PAX Centurion - November / December 2015

www.bppa.org PAX CENTURION • November/December 2015 • Page 25 Legal Thoughts: Kenneth H. Anderson, Esq. Byrne & Anderson, L.L.P., Counsel to Members of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association Another year of mostly coal I n 1881, a Boston lawyer named OliverWendell Holmes, Jr., wrote a book entitled T he Common Law, a book which traces the history of our law back through time, beginning with Ro- man law that was premised upon vengeance. The book discusses the evolution of law through theAnglo-Saxon time period up through the (then) present time. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. would later became a judge on our Supreme Judicial Court, and then a judge on the United States Supreme Court. In his book, Holmes discusses how the life and history of our law has not been one of logic, but largely has been one of history, based upon the necessities of the time, prevalent moral and political theories, public policies, and prejudices. Very early in his book, in making the point that we all have an innate sense of right and wrong, Holmes wrote that “even a dog dis- tinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.” So how did 2015 treat you?Were you mostly stumbled over? Or were you mostly intentionally kicked? 2015 was a crazy year. In Googling the major events of 2015, my memory was refreshed of how on January 4, 2015, NewYork City police officers turned their back on Mayor Bill deBlasio as he spoke at a funeral for one of two officers who were assassinated while sitting in their cruiser. Two months later, in March of 2015, the Justice Department released their report on the Ferguson Police Department, noting that ninety-three percent of the arrests in Ferguson were on black citizens who made up sixty-seven percent of the population. A week after releasing this report, the Justice Department announced that they would not prosecute Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown inAugust of 2014, an event that was the source of several days of rioting. In late March, Officer John Moynihan was shot in the face at point-blank range, miraculously surviving something that looked unsurvivable. InApril we had the Baltimore riots, followed by several movie theater shoot- ings, a white supremacist nut opening fire in a black church in South Carolina killing nine people in June, and another crazy shooting in October at an Oregon community college where seven people were killed while being asked about their religion. This past year gave us the trials of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Aaron Hernandez. It brought us a Patriots Super Bowl win and a full year of Deflategate nonsense. 2015 brought us the rise of Isis, mayhem in Paris, a refugee crisis and lots of other bad stories about misguided and hateful people. Politi- cally, our country is probably as polarized as it has ever been, and it does not appear that things are getting any saner, with the most polar- izing candidates currently leading in the polls. The year was not all doom-and-gloom, but from a law enforcement perspective the year sure brought to light a number of challenging issues. As we reflect on 2015, what have we learned?And where are we going? Through defending patrol officers for the past eighteen years, I have had the pleasure of going to many retirement dinners. By far one of the best talks I ever heard at these functions came from retired old-timer Deputy Edward Eagar, who reminisced about the old days when portable radios were not the norm. Deputy Eagar talked about these days when, after arresting a suspect, the suspect would have to be coaxed to the nearest “call box” in order to call for assistance and the transport wagon. Deputy Eagar joked that in those days, you had to either become a real good fighter, or you had to become a real good talker. Although it may be ironic, your talking skills as a police officer today need to be even better than your predecessor’s skills were back in those days. My guess is that there was often a lot of colorful language used to “encourage” people to comply with verbal commands, and many things were said and done back then that would not translate well if videotaped on an i-Phone and posted onYouTube. The world we live in has changed drastically. While people can debate whether it has changed for the better, it cannot be disputed that these changes have made it more dif- ficult to work as a police officer. It would have been nice if 2015 was the year that the Boston Police Department command staff and the Legal Ad- visor’s office decided it would be helpful to sit down with the union attorneys and the BPPA leadership to discuss how to resolve many of the ongoing issues we face, particu- larly as it relates to discipline. That has not been the case. With the exception of Deputy JeffreyWalcott who makes an honest effort to return my calls, the majority of my phone calls to the third and fourth floor at Schroeder Plaza go unanswered and unreturned. Many of my questions are simply ignored. So much could be accomplished if those “talking skills” that Deputy Eagar discussed could be put to use in a calm and reasoned setting, but instead the Boston Police Department continues to pursue the age-old approach. Regrettably, all we hear is “fire them” and “let them fight to get their jobs back.”Whether the officer is fighting to keep their job or is fighting against a suspension, there is seldom any real face-to-face sit-down to discuss the issues before the phony trial board process is put in motion. When, almost invariably, the department loses cases on appeal, it employs the same old strategy of whining to the Boston Globe that the Commissioner’s hands are tied due to the Civil Service process or because of civil arbi- trators. Things continue on the way they have always gone on because of history and not because of logic. Many things have changed for the better over the years, but often those things now get taken for granted. Much like the dog referenced by OliverWendell Holmes, Jr., we all know whether we have been stumbled into or whether we have been kicked. Hopefully 2016 brings you all great things on a personal level, and hopefully it brings us all closer together in this crazy world we live in with the profession you have chosen. No one likes to be stumbled into, but it is certainly better than being intentionally kicked. Hopefully as we make our way through the holidays into the begin- ning of a new year, things evolve to a place where logic can prevail over history, where we can do more discussing and less fighting, and we can all get to a place where we get kicked a little bit less. Happy Holidays from all of us at Byrne &Anderson. Please enjoy your holidays, please stay safe, and please continue to watch out for each other.