WORCESTER ― An outside lawyer hired by the City of Worcester, in a statement early Monday, slammed a forthcoming U.S. Department of Justice investigation of the Police Department as “unfair, inaccurate and biased.”
In a statement sent to the Telegram & Gazette early Monday morning, Brian T. Kelly, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice, alleged the report to be “riddled with factual inaccuracies” and said it “ignores information provided by the City which debunks many of the anonymous claims.”
City spokesperson Tom Mathews confirmed Kelly is representing the city with respect to the investigation, and deferred comment to Kelly.
Kelly’s letter does not state when the Justice Department report will be released; he told the T&G in an email he expected it to be released as soon as Monday.
Spokespeople at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston could not immediately be reached for comment Monday morning.
November marked two years since the Justice Department announced it had found “significant justification” to investigate whether city police use excessive force or discriminate based on race and gender.
The investigation is one of about 80 so-called “pattern or practice” inquiries the Justice Department has conducted since being authorized to do so by Congress in 1994.
The investigations – relatively rare given the 18,000 law enforcement agencies eligible for scrutiny nationwide – usually result in binding court agreements, called consent decrees, aimed at forcing reforms.
However, the efficacy of such decrees –- which cost cities millions and can require a decade or more of federal oversight – has been increasingly scrutinized in recent years, and they were largely abandoned during Donald J. Trump’s first term as president.
With Trump set to return to office in January, the Justice Department has reportedly been working to release a number of outstanding reports across the country; in the last three weeks, it has released similar investigations in Trenton, New Jersey and Memphis, Tennessee.
In his statement, Kelly accused the Justice Department of fast-tracking the Worcester report, and getting things wrong.
“In racing to publish an inaccurate report before the change in presidential administrations, without bothering to get the facts right, DOJ has done an extreme disservice to the entire Worcester community and, in particular, to the hundreds of honorable Worcester police officers who risk their lives every day to make Worcester a safe place to live,” Kelly wrote.
Kelly wrote that the city has cooperated fully with the investigation, and has already issued some policy changes, but said it is disappointed with findings he called flawed.
“Notwithstanding WPD’s full cooperation and the anonymous nature of the complaints, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has issued an unfair, inaccurate, and biased report which unfairly smears the entire Worcester police force by claiming there is a pattern or practice by the WPD to engage in excessive use of force and sexual harassment of prostitutes,” Kelly wrote.
Kelly wrote that the allegations regarding harassment of prostituted women are based on flimsy claims, and challenged the Justice Department to prosecute police officers if it truly believed such things happened.
“Anyone reviewing this report should ask themselves: if the allegations in this report are true, why hasn’t DOJ prosecuted a single officer and instead simply drafted a report by DOJ’s Civil Rights Division?” he wrote.
The Telegram & Gazette exclusively reported shortly after the Justice Department probe was announced that investigators were looking at whether police sexually assaulted women engaged in prostitution.
Return to telegram.com for more on this developing story.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Lawyer for city: Federal investigation of Worcester police ‘unfair’