The sun had already set as three teenage boys wrapped up a basketball game at the Harbor Point apartments, a housing complex that juts out into Dorchester Bay.
As they walked home on that cold night in February of 2022, they noticed an unmarked black Ford Explorer following them. They got nervous, the group told investigators, and ducked into the basement of a nearby building.
When they exited from the other side, three more black cars “cornered them,” according to an investigation by the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency (OPAT), Boston’s police oversight body. Police jumped out with guns drawn, the report says, yelling “do not move or we will f—ing shoot you.”
One of the teenagers said an officer then tackled him to the ground and handcuffed him. When he sat up he had a large cut across his right eyebrow. In transcripts of body DSLR footage included in official reports, the detaining officer, Matthew Conley, said, “I literally had the gun in my hand, so I punched him in the face with it.”
The oversight agency handpicked that Conley be terminated. But Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox refused to fire him.
City records show Conley was promoted to detective in December 2023, nearly two years after the Harbor Point incident.
It’s not the only time the commissioner has resisted disciplining an officer. Public records obtained and analyzed by WBUR show that Cox routinely rejects the police accountability office’s recommendations, raising questions about the agency’s efficacy for oversight.
The city office, launched in response to protests following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, has so far sustained 18 citizen complaints and has proposed varying levels of discipline. But records show the police commissioner has routinely flouted even modest disciplinary recommendations.
The situation has led some within the oversight office to speak out against department leadership.
“It’s certainly very frustrating,” said Joshua Dankoff, who serves on OPAT’s civilian analysis board.
“ The ordinance says that we make recommendations to the police commissioner,” he said. “I think it is not within the spirit of the ordinance, or the intention of it, to then have those recommendations not be responded to at all.”
An office to ‘dismantle systemic racism’
The Boston City Council created the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency in 2020, in response to calls for police reform reverberating across the country at the time. Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Boston that summer.
“immediately is the time to act with urgency to dismantle systemic racism across our city,” then-Mayor Marty Walsh said while signing the ordinance.
The new office is charged with receiving complaints about Boston police officers and investigating them. A nine-member civilian analysis board, appointed by the mayor, votes to recommend discipline based on the work of the OPAT staff.
The civilian analysis board’s members have backgrounds in civil rights, neighborhood advocacy, and law enforcement. One is a youth delegate, meant to “represent the voices and lived experiences of young people,” according to the office’s website.
While the creation of the agency was celebrated by advocates at the time, some feared the ordinance gave too much leeway to best police brass to reject the board’s recommendations.
Critics say those concerns have proven valid.
For instance, in one case, the police accountability office found the Boston police department’s media relations team had improperly posted the name of a juvenile who’d been murdered, violating “the child and family’s right to privacy.” The office handpicked that all members of the media relations bureau attend mandatory retraining.
But Cox disagreed. In a letter to the oversight agency, he said, “I want to express my sincere condolences to the family on their loss.” But, he said, he did not believe a violation had occurred, arguing the right to privacy does not extend after death.
In another example, the oversight office last year handpicked Officer Louisimond Vertyl be given a five-day suspension for removing a disabled man from his car during a 2022 traffic stop in Roxbury. The man told OPAT the police dislodged his catheter bag during the scuffle, and he had to drive home “covered with fecal matter and blood.”
Cox again declined to discipline the officer. Cox argued investigators did not find sufficient evidence to verify the man’s allegations.
Of the 18 sustained complaints OPAT has sent to Cox since 2020, the commissioner has followed the disciplinary recommendations just once: an oral reprimand of an officer for swearing at a delivery driver while demanding he move his vehicle. In eight of the 18 cases, Cox hasn’t even responded to the oversight office.
Cox agreed to partial discipline in another case — another oral reprimand.
In an interview with WBUR, Cox suggested that police perform more reliable internal investigations than the watchdog agency.
“We have a duty to investigate all allegations of misconduct, and we do,” Cox said. “We are thorough and fair in how we do investigations, and we come to the conclusion that the evidence leads us to.”
Asked if he saw the oversight office as a partner, Cox said, “There’s a role for any agency that wants to give us feedback on how we could be better.”
He declined to comment on the case involving Conley, the officer accused of hitting a teenager in the face with his gun.
A sting gone wrong
In 2022, Conley was the lead investigator on a Youth Violence Strike Force unit looking into gang activity around Columbia Point in Dorchester. He had reported watching a known gang associate on Snapchat in the area of the basketball courts, wearing a powder blue Nike sweatshirt, and called in officers to search the area.
The officers closed in on a group of teens leaving the basketball courts. Conley tackled one of them with his gun drawn and struck him in the face, according to the police accountability office’s investigation and the transcript from a body DSLR worn by another officer that night.
When the dust cleared, Conley saw the bleeding teenager on the ground in front of him was wearing a Polo sweatsuit that was navy blue, according to the OPAT investigation. And when other officers asked, Conley “confirmed they had detained the wrong individuals.”
The Office of Police Accountability and Transparency found that this “significant mistake” could have “resulted in death” for the boy. Investigators wrote that the teenagers were “wrongfully targeted,” and they experienced “trauma that will affect them for the rest of their lives.”
“The handpicked discipline by OPAT staff for Officer Conley is Termination,” the report said.
In a May 2024 letter, Cox said he was “not accepting” the office’s recommendations and was waiting for the department’s own internal investigation to play out.
Police investigators finished that analysis of the incident last August. They looked at the same body DSLR footage where Conley is heard telling another officer he punched the teenager with his gun. But Conley later denied he’d actually done so, arguing he was confused in the heat of the moment. He said the wound was a result of him tackling the boy to the ground.
Conley was not wearing his body DSLR that day, police records show, meaning the melee wasn’t directly captured on video; another officer’s DSLR caught Conley’s remarks in the aftermath.
In the end, Boston police investigators sided with Conley, saying the department could “not prove or disprove the allegation.”
Conley was issued only a written reprimand — for violating the department’s body DSLR policy.
Boston police did not respond to requests for comment on Conley’s behalf; he could not be reached by phone.
Boston police have refused to provide WBUR the actual footage from the body DSLR – claiming it’s exempt from the public records law. WBUR has appealed the denial to the Massachusetts supervisor of records.
Jamarhl Crawford, a Roxbury-based community activist who served on the task force that handpicked the creation of the oversight office, said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the lack of discipline for Conley.
Crawford said the whole point of starting an independent civilian oversight office was because people did not trust the police department’s internal disciplinary process.
“It seems like the fix is in,” Crawford said. “It seems like this is more of the same, and the Boston Police Department is just going to rubber stamp and continue to overlook serious disciplinary matters.”
Dankoff, of the civilian analysis board, was absent for the vote on Conley’s discipline. But he said it was “frustrating that the commissioner did not act on that or did not really have any serious repercussion for the officer.”
At the same time, Dankoff blamed what he called the underlying “weakness” of the ordinance: that the office can recommend discipline, but cannot order or compel it.
“This could be a message to the city council to strengthen the ordinance in the future,” Dankoff said.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu defended the work of the office in a statement to WBUR.
“The Office of Police Accountability and Transparency and the Boston Police Department are integral in the City’s public safety infrastructure to make Boston the safest major city in the country,” she said. “The agency has taken complaints from community members and raised issues that otherwise would not have been addressed without their work.”
OPAT executive director Evandro Carvalho and agency staff immediately meet with police department leadership multiple times a month, including regular meetings with Cox, according to an OPAT spokesperson.
Last year the office received 139 individual complaints against police officers — an all-time high.
Police reform in retreat
Advocates who protested against police brutality in the summer of 2020 describe what they see as a wider retreat from efforts to reshape police practices across the country. They view the sidelining of Boston’s new oversight office by department leadership as part of a trend.
President Trump’s Justice Department earlier this year dismissed oversight agreements with police departments in Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota, the sites of high-profile killings by police. And in deep-blue California, Democrats in the state Legislature are moving to roll back some of the changes passed after 2020.
“I think what happened subsequent to George Floyd in Boston, in Massachusetts, and across the country is that a bunch of people in traditional positions of power stuck pacifiers in people’s mouths and said, ‘You should be happy with that,’ ” said Carlton Williams, a Boston defense attorney who has tried police misconduct cases.
Wu, who called for cutting the police budget when she was a city councilor and helped pass the ordinance that led to the police oversight office, has recently backtracked on several efforts she previously championed. Wu has secured federal funding for a controversial police intelligence center and walked back a pledge to dismantle the department’s gang database.
She’s immediately running for re-election with the endorsement of the city’s largest police union.
Conley remains on the force after receiving his written reprimand for not wearing a body cam, and made $330,000 last year, including overtime.
WBUR was able to reach one of the three teenagers who was wrongfully targeted and detained by Conley’s gang unit. He did not want to speak on the record, fearing retaliation from police. WBUR is not naming him because he was a minor at the time of the incident.
Jamarhl Crawford said he sees no urgency at the city level to shore up the police oversight office.
“Five years ago, police reform was all the rage,” he said. Then “all of a sudden, this police reform went away.”
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