BOSTON — Before dawn one January morning in 1995, the phone rang at the home of Michael A. Cox Sr., a Boston police officer. His wife answered, still dazed. He was injured. As two of his fellow officers rushed her to the emergency room, she asked what had happened.
Their response: He slipped on a piece of ice and hit his head.
That was a lie. Officer Cox, who is black and was in plainclothes, was mistaken for a murder suspect after a high-speed chase and a group of fellow officers brutally beat him, kicking him in the face and hitting his head with hard objects. When they found out who he was, they left him there, unconscious and bleeding.
But the facts of that night were swallowed up in a code of silence, the unwritten law that assumed police officers would shield each other from accountability.
Officer Cox spent four lonely years fighting his department in court before any of his attackers were punished. The city ended up paying him $1.25 million in damages and legal fees. Meanwhile, he was shunned. His tires were flat. Received threatening phone calls.
So it was extraordinary to see him introduced last week as Boston’s new police commissioner.
Mr Cox, 57, has rarely spoken about the beating, which left him with kidney damage, a concussion and lasting effects from the trauma. But he did it in front of the entire city, describing it as “no different than the incidents that have happened all over the country to black and brown people in general.”
“After this incident happened, I had a choice to leave 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 believe the same thing.”
Mr. Cox’s selection as police commissioner is a defining one for Mayor Michelle Wu, who was elected last year with a mandate to push for change in this city’s entrenched and isolated centers of power.
None of them is more impenetrable than the Boston Police Department, which has a history of covering up wrongdoing and obstructing investigations.
Last year, it emerged that Patrick M. Rose, a former police union president, rose through the ranks for more than two decades, even though an internal investigation concluded that he may have sexually abused a 12-year-old child. Mr. Rose was eventually charged with 30 counts of child abuse.
That same year, Dennis White, the newly appointed police commissioner, was suspended two days into his tenure after The Boston Globe revealed allegations of domestic abuse dating back 20 years. A city investigation described widespread obstruction of the investigation. One retired officer said he received five phone calls from colleagues dissuading him from cooperating.
The selection of Mr. Cox, who served on the Boston police force for 30 years before becoming chief of police in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2019, surprised many in Boston.
“I said Michael Cox — that Michael Cox?” said Kay Gibbs, 81, a longtime political aide, describing her initial reaction as “ecstatic.”
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“It’s — what do you call it — poetic justice,” said William E. Dickerson II, senior pastor of Greater Love Tabernacle, who serves on the search committee that recommends candidates for the job. “We will not be defined by our past,” he said. “But we will not ignore our past either. Because it is inextricably linked to who we are.’
Others dwelled on the irony that Mr. Cox would be the head of an organization that had for a time made him a pariah.
“When you take over a department the way he does,” you “become isolated, nobody wants to be around you,” said Detective Larry Ellison, past president of the Massachusetts Minority Law Enforcement Officers Association.
“Now he’s going to have more friends than he can count,” he said. “Some of the same people will tell him they were supporting him when they really weren’t.”
A test of faith
On that night in 1995, a convoy of police cars pulled into a cul-de-sac in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood, chasing murder suspects. Mr Cox, who was in the lead car, jumped out and chased one of the suspects as he jumped a fence.
He had reached the fence when he felt a sharp blow to his head from behind.
He was then on the ground, trying to shield 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 Boston Globe reporter who reconstructed the night based on testimony, court documents and witness interviews.
Mr Cox was alone trying to get to his feet when two other officers found him. One of them was trying to handcuff him when he noticed his badge and exclaimed, “Oh my God.” Then Mr. Cox fainted.
It was the fourth time he had been attacked by fellow officers at crime scenes while in plain clothes, Mr Cox later said as part of his case.
James Burgio, 56, who was found civilly liable for using excessive force and fired by police for his role in the incident, said he had been falsely identified as Mr Cox’s attacker and that other officers were responsible. He was never charged with a crime and found a new career as a union sprinkler fitter.
Mr Burgio described the scene that night as “pure bedlam”, with more than 20 police officers converging on the cul-de-sac after a high-speed chase. Under the circumstances, he said, it’s not surprising that a black plainclothes officer could be mistaken for a suspect.
“Nobody knew who was who,” he said. “Without making obnoxious statements, you work in a neighborhood that’s 90 percent minority, you can’t tell who’s who some of the time.”
He said he had a favorable impression of Mr. Cox, who he heard was “a good, hard-working cop like me.”
“The kid was beaten and unfortunately suffered serious injuries,” Mr Burgio said. He added that it was “unlikely that no one saw it,” but that “a lot of people just don’t want to get involved.”
“They saw somebody get hurt and nobody wanted to be a part of it,” he said.
Mr. Cox grew up in Roxbury, a black neighborhood in the heart of Boston, the soft-spoken son of a landscaping business owner who took care of his education by sending him to a private school.
He was “young and naive” at the time of the attack, he said in an interview. As he recovered from his injuries, a six-month process, he expected an apology, but none came. He was shocked to learn that none of the police officers at the scene reported seeing the attack.
Activists hoped he would go public as a critic of the department; his fellow officers hoped he would drop the matter. Then there was a third way: to stay and fight.
“I told him the hardest battle he was going to have was going to be on the inside, and if that was his choice, we would stand by him,” recalled Cora Davis, 75, his sister. “To me, it’s one of the hardest choices people can make.”
Nearly a year after the attack, Mr. Cox filed a lawsuit against city officials and several employees, alleging that his civil rights were violated and that the department tolerated the excessive use of force against black men.
Four years later, three officers, including Mr Burgio, were fired from the police force and held civilly liable for elements of the attack. One of them, David S. Williams, was reinstated in 2005 after civil service arbitration.
In an interview, Mr. Williams denied any wrongdoing, noting: “If I did what they said I did, I should be in jail.”
No criminal charges were ever filed; in 2000, a federal prosecutor ruefully explained that he had “hit a blue wall.”
Mr. Cox went on to serve 15 years on the department’s command staff, including assignments in internal affairs and operations, and directed the Boston Police Academy.
He has never taken a public stance on police brutality, said Jamarl Crawford, a community activist who has communicated with him on police issues, and described him as “very dark, very direct,” almost professorial in his manner.
“All these years he hasn’t been vocal, even about his own situation,” Mr. Crawford said. He added: “The fact that he has chosen and continues to choose not to speak out about it, that says something.”
Mr. Cox described the experience as an awakening that left him hungry to better understand why police departments work the way they do and prompted him to pursue dual degrees in criminal justice and business administration.
“At the time, I didn’t understand why this happened to me,” he said. “I felt violated. I struggled with the question, how could a person do this to another person? And for me, looking for answers and thinking that maybe my answers could change him, that was a driving force.
He was sure of one thing: if he left, he would achieve nothing.
“The very fact that I’m present,” he said, “is a reminder to some people that these things exist.”
Meeting with the mayor
Mayor Wu never spoke to Mr. Cox until his name was on a list of four finalists for the position of police commissioner.
As part of the vetting process, she “reviewed every document in existence” about his beating and legal battle.
“In many ways, this was a pivotal experience in Boston’s history,” Ms. Wu said, presenting the city with “such a stark example of how broken the system is and how seemingly ordinary this experience can be.”
The two met for an interview June 23, and “within minutes of our conversation, I knew Commissioner Cox was the one,” she said, combining an insider’s knowledge of the department with an outsider’s understanding of “what it means when the system doesn’t see everybody. “
Mr. Cox was not a national figure; as of 2019, he ran the Ann Arbor Police Department, which…
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