his head with his hands as officers kicked and punched him, according to “The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston’s Racial Divide,” by Dick Lehr, a former journalist of the Boston Globe who reconstructed the night from witnesses, court documents, and witness interviews.
Mr. Cox was alone, trying to stand up, when two more officers found him. One of them was trying to handcuff him when he saw his badge and exclaimed, “Oh, my God.” Then Mr. Cox fainted.
It was the fourth time he had been assaulted by fellow officers at the crime scene while dressed in civilian clothes, Mr. Cox as part of their demand.
James Burgio, 56, who was held civilly responsible for using excessive force and was fired by police for his role in the incident, said he was falsely identified as Mr. Burgio’s assailant. Cox, and that other agents were responsible. He was never criminally charged and found a new career as a unionized sprinkler assembler.
Mr. Burgio described that night’s scene as “pure confusion,” with more than 20 officers converging on the dead end after a high-speed chase. Under these circumstances, he said, it was not surprising that a black officer dressed in civilian clothes could be mistaken for a suspect.
“No one knew who was who,” he said. “Without making a color statement, you work in a neighborhood that’s a 90 percent minority. You can’t say who’s who sometimes.”
He said he had a favorable impression of Mr. Cox, who felt he was “a good cop and hard worker like me.”
“The boy was beaten and unfortunately suffered serious injuries,” Mr. Burgio. He added that it was “unlikely that anyone would see it”, but that “a lot of people just didn’t want to participate”.
“They saw someone getting hurt, and no one wanted to have any part of it,” he said.
Mr. Cox grew up in Roxbury, a black neighborhood in the heart of Boston, the gentle son of a landscaping company owner who devoted himself to his education and sent him to a private school.
At the time of the assault, he was “young and naive,” he said in an interview. When he was recovering from his injuries, a six-month trial, he expected an apology, but none came. He was surprised to find that none of the officers at the scene reported seeing the assault.
Activists expected him to make himself public as a critic of the department; his fellow officers were waiting for him to drop the matter. Then there was a third way: stay and fight.
“I told him the hardest battle he would have would be to fight from within, and if that was his choice, we would be by his side,” recalled Cora Davis, 75, his sister. “It’s, for me, one of the hardest decisions people can make.”
Almost a year after the attack, Mr. Cox filed a lawsuit against the city and several agents, arguing that their civil rights had been violated and that the department tolerated the excessive use of force against black men.
Four years later, three officers, including Mr. Burgio, were forcibly removed and held civilly responsible for elements of the attack. One of them, David C. Williams, was reinstated in 2005 after a civil service arbitration.
In an interview, Mr. Williams denied any wrongdoing and commented, “If you do what they said I did, you should be in jail.”
Criminal charges were never filed; in 2000, the federal prosecutor sadly explained that he had “crashed into a blue wall.”
Mr. Cox spent 15 years on the department’s command team, including assignments in Home Affairs and Operations, and oversaw the Boston Police Academy.
He never took a public stand on police brutality, said Jamarhl Crawford, a community activist who interacted with him on police issues, and described him as “very gloomy, very direct,” almost professor in his own way.
“In all these years, he hasn’t talked, not even about his own situation,” Mr. Crawford. He added: “The fact that he has opted and continues to choose not to talk about it, that says something.”
Mr. Cox describes the experience as an awakening, which left him eager to better understand why police departments work the way they do, and encouraged him to pursue two advanced degrees, in criminal justice and business administration.
“At the time, I didn’t understand why this had happened to me,” he said. “I felt violated. I struggled with, how can one human do it to another human? And for me, finding answers, and the idea that my answers, maybe, could change that, was a driving force ”.
One thing I was sure of: leaving would get me nothing.
“The mere fact that I’m present,” he said, “is a reminder to some people that these things exist.”
Meeting with the mayor
Mayor Wu had never spoken to Mr. Cox until his name was included in a list of four finalists for the post of police commissioner.
As part of the verification process, she “reviewed all documents that existed” about her beating and legal battle.
“In many ways, this was a pivotal experience in Boston’s history,” Ms. Wu, confronting the city with “such a clear example of how broken the system is and how this seemingly common experience could be.”
The two met for an interview on June 23 and “within minutes of our conversation, I knew Commissioner Cox was the only one,” he said, combining the knowledge of a person’s department with an external understanding of “what it means when the system does not see everyone.”
Mr. Cox was not a national figure; since 2019, he headed the Ann Arbor police department, which has …