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BODYCAM VIDEO SHOWS ‘MOB MENTALITY’ OF BOSTON POLICE WHO RESPONDED TO GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS, LAWYER SAYS
Hours of video given exclusively to The Appeal show police officers bragging about attacking protesters and multiple instances of excessive force and the liberal use of pepper spray.
As demonstrations against police brutality and abuse of Black Americans spread across Boston on the night of May 31 and early morning of June 1, the city’s police department was out in force.
Many officers wore body cameras. During the unrest, the cameras recorded hours of footage that the department subsequently stored.
That footage was given to attorney Carl Williams, who is representing some protesters arrested that night, as part of a discovery file encompassing 44 videos and over 66 hours of footage. Williams assembled a team of volunteer lawyers and law students to pore over the videos to find exculpatory evidence for his clients. What they found, however, was something more.
The hours of video, given exclusively to The Appeal by Williams, show police officers bragging about attacking protesters, targeting nonviolent demonstrators for violence and possible arrest, discussing arrest quotas and the use of cars as weapons, and multiple instances of excessive force and liberal use of pepper spray.
“It’s this mob mentality,” Williams said of the police behavior. “And I use ‘mob’ as a sort of a double entendre—mob like the mafia and mob like a group of a pack of wild people roaming the streets looking to attack people.”
The Appeal shared sections of the footage with Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins, who said that in her view, police behavior in the videos is indicative of the very issues that demonstrators were marching to bring attention to.
“I have not watched the entire video, but the snippets that I have seen are incredibly troubling,” said Rollins, adding that she has sent the clips to her special prosecution team.
The Boston Police Department has opened an investigation into the revelations in the videos, Sergeant Detective John Boyle told The Appeal. Citing the investigation, Boyle declined further comment.