Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: If you don't know that the cops in Boston have
Speaker 2: a bad reputation, it's possible you just haven't seen many movies.
Speaker 2: There's The Town, the Boondock Scenes, Black Mass, Spotlight, Mystic Riva.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure even the cops in Ted and Ted
Speaker 2: Too are incompetent. As a rule of thumb, any movie
Speaker 2: where a grown man is shouting my daughter probably takes
Speaker 2: place in Boston and as a result of the war
Speaker 2: between the Boston cops and the white working poor. What
Speaker 2: I'm saying is, if you're not familiar with the police
Speaker 2: of Boston's reputation, that's a cinema problem. My name is
Speaker 2: Jamie Loftus and my neighbors who are always arguing just moved.
Speaker 2: And this is sixteenth minute the podcast where we take
Speaker 2: a closer look at the internet characters of the day
Speaker 2: and what that says about us and the Internet and
Speaker 2: us on the Internet. Play eighty's amazing theme song about.
Speaker 1: Its Us.
Speaker 2: Six six Today's subject hits close to home for me
Speaker 2: because it takes place within a twenty mile radius of
Speaker 2: my entire family, where all of the characters of the
Speaker 2: day that stick with us. It's a little unusual for
Speaker 2: the person we talk about and the place where they
Speaker 2: are as equally important. But this week's story takes that
Speaker 2: even further because we're cruising the entire spectrum of what
Speaker 2: a noun can mean. The person, the place, and the
Speaker 2: thing are all critical as to why this story made
Speaker 2: the splash, or, if I'm being unkind, the nearly lethal
Speaker 2: tumble that it did. The place, as you may have guessed,
Speaker 2: is Boston. I'm from that area. The fact that anyone
Speaker 2: from there is legally required to tell you within twenty seconds,
Speaker 2: and if you're really from there, you have to be
Speaker 2: more specific so people know that you're not from some
Speaker 2: hoity toity place like Duxbury or, as my mom calls it,
Speaker 2: de Luxebury. Ooh, No, I'm from Brockton, Massachusetts, which was
Speaker 2: ranked as one of the one hundred worst cities in
Speaker 2: America when I was in high school because that list
Speaker 2: was very racist. In fact, people are still giving Brockton shit.
Speaker 2: A radio station I used to work the overnight shift
Speaker 2: at published an article in twenty sixteen that said, you're
Speaker 2: ugly Brockton why it was voted the ugliest city in Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: And in that article they cite no reason for why
Speaker 2: it has that distinction, because people in Massachusetts are both
Speaker 2: perfect and evil. The point I'm talking around is that
Speaker 2: there is a media pattern of how people from the
Speaker 2: Boston area are shown, and because I'm from there, I
Speaker 2: am not allowed to shut up about it. I had
Speaker 2: the accent.
Speaker 3: I'm going to come out and completely changed veryon the
Speaker 3: documentary of my life jamielostis the true Hollywood story.
Speaker 2: Good for her, And the only reason I don't talk
Speaker 2: that way now is because I realized from a very
Speaker 2: young age that this accent would be mocked and quote
Speaker 2: unquote sounds poor. But when I say poor in that context,
Speaker 2: what I mean truly is poor, meaning undeserving of respect,
Speaker 2: and that's horseshit right. I wish I hadn't let the
Speaker 2: world convince me that the accent was unworthy of respect,
Speaker 2: but I do have these very specific memories of that
Speaker 2: idea calcifying in my mind to the point where it
Speaker 2: ended up coloring my perception of my own parents. I mean,
Speaker 2: the moms on TV sounded like they were from nowhere,
Speaker 2: and the only thing I thought was more chic than
Speaker 2: sounding like you were from nowhere was being from somewhere wealthy.
Speaker 2: I have so many strong memories of this. My dad
Speaker 2: would do this very soft class code switching when he
Speaker 2: got home from his job where he worked at a
Speaker 2: local newspaper. When he was around journalists from other states,
Speaker 2: he did his reporter voice hit the RS, no problem, Chuck.
Speaker 2: But when he came home, he'd dropped that, and he'd
Speaker 2: sound like the class and place he was from. And
Speaker 2: this was all mostly involuntary, but I internalized it, and
Speaker 2: by the time I moved to California when I was
Speaker 2: twenty two, the accent was fully gone. Because I wanted
Speaker 2: to be a performer. I wanted to sound like I
Speaker 2: was from nowhere at all. This is why I feel
Speaker 2: sure that cultural stereotypes around Bostonians are thoroughly ingrained and
Speaker 2: not completely without reason. There is some truth to it,
Speaker 2: as stereotypes can go, but these stereotypes lack context and
Speaker 2: don't take individuals into account. As far as pop culture
Speaker 2: is concerned. Stories in Boston either take place at Harvard.
Speaker 1: Don't hi.
Speaker 4: My name is el Woods, and from my admissions essay, I'm.
Speaker 3: Going to tell all of you at Harvard why I'm.
Speaker 5: Going to make an amazing lawyer.
Speaker 2: Or in like three square blocks of Southey, which is
Speaker 2: just one neighborhood in Boston.
Speaker 4: Megan Uncle Leos, Tommy Corstkin's another goof. He gets busted
Speaker 4: selling guns to federal offices, among many, many, many other
Speaker 4: depatas from a normative behavior.
Speaker 3: What's this got to do with me?
Speaker 6: Huh?
Speaker 7: Why you pretended to be a cop?
Speaker 2: Or bonus points if you want to win an oscar
Speaker 2: both You dropped one.
Speaker 3: Hundred and fifty grand on a fucking education.
Speaker 2: You could have gone for a dollar fifty and lay
Speaker 2: chadges at the public library. Yeah, but I will have
Speaker 2: a degree and you'll be serving my kids fries at
Speaker 2: a drive through on our way to a skiing trip.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe my boys awaited smile.
Speaker 2: That's from Goodwill Hunting. It's a good movie, but you
Speaker 2: see where I'm going with this, And as many people
Speaker 2: from that area will tell you, even when these movies
Speaker 2: are good, they're not necessarily an accurate representation of the area.
Speaker 2: Most media about Boston suggests that the area is extremely racist,
Speaker 2: which is true, but it rarely shows any non white
Speaker 2: character that lives in that same city. And that's because
Speaker 2: most popular media about Boston is based on stories about
Speaker 2: a neighborhood of majority low income white people and often
Speaker 2: just all white mobsters. So for the record, yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: the Boston area has a history of Irish and Italian gangs. Yes,
Speaker 2: racism is still extremely persistent in Boston and Massachusetts on
Speaker 2: the whole. But no, not everyone who lives in Boston
Speaker 2: is white. In fact, that erases over half the population
Speaker 2: of the city today and that's fucking weird to me.
Speaker 2: But still to this day, the characters that come out
Speaker 2: of Boston tend to follow a very certain type. Today,
Speaker 2: we are talking about a recent legend in the Internet
Speaker 2: Character of the day pantheon, a person and an incident
Speaker 2: that makes me sad I cannot show you the video
Speaker 2: in question. This character exists at the intersection of many things, yes,
Speaker 2: stereotypes around Boston, one of which is rightfully that Boston
Speaker 2: cops are particularly racist and particularly incompetent, and just as importantly,
Speaker 2: the Internet's view of American policing at the time. The
Speaker 2: story went viral on an undetermined date in the summer
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty three, Return with me if you dare.
Speaker 2: Summer twenty twenty three, all over the world, global temperatures
Speaker 2: were being broken just one symptom of our rapidly dying planet,
Speaker 2: and we had recently weathered the phenomenon that was Barbenheimer,
Speaker 2: a symptom of the human need to feel good about something,
Speaker 2: even when half of that was a three hour movie
Speaker 2: about the atomic bomb. This character manages to scratch both
Speaker 2: of these edges, a flailing institution's attempt to convince the
Speaker 2: public that summer is a beach party and not an
Speaker 2: incinerator that failed so spectacularly that the good people of
Speaker 2: the Internet got a worthy adversary to laugh at for
Speaker 2: months to come, A character so baffling that I regret
Speaker 2: this as mere audio, because this viral video clip has
Speaker 2: to be seen to be believed. Austin's slide cop Your
Speaker 2: sixteenth minute of Fame starts right now. On August second,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three, Twitter x whatever, Twitter user Ryan Whitney
Speaker 2: six posted a video filmed at a relatively new playground
Speaker 2: in front of Boston City Hall. The clip itself was
Speaker 2: quickly deleted. Ryan Whitney, who co hosts a podcast on
Speaker 2: Barstool Sports, had over four hundred thousand followers when the
Speaker 2: tweet was posted, though he followed up when people asked
Speaker 2: why it was deleted and said I just deleted what
Speaker 2: I think is one of the funniest videos of all time.
Speaker 2: I was begged to take it down. Sad who begged him?
Speaker 2: I don't know. He didn't answer my DMS. In any case,
Speaker 2: it was already too late. The video was already doing
Speaker 2: numbers over on TikTok, prompting comments like I'm crying, why
Speaker 2: did he fly out like a corpse? And Bro looked
Speaker 2: it's dead. The public had spoken, it was funny. The
Speaker 2: City Hall Plaza playground where the famous slide lives, opened
Speaker 2: in November twenty twenty two, and it's pretty impressive by
Speaker 2: far the flashiest part of a seventy million dollar renovation
Speaker 2: of City Hall Plaza by Boston based architecture firm Sasaki.
Speaker 2: The renovation created what I feel was a much needed
Speaker 2: friendlier feel in a historically hostile vibes area surrounding City
Speaker 2: Hall's brutalist architecture. According to an article in Boston dot
Speaker 2: Com from twenty twenty three, city Hall is the fourth
Speaker 2: ugliest building in the world, which I think is maybe
Speaker 2: a little dramatic, but it's not beautiful regardless, this new
Speaker 2: playground was kind of the crown jewel of the renovation,
Speaker 2: at least far as the general public was concerned. I
Speaker 2: actually got my first taste of it in spring twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three when my friend Tory had two glasses of
Speaker 2: wine in the North End and then climbed up and
Speaker 2: ricocheted down a truly massive, steep covered steel slide sometime
Speaker 2: around midnight. And for the playgrounds many attractive qualities, it
Speaker 2: is this slide that is the star of this story.
Speaker 2: No Internet cinema, you should be able to log this
Speaker 2: on letterboxed because in it, a Boston police officer absolutely
Speaker 2: eats shit. I mean, like really eats shit. Take a
Speaker 2: listen to the video again. Okay, so let me attempt
Speaker 2: to walk you through what I just saw for easily
Speaker 2: the hundredth time. The slide is what I describe my
Speaker 2: friend taking this drunk trip down in the spring of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three. It's steep, it's steel, it's in the
Speaker 2: middle of this very very public area. And then that loud,
Speaker 2: bizarre sound of like Nichols being shaken in a tin
Speaker 2: can is the cop who seems to be banging against
Speaker 2: every square inch of this fucking thing. And then finally
Speaker 2: he emerges from the tunnel of the slide somehow asks
Speaker 2: first backwards on his stomach, shooting out of the slide
Speaker 2: at Formula one speeds onto the pavement, and to make
Speaker 2: matters worse, a weapon seems to fly out of his
Speaker 2: belt as well. Because this is an American cop we're
Speaker 2: talking about, so of course he didn't go unarmed to
Speaker 2: a playground. And because some stereotypes are true, and this
Speaker 2: is an older white guy in Boston. You hear him
Speaker 2: say i'd talk, oh fuck like my uncle, stubbing his toe. Right,
Speaker 2: So the cop stands in a daze and quickly grabs
Speaker 2: his stuff and turns from the camera. But who is
Speaker 2: hohole the camera? Not Twitter user at Ryan Whitney six,
Speaker 2: who said that he was reposting the video, So that's
Speaker 2: still a mystery. So we get a quick look at
Speaker 2: slide CoP's face, but the quality of the video is
Speaker 2: pretty low, so you only really get a flash of
Speaker 2: what seems to be a pretty stereotypical Boston cop. He's white,
Speaker 2: he's older, he's got a crew cut, and he just
Speaker 2: did something massively incompetent in broad daylight. And just to
Speaker 2: can we listen to the clip one more time? Now?
Speaker 2: If you need to pause the podcast and watch this
Speaker 2: video yourself. I encourage you to do so because I'm
Speaker 2: finding it hard to explain exactly how wrong this man
Speaker 2: has gone down a slide. There is a weird amount
Speaker 2: of momentum, like he was pushed as first by a
Speaker 2: middle school bully. So if this happened to a twelve
Speaker 2: year old and not a middle aged man protected by
Speaker 2: the Commonwealth, it would be life ending. So what I'm
Speaker 2: trying to say is that this clip rocks. It's amazing,
Speaker 2: it's confusing, it's funny, and it's punging down from the
Speaker 2: perspective of both society and gravity. For a large corner
Speaker 2: of the Internet, of which I am a member, this
Speaker 2: is the marriage of two tried and true viral video genres,
Speaker 2: a hatred of cops and a love of people falling down.
Speaker 2: It would be patronizing of me to explain to you
Speaker 2: why the only thing funnier than a regular adult falling
Speaker 2: down a terrifying slide for children is a cop doing
Speaker 2: that same thing. Cop height has been around for as
Speaker 2: long as cops have in the US, and has become
Speaker 2: more and more common in the last few years following
Speaker 2: the murder of George Floyd cop height is just common sense.
Speaker 2: And here's where in a just world, I'd tell you
Speaker 2: whose slide cop is and the adorable press cycle that
Speaker 2: surrounded them. But that's one of the weirder elements of
Speaker 2: this story. For all of the clickbait that this clip generated,
Speaker 2: Boston copslide turns up on John Oliver how the playground
Speaker 2: slide defeated the Boston cop. I went down the Boston
Speaker 2: cop slide. It was so tame. I have no idea
Speaker 2: how he went flying. Okay, kind of not like other
Speaker 2: girls on that last one. The slide cop has still
Speaker 2: not been identified, and that's weird. This far into Internet
Speaker 2: sleuthing history, there are plenty of main characters that become
Speaker 2: so against their will, some regular person thinking they're tweeting
Speaker 2: to no one, or worse, someone who's filmed in public
Speaker 2: without their consent. But it rarely takes the Internet more
Speaker 2: than a few hours to find out who someone is,
Speaker 2: regardless of ethics, particularly if they work for a prominent
Speaker 2: institution like I don't know, the Boston Police. But that
Speaker 2: never happens. After the clip went viral, and while the
Speaker 2: original wheet was removed, it had already spread to TikTok.
Speaker 2: The media doesn't jump to the who, they jump to
Speaker 2: the why. One of the early examples of meaningful curiosity
Speaker 2: into slide CoP's identity was from Boston Fox twenty five
Speaker 2: in a piece from reporter Carry Kavanaugh. She got responses
Speaker 2: for comment from the police department and current Boston Mayor
Speaker 2: Michelle Wu. Here's a piece from that article. I don't
Speaker 2: know what the circumstances were or what happened, said Mayor Wu,
Speaker 2: but I will definitely check in and make sure the
Speaker 2: officer is okay. If it looks like there needs to
Speaker 2: be more assignage that this is for children or something,
Speaker 2: we can do that too. Boston twenty five also asked
Speaker 2: the Boston Police about this video. The department says the
Speaker 2: officer was hurt, used his personal insurance for care, and
Speaker 2: did not charge the city. BPD says the officer did
Speaker 2: not miss any time and he's not facing any disciplinary action.
Speaker 2: Everything has a chance to be viral these days, said
Speaker 2: Mayor Wu. Okay, I'll bite a couple questions. What would
Speaker 2: the officer have charged the city for? Would he have
Speaker 2: sued the maker of the slide, Would he have sued
Speaker 2: the slide and Furthermore, I'm confused about the use of
Speaker 2: the phrase personal insurance. I mean, presumably a CoP's health
Speaker 2: insurance would be through their job, but this quote implies
Speaker 2: that their health insurance came from somewhere else. All we
Speaker 2: really learned from this story is that the Boston Police
Speaker 2: Department did confirm that slide Cop was their employee, not
Speaker 2: some cosplaying internet stunt person or freaky AI, and that
Speaker 2: Mayor Michelle Weu is kind of funny for a mayor.
Speaker 2: Outside of that, only questions. And while I do find
Speaker 2: it weird that there didn't seem to be much public
Speaker 2: interest in the who, I can't blame the interest in
Speaker 2: the how. I mean I wanted to understand myself, and
Speaker 2: most reporting from the time elected to ask local physicists
Speaker 2: how eating shit this hard was even humanly possible. I
Speaker 2: cannot overstate how many minutes of my one human life
Speaker 2: I have spent watching physics YouTubers trying to unpack the
Speaker 2: slide Cops descent. I've seen equations, I've seen attempts to
Speaker 2: determine the length of the slide from Google Maps aerial shots.
Speaker 2: I've seen it all, and this is as close as
Speaker 2: someone has gotten to a Kojun theory. This is from
Speaker 2: YouTube channel dot Physics, which is run by the resident
Speaker 2: physicist for Wired, Rhett Elaine.
Speaker 6: Welcome back to that again. Data and I have this
Speaker 6: distance LX. That's l Y, and that's the total length
Speaker 6: L I know data. I know LX. That's where I measured,
Speaker 6: so I can find l Y. Tangent of data is
Speaker 6: opposite over hyppot news, so that would be l Y
Speaker 6: over l LX. If I solve that for l Y,
Speaker 6: I get l Y is so No.
Speaker 2: I don't really know what any of that meant, but
Speaker 2: clearly people have thought a lot about it. For my
Speaker 2: listeners who also got sees in high school physics. The
Speaker 2: reality kind of boils down to what red Elaine wrote
Speaker 2: for Wired back in twenty twenty two about the increased
Speaker 2: popularity and danger in these kinds of steep steel slides.
Speaker 2: He was inspired by one at bell Isle Park in Michigan,
Speaker 2: and not just because it was big, but because people
Speaker 2: moved so fast on it that they were completely airborne
Speaker 2: and the slide had to close temporarily, said one child
Speaker 2: to a local news affiliate. Gravity hurts too, true, child.
Speaker 2: One of the many difficult realizations of child. Anyways, here's
Speaker 2: what Professor Elaine had to say about why people often
Speaker 2: move freakishly fast on these slides.
Speaker 4: Friction depends on the two surfaces interacting. So if you
Speaker 4: have a metal slide and it's in contact with skin
Speaker 4: or cotton clothes, you have a certain coefficient of friction,
Speaker 4: and if you change the material, maybe do something stiff,
Speaker 4: it could make it a lot slipperier.
Speaker 2: So the fact that the cop as an adult and
Speaker 2: the slide is intended for children actually doesn't make that
Speaker 2: much of a difference, even if it's really funny when
Speaker 2: mirr Wu implies that it is think back to your
Speaker 2: freshman year in high school. If there is no external
Speaker 2: force acting on an egg and a bowling bowl, they
Speaker 2: will propel forward at the same rate. So theoretically, if
Speaker 2: slide cop wasn't pushed, he would have come careening down
Speaker 2: the slide at the same rate as the two to
Speaker 2: twelve year olds that the slide is actually intended for. Alternatively,
Speaker 2: Elaine suggests that it's feasible that the uniform fabric might
Speaker 2: be a contributing factor. Polyester interacts with steel very differently
Speaker 2: than cotton does, but that really wouldn't account for someone
Speaker 2: eating shit as hard as slide Cop does, which makes
Speaker 2: me believe the slide cop had an external force acting
Speaker 2: on him. So who the fuck is he? I was
Speaker 2: beside myself trying to figure this out because it was
Speaker 2: starting to look like I was going to have to
Speaker 2: file a Foyer report and listen, I'm a dufus, I'm
Speaker 2: a clown. I lack the discipline and the jargon type
Speaker 2: knowledge to make such an attempt on my own. I
Speaker 2: needed help. Unfortunately, I have producer Sophie Lichtman to point
Speaker 2: out the obvious that we already know one of the
Speaker 2: greatest FOYA for good minds of our age, and so
Speaker 2: Sophie connected me to Molly Conger, a brilliant anti fascist journalist,
Speaker 2: FOYA expert, and the mother of two beautiful dog sons,
Speaker 2: and she guided me through how to approach this search.
Speaker 5: I am Molly Conger. I am a local journalist here
Speaker 5: in Charlottesville, Virginia, sort of a busybody about town, and
Speaker 5: unlike Alex Jones, I actually do have the documents, right.
Speaker 5: I'm a documents guy. I love my documents, and one
Speaker 5: of the ways that you can get documents is with
Speaker 5: a freedom of information Act Request, So when people say
Speaker 5: they foid something, they're referring to the Freedom of Information Act.
Speaker 5: That's the federal law governing public access to government records.
Speaker 5: Every state has their own version of it. Sometimes it's
Speaker 5: literally called FOYE as well. Sometimes it's called something else,
Speaker 5: and Pennsylvania it's called right to Know. In Massachusetts, which
Speaker 5: we're talking about today, I think it's called just the
Speaker 5: massas Chusetts Public Record Law, and they very state to
Speaker 5: state right the kinds of exemptions that exist, the statutory
Speaker 5: time limits, very the kinds of things that they will
Speaker 5: give you the run around on very so like, for instance,
Speaker 5: in my state, Virginia, only Virginia residents can request public records,
Speaker 5: which I think is it's one of only nine states
Speaker 5: that has a residency requirement for a four year request.
Speaker 2: Interesting, So do you have to like send pictures of
Speaker 2: your mail to get record?
Speaker 5: It depends on what kind of bug they have up
Speaker 5: their butt. Like different jurisdictions are more uptight about it,
Speaker 5: Like they'll ask you your address through US sometimes they
Speaker 5: will ask you to prove it or if you're a
Speaker 5: representative of news media, but the outlet has to have
Speaker 5: demonstrable circulation within the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that's interpreted
Speaker 5: in a variety of ways that can be pretty harmful
Speaker 5: to independent journalists or online outlets. So, like, you know,
Speaker 5: if you have a very popular blog, they're like, well,
Speaker 5: can you prove that anyone in Virginia reads it?
Speaker 2: Really? So wait, you have to, like it's like being
Speaker 2: an Instagram model, Like you have to also prove that
Speaker 2: people are looking at stuff.
Speaker 5: That's that's crazy, very subjective, right, because the law was
Speaker 5: originally written with newspapers in mind, So it's like, do
Speaker 5: people in the state receive this physical newspaper? But that's
Speaker 5: not really how we do news media anymore. So the
Speaker 5: response times can vary. Like in Arkansas, by law, they
Speaker 5: only have three days to respond, which is like one
Speaker 5: of the tightest timelines in the country. Twelve states don't
Speaker 5: have a statutory time limit, which means that like you
Speaker 5: have no recourse and they just never respond to you.
Speaker 5: So in Massachusetts, the law says they have to respond
Speaker 5: to you within ten days, but they can get a
Speaker 5: good cause extension. I think it's they can get twenty
Speaker 5: days for agencies, thirty days for municipalities, and in Massachusetts
Speaker 5: they can only ask for an extension once they can't
Speaker 5: just keep saying ooh, actually thirty more days. Actually thirty
Speaker 5: more days for the rest of your life. But because
Speaker 5: you're looking for police records, I think in almost every
Speaker 5: state there are huge carve outs for the cops because
Speaker 5: they are not an institution that favors transparency. They like
Speaker 5: to operate in the dark, they don't like to engage
Speaker 5: with the public, and they're hiding. I mean, in this
Speaker 5: case they're just hiding something funny, but a lot of
Speaker 5: times they're hiding something bad. So there are massive carve
Speaker 5: outs for the police. And so I think in Massachusetts specifically,
Speaker 5: I think the Sogain I guess back to the idea
Speaker 5: that every state has different sort of specifics to their
Speaker 5: public records law, and so one of the things that
Speaker 5: varies from state to state are the exemptions. So a
Speaker 5: public records law should cover every document that the government creates,
Speaker 5: right because those are our documents. The government works for us.
Speaker 5: But there are carve outs for things that they don't
Speaker 5: think you should have. Like I mean, some of it's
Speaker 5: pretty obvious, like most states won't let you say, I'm
Speaker 5: making a public records request for the home address of
Speaker 5: every judge like, it's obvious that you can't do that.
Speaker 5: That's a good idea. You can't say I would like
Speaker 5: to foil the credit card number that the city clerk
Speaker 5: uses to buy pizza for meetings. You can't have that.
Speaker 5: That makes sense, you know, most.
Speaker 2: You know that because you've tried. No.
Speaker 5: I was actually reading the Virginia State Code and it's
Speaker 5: specifically lists like you can't FOI a credit card numbers.
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm glad you put that in there, but
Speaker 5: I think what the exemption you're going to run up
Speaker 5: against here is personnel, and that varies from state to state.
Speaker 5: I know here in Virginia. Just last year, city attorneys
Speaker 5: had to conduct new trainings with everyone because they were
Speaker 5: using the personnel exemption. They were saying that, well, anything
Speaker 5: that has an employee's name on it is personnel, and
Speaker 5: that's not the case. It's about like private employee information
Speaker 5: some certain disciplinary records. But they were just like not
Speaker 5: turning over anything that had an employee's name on it,
Speaker 5: which is not how that's.
Speaker 3: Supposed to work.
Speaker 5: But then like in states like Pennsylvania, which actually this
Speaker 5: happened to me earlier this year, I was trying to
Speaker 5: get some police reports from Pennsylvania under their Right to
Speaker 5: Know Act, and their exemptions around law enforcement records are
Speaker 5: so complete that you can't get anything. A cop ever
Speaker 5: wrote down basically like you just can't get police And
Speaker 5: this was a twenty year old closed case, and they
Speaker 5: were like, well, those are investigative records.
Speaker 2: And I was like, wow, you're.
Speaker 5: Not investigating it anymore. He's in jail.
Speaker 2: We'll pick up with Molly in a bit. So, with
Speaker 2: the fear that the FOYA god struck into my heart,
Speaker 2: I made my request and while I waited for the
Speaker 2: mandated ten business days, I kept investigating. And to be clear,
Speaker 2: I was not the first person to file a FOYA
Speaker 2: to try and crack slide CoP's identity. Someone had already
Speaker 2: filed one trying to find out who he was. Almost
Speaker 2: immediately after the video surfaced, four h four Media co
Speaker 2: founder and former editor in chief of Motherboard Jason Koebler
Speaker 2: hit the VPD with a FOYA more or less immediately
Speaker 2: and published the reply on August twenty second, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: His request had been for any and all records, bodycam footage,
Speaker 2: or images of the incident, and he'd gotten the classic
Speaker 2: police Department Square.
Speaker 4: The VPD does not have any body camera footage, images,
Speaker 4: audio recordings, or any other reportings or media of this incident. Therefore,
Speaker 4: there are no responsive records. Attached is a redacted incident report.
Speaker 2: He requested lies they're lying. I think they're lying, And
Speaker 2: Koobler points out in his piece that this is probably
Speaker 2: not true because if you look in the far right
Speaker 2: of the slide cop clip, there is a second person
Speaker 2: filming who and I can't confirm it, but others have
Speaker 2: speculated who appears to be wearing a police uniform and
Speaker 2: a fluorescent mesh best identical to the one that slide
Speaker 2: Coop is seen wearing in the video. Still a lot
Speaker 2: of questions, but we do get this one document released
Speaker 2: from Koebler's FOYA, the incident report, and we learn a
Speaker 2: few things from this. We learned that the name of
Speaker 2: the reporting officer with Steven Canto, we learned the name
Speaker 2: of the doctor who treated slide Cop, and critically, we
Speaker 2: learn the date of the incident, because remember, the person
Speaker 2: who uploaded the video to Twitter was reposting and couldn't
Speaker 2: answer when the clip was taken in the first place,
Speaker 2: and most media did not look into when it was,
Speaker 2: but I care when it was. And so here is
Speaker 2: what the incident report from that FOYA says.
Speaker 4: On July twenty ninth, twenty twenty three, at about eighteen
Speaker 4: thirty five.
Speaker 8: And then the name of slide Cop, which is redacted.
Speaker 8: I mean, of course it is redacted. They're not going
Speaker 8: to make it this easy because my life has to
Speaker 8: be difficult, even if I'm having a hard time.
Speaker 2: So back to the report.
Speaker 4: On July twenty ninth, twenty twenty three, at about eighteen
Speaker 4: thirty five, officer reacted to work a special event at
Speaker 4: City Hall Plaza when he struck his head and right arm.
Speaker 4: The officer was brought back to District A one and
Speaker 4: EMS was requested. The on duty supervisor, Sergeant Downey, was notified.
Speaker 4: Boston EMS Ambulance three A zero eight responded to District
Speaker 4: A one and transported the officer to Tuft's Medical Center
Speaker 4: for treatment. The officer was treated by doctor Pam and
Speaker 4: returned to duty.
Speaker 2: You can say it, that's not a lot of information
Speaker 2: except that slide Cop busted his ass so badly that
Speaker 2: he had to be taken in an ambulance to the
Speaker 2: nearest hospital. And well, slide Cops age is also blacked out.
Speaker 2: He is confirmed to be the white male we saw
Speaker 2: in the video, and we also have the name of
Speaker 2: that reporting officer, Stephen Canto, who it only takes a
Speaker 2: few clicks to learn, made about one hundred and eighty
Speaker 2: four thousand dollars a year in twenty twenty one and
Speaker 2: has been the subject of a sustained finding in both
Speaker 2: an internal investigation and a citizen complaint. Not to mention,
Speaker 2: he doesn't even live in Boston, which is still a
Speaker 2: requirement for this department cops man. But let's take it
Speaker 2: back to the date July twenty ninth, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: This was a Saturday, around six point thirty in the evening,
Speaker 2: and the event going on at City Hall Plaza at
Speaker 2: that time would have been the Puerto Rican Festival of Massachusetts,
Speaker 2: very cool annual event in the city that was set
Speaker 2: to go on all weekend. Earlier in the day, there
Speaker 2: was a parade in the downtown Boston area that went
Speaker 2: from noon to ten at night both days, so perfect
Speaker 2: event to send a pair of middle aged white Boston
Speaker 2: cops to. The Puerto Rican Festival covered City Hall Plaza
Speaker 2: with food stands, music, carnival, attractions, you name it. So
Speaker 2: I looked into the moment to moment schedule of this event,
Speaker 2: and at the time that the slide cop allegedly took
Speaker 2: this tumble, musician Ashawnee was scheduled to be performing at
Speaker 2: City Hall, right near the playground. But in spite of
Speaker 2: the fact that this is a family event, the playground
Speaker 2: doesn't seem to be very busy at all, and you
Speaker 2: can't really hear indications that there's a festival going on nearby. Granted,
Speaker 2: based on the videos I watched at the festival, it's
Speaker 2: not super close to the playground, but from anecdotal evidence,
Speaker 2: I do think you would be able to hear something.
Speaker 2: But at this point I had more information than anyone
Speaker 2: else I had seen. So I did what Molly said.
Speaker 2: I foyed the FOYA, something I did not previously know
Speaker 2: was the thing you could do. But, as she said,
Speaker 2: a little bit of a wider net in hopes that
Speaker 2: the Boston Police Department would not realize exactly what I
Speaker 2: was looking for. So, trying to be slick, I foyed
Speaker 2: for all records in the weeks before and after the incident,
Speaker 2: and here's what I received in return. The wrong papers
Speaker 2: They straight up did not send me what I asked for,
Speaker 2: which was where cops were stationed with regards to events.
Speaker 2: What I instead got back was promotions or office transfers. Basically,
Speaker 2: I got the run around. And that's tremendously frustrating because
Speaker 2: by the time I got this run around, the Boston
Speaker 2: police and cops all over the country in the world
Speaker 2: were brutalizing peacefully protesting college students holding it down for Palestine.
Speaker 2: The police and citizen mob violence people were subjected to
Speaker 2: for conducting teachings denouncing genocide and demanding divestment from Israel
Speaker 2: were horrific, and in my tiny brain I couldn't help
Speaker 2: but think slide Cop could very well be in that
Speaker 2: stormtrooper line brutalizing young people. And I got the fucking
Speaker 2: run around, and so, with my tail between my little legs,
Speaker 2: I went back to Molly Conger to find out what
Speaker 2: to do next besides file another Foyer request, which I did. God,
Speaker 2: I don't know how people do it. I was reading
Speaker 2: through the first round of You Know there was a
Speaker 2: writer from four to four who immediately made a Foyer request,
Speaker 2: and conveniently, this specific cops name was redacted and the
Speaker 2: reason for that, I feel like is pretty clear. But
Speaker 2: what is the excuse to redact someone like slide CoP's
Speaker 2: name When the guy he was with and the guy
Speaker 2: who reported it that CoP's name is available, and the
Speaker 2: doctor who treated him his name is available. What about
Speaker 2: slide Cop makes him redactable?
Speaker 5: So I found this particular exemption in the Massachusetts law
Speaker 5: about public records. This is Subclause C personnel and medical
Speaker 5: files or information and any other materials or data relating
Speaker 5: to a specifically named individual, the disclosure of which may
Speaker 5: constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, provided, however, this
Speaker 5: subclause shall not apply to records related to law enforcement
Speaker 5: misconduct investigation. So had he been an investigated for misconduct
Speaker 5: for inappropriately sliding, then you could get the records, right,
Speaker 5: Like if this were a misconduct investigation because he was
Speaker 5: behaving badly at the Puerto Rican Pride festival, then you
Speaker 5: could get it. But in this case, it's just that
Speaker 5: it's this is a personnel incident report, right that this was.
Speaker 5: I wonder if they're claiming a medical exemption right because
Speaker 5: he was injured on the job and sent to the hospital.
Speaker 5: So there's a variety of ways they can pretend that
Speaker 5: it's legal for them not to give this to you, right,
Speaker 5: And that's kind of why when we talked about making
Speaker 5: this request, it's like, don't make it clear what you're
Speaker 5: looking for, right. If you say, like I want records
Speaker 5: of outside cop, they'll just say no, or they'll find
Speaker 5: a reason to say no. But if you don't let
Speaker 5: them know what you're looking for, maybe they won't think
Speaker 5: to abuse their discretion around exemptions.
Speaker 2: It's interesting because I started working on this episode before
Speaker 2: the student protests for Palestine began. Now we're talking several
Speaker 2: weeks in, and I know that you've been covering them
Speaker 2: as well, and the American cops are once again in
Speaker 2: a bit of a PR crisis because they're arresting and
Speaker 2: brutalizing students. So I guess my question around slide Cop,
Speaker 2: and I think we talked about this, was why not
Speaker 2: take advantage of what seems like kind of a PR
Speaker 2: slam dunk a cop did something funny that everyone thought
Speaker 2: was Like, I felt like there was a missed opportunity
Speaker 2: for a spin here, and the cops usually seem to
Speaker 2: take every opportunity for spin. Do you have any thoughts
Speaker 2: on why they may not have taken advantage of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it would have been like funny and cute,
Speaker 5: right if you like, went on the New news. Was like,
Speaker 5: you know, I was just enjoying our public I'm not
Speaker 5: gonna do a Boston accent, right, but I was just
Speaker 5: enjoying this public park. I just said, I wasn't going
Speaker 5: you know what I mean, Like he could have gone
Speaker 5: on the news and like been cute about it. But
Speaker 5: I'm thinking, you know what Margaret Atwood said about men
Speaker 5: and women, right, Like men are afraid women will laugh
Speaker 5: at them. Women are afraid men will kill them. And
Speaker 5: I think in this scenario, it's you know, cops in
Speaker 5: the public like being laughed at is the worst thing
Speaker 5: that can happen to them after getting a little bit
Speaker 5: of a booboo. They also hate getting a little bit
Speaker 5: of a booboo. And so he was getting laughed at,
Speaker 5: he got a booboo, and that makes them lash out
Speaker 5: like they're not capable of normal human experience. They can't
Speaker 5: just laugh about it because it is funny. He should
Speaker 5: have He should have gone on whatever garbage vaguely right
Speaker 5: wing local news network you have in Boston and just
Speaker 5: laughed and the Boston cops. I will say, in my
Speaker 5: experience with cops in a variety of locations, I have
Speaker 5: a special hatred for the Boston Police Department, and I
Speaker 5: don't care if they hear this. I do hate you.
Speaker 5: I do hate you, Captain John dani Lucky in particular.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much to Molly Coonger, and you can
Speaker 2: support her work over at patreon dot com slash socialist
Speaker 2: dog bomb.
Speaker 5: But in the.
Speaker 2: Meantime, most Boston journalists I spoke with did not seem
Speaker 2: to think that the main character was the slide cop.
Speaker 2: They felt it was the slide. This was challenging for me.
Speaker 2: Why the fuck did everyone care about the slide? I mean,
Speaker 2: I'd seen the slide myself, too slippery, too steep. But
Speaker 2: after the incident, Capital T Capital I, the slide became
Speaker 2: the celebrity, not the slide cop. The week after the incident,
Speaker 2: there was a forty five minute line around the new
Speaker 2: playground consisting of all adults, according to Jezebel on August fourth.
Speaker 2: By August eleventh, slide cop mania had reached such a
Speaker 2: frenzy in downtown Boston and so many people were ready
Speaker 2: to kill themselves for a bit that there was a
Speaker 2: tiny little fence put around the slide by the city,
Speaker 2: said Twitter user unpuppable. They arrested the fucking slide and
Speaker 2: this didn't last long, But they arrested the slide, and
Speaker 2: I can tell you with complete certainty that the lore
Speaker 2: surrounding the slide endured for months and months afterward. That Halloween,
Speaker 2: several locals went soft viral for dressing up like the
Speaker 2: slide or even more cursed a couple's costume of the
Speaker 2: slide and the slide cop. So, while the slide CoP's
Speaker 2: identity remains a mystery for now, I'm adding this to
Speaker 2: the open case files of sixteenth Minute were left with
Speaker 2: the cop hitting slide itself. How does a steep slide
Speaker 2: end up in front of a major city hall and
Speaker 2: has it tried to kill anyone else? When the new
Speaker 2: City Hall plaza was opened after the renovation in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two, the local news was all over it. CPS
Speaker 2: Boston's Katrina Kincaid reported live from the top of the
Speaker 2: slide you can see her from behind its freaky cage
Speaker 2: on the day that it opened, and went down the
Speaker 2: slide itself at the end of her broadcast and she
Speaker 2: you guessed it completely ate shit. Here's the clip, and
Speaker 2: this whole thing is.
Speaker 5: Gonna open also, you know, including this playground, which if
Speaker 5: you can see this big slide, I get to try
Speaker 5: out the big slide.
Speaker 2: Give me a moment.
Speaker 5: Here we go, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 7: Five to eight.
Speaker 2: More celebrations continue. If you can't make it today, you
Speaker 2: can join from tomorrow. There's gonna be even.
Speaker 1: More stuff here.
Speaker 2: Guys. Oh my gosh, that's definitely a workers comp claim
Speaker 2: right there. An, I'm doing great again. The clunking noise.
Speaker 2: A middle class professional cannot go down this slide without
Speaker 2: the clunking noise. But it wasn't until an especially incompetent
Speaker 2: public servant made use of it that things really went haywire.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 2: As or why the slide is here, it is to
Speaker 2: attract people back to City Hall plaza, which has always
Speaker 2: been challenging because it's ugly, or as one of my
Speaker 2: best friends in WGBH reporter in Boston, Tory Bedford says,
Speaker 2: city hall has a certain brutalism about it.
Speaker 9: Sure, and then they constructed this city Hall in this
Speaker 9: beautiful brutalist architecture.
Speaker 2: That are you a fan? I don't know.
Speaker 9: It's really like on the inside of the building too.
Speaker 9: It's so echoey, and I don't know about a building
Speaker 9: that looms over its residence to assert power.
Speaker 2: Personally, I think it's ugly, and I know ugly. I'm
Speaker 2: from Brockton. So does this story boil down to cops
Speaker 2: eating shit? Is funny? Maybe? Because sure, But I wanted
Speaker 2: to understand what was going on in Boston at the
Speaker 2: moment this story took off that made this specific cop
Speaker 2: uniquely hateable. As it turns out, the month that Slidecock
Speaker 2: took his little tumble should have been a huge moment
Speaker 2: for forward motion and transparency between the police and the public.
Speaker 2: In late August twenty twenty three, a database full of
Speaker 2: complaints made against Massachusetts police officers was released, over a
Speaker 2: year after it was promised to the public, consisting of
Speaker 2: around thirty four hundred disciplinary reports ranging across twenty one
Speaker 2: hundred officers. Yes, feel free to do that math, it's
Speaker 2: not great. The records were compiled and released by a
Speaker 2: police oversight committee that came together in twenty twenty following
Speaker 2: the murder of George Floyd. The oversight board is called
Speaker 2: Post the Peace Officer's Standards and Training Commission. In a
Speaker 2: WBUR report from Deborah Becker and Ali Jarmanning broke down
Speaker 2: the results, or rather what was released of the promised results,
Speaker 2: because a lot of complaints were excluded from this report.
Speaker 2: Among the top offenders included were the Massachusetts State Police,
Speaker 2: the Springfield Police, and the Boston Police. And these are
Speaker 2: just disciplinary reports that were filed. Enrique Zunitta, Post's executive
Speaker 2: director said this when the report was released.
Speaker 3: There are approximately twenty thousand police officers in the Commonwealth.
Speaker 3: In the database contains records for about twenty one hundred.
Speaker 3: The majority of officers are doing their work in the
Speaker 3: professional way that is expected of them.
Speaker 2: But that's still more than one in ten police officers
Speaker 2: with a disciplinary record in a field where many people
Speaker 2: would not feel safe retaliating against officers in the first place.
Speaker 2: One in ten is not a bad apple situation. So
Speaker 2: it's no surprise that the people of Boston want to
Speaker 2: see their cops eat shit. They're in active danger, and
Speaker 2: many people feel that the year late Post report didn't
Speaker 2: tell the half of it. Independent reporters like Jeff Raymond
Speaker 2: runs the blog mass Transparency, say that the committee is
Speaker 2: missing a lot of the truth and is working to
Speaker 2: fill in the blanks himself. I caught up with him
Speaker 2: to learn more.
Speaker 10: My name is Jeff Raymond, A moonlight as an investigative journalist,
Speaker 10: and mass Transparency is a public records project that I
Speaker 10: launched last spring to do some public records journalism throughout
Speaker 10: the state of Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: Do you remember where you were when you saw the
Speaker 2: slide cop video?
Speaker 10: I mean, I mean, I think we were all on
Speaker 10: the bird app at the same time at that point.
Speaker 10: And it's funny because I'm pretty sure I saw the
Speaker 10: means of slide cop before I saw a slide cop himself.
Speaker 2: Wow, it was, in.
Speaker 10: Fact, you know, I'm thinking about it now. I hadn't
Speaker 10: even thought of when I first saw it. I believe
Speaker 10: it was a video where it was essentially the cop
Speaker 10: coming out of the thing and then a bunch of
Speaker 10: other cops spelling out underneath him into.
Speaker 7: A side cops.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Austin needed a win, and perhaps more importantly, Boston
Speaker 10: didn't have his own entry in the in the air
Speaker 10: tonight drum break.
Speaker 7: Yeah provided that to.
Speaker 2: Us exactly, and we're richer for it.
Speaker 10: This is community policing distilled into its personal essence. Yeah,
Speaker 10: cops tries to get along with the common man, and
Speaker 10: he's like, I'm going to go down this slide, and
Speaker 10: the next thing you know, he's concustom There's records of
Speaker 10: things and incident reports.
Speaker 7: And physicists are being consulted. Like it's putting.
Speaker 10: Barriers up around the slide at night and make sure
Speaker 10: that nobody else goes down it, because you know, all
Speaker 10: the kids who went down that slide for the last
Speaker 10: X number of years were fine, but the minute of
Speaker 10: police officer hits the side the wrong way, we have
Speaker 10: to Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was really excited to get to talk to you
Speaker 2: because I wanted to contextualize just a general attitude towards
Speaker 2: policing in Massachusetts right now, but also just in this
Speaker 2: specific moment, because I feel like it was an eventful
Speaker 2: and interesting summer in police oversight or the lack thereof.
Speaker 2: What motivated you to start the mass Transparency Project? What
Speaker 2: are its goals at present?
Speaker 10: This started as an offshoot of a local news thing
Speaker 10: that I was doing, because local news is being decimated
Speaker 10: across the country. Massachusetts is no different in that regard.
Speaker 10: Some IT company bought the paper along with like six
Speaker 10: others in the region about a year and a half
Speaker 10: two years ago, me and a friend tried and failed
Speaker 10: to kick something off on the ground here, But I
Speaker 10: wanted to focus a little broader because I enjoyed doing
Speaker 10: public records or class because I'm a huge nerd, and
Speaker 10: this was a perfect incident on it. Which is the
Speaker 10: post Commission, the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission,
Speaker 10: that's a nice word jumble. They had launched shortly after
Speaker 10: the George Floyd murder in Massachusetts as part of a
Speaker 10: wholesale reform bill. So to give some very high level background.
Speaker 10: After the murder, a very contentious reform package went through
Speaker 10: the Massachusetts legislature and was signed by Governor Baker, Republican
Speaker 10: at the time, right, and part of it was to
Speaker 10: create a state level oversight committee for the police officer
Speaker 10: in the state. The post Commission has a lot of
Speaker 10: different avenues they have to go through, but one of
Speaker 10: them is to keep a public database of disciplinary records.
Speaker 10: So if an officer has a complaint lodged against him
Speaker 10: or her, the complaint is already lodged at the local
Speaker 10: police department or police vehicle, depending on what it is.
Speaker 10: Because they can they handle the colleges and stuff too,
Speaker 10: but those complaints were being compiled by the individual departments
Speaker 10: and sent off the Post, and Post was supposed to
Speaker 10: put the online. That database was supposed to happen. This
Speaker 10: is how long this has been going on.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 10: This database was supposed to launch in November of twenty
Speaker 10: twenty two.
Speaker 2: Wow, okay.
Speaker 10: I started my project in March of twenty twenty three
Speaker 10: because A the database still hadn't happened, and B Post
Speaker 10: was putting out feelers that said they weren't going to
Speaker 10: publish it at all.
Speaker 2: And was was there a reasoning given for that?
Speaker 10: The official reason they gave was that it was data
Speaker 10: fidelity issues, which essentially is a BS term for we
Speaker 10: don't like what we're getting and we're just going to
Speaker 10: push it aside. Again, I am a nerd with a
Speaker 10: lot of free time on his hands, and I know
Speaker 10: how to craft a good public record request, so I
Speaker 10: decided to do the insane thing and write all three
Speaker 10: hundred and fifty one local police departments in Massachusetts to
Speaker 10: get the records they sent the Post.
Speaker 2: Wow, oh my god. Foyer nerds are are our bravest soldiers,
Speaker 2: Our bravest soldiers.
Speaker 7: Randred fifty requests.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what was the response rate?
Speaker 10: Oh, they hate me. There were towns that I felt
Speaker 10: like I could not drive in for a while. There
Speaker 10: were some very contentious conversations with chiefs of police and
Speaker 10: town clerks and stuff. I got the ire of the
Speaker 10: Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, which is sort of like
Speaker 10: the lobbying body for the different chiefs in the state.
Speaker 10: They tried to coordinate over email a way to give
Speaker 10: a blanket denial of my request, which was a lot
Speaker 10: of fun. But their lawyer put a typo in so
Speaker 10: I was able to find out really quickly who was
Speaker 10: using this thing, and I was able to you know,
Speaker 10: I was putting appeals into the state. The State Public
Speaker 10: Records Division knows me by name. Now, like you know,
Speaker 10: one of the women there is you know, she and
Speaker 10: I are tight. It's it became a whole thing. I
Speaker 10: think at the end of the day, with this project
Speaker 10: for policing in particular, like you said, three hundred and
Speaker 10: fifty individual towns got requests from me, I've had to
Speaker 10: issue an additional I believe I'm up to three hundred
Speaker 10: and eighty five appeals because these departments are trying not
Speaker 10: to release this information, and there are still some departments
Speaker 10: out there, about thirty of them now that are still resisting,
Speaker 10: and we're a year out now. They will have to soon.
Speaker 10: We're waiting on a Supreme Court decision that I'm not
Speaker 10: related to but is being used to deny the records.
Speaker 10: But it has been what I thought was going to
Speaker 10: be a fun quote unquote fun project over like Easter
Speaker 10: break while I didn't have a lot going on, became
Speaker 10: this like year long crusade where I've become like the
Speaker 10: poster boy for police transparency in central Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: So wow, I learned of your coverage doing a general
Speaker 2: look at what was going on in from a wb
Speaker 2: R piece about initial launch, which is the same week
Speaker 2: as slide cop did walk me through this. The database
Speaker 2: is kind of released it.
Speaker 7: What happened.
Speaker 10: What happened was is that all these departments, now that
Speaker 10: I have all the documents, I can see the transition
Speaker 10: and the trajectory of where this went. All the departments
Speaker 10: were tasked by the Post Commission to compile this evidence
Speaker 10: on their own. Essentially, instead of the Post Commission going
Speaker 10: directly to the chiefs, they were saying, chiefs, use this form.
Speaker 10: Fell out the information send it back to us. These
Speaker 10: chiefs don't know how to use technology. They don't know
Speaker 10: how to craft a coherent Excel spreadsheet. None of them
Speaker 10: were exporting them the same way.
Speaker 7: None of them.
Speaker 10: Some of them would pdf it. And you know, if
Speaker 10: you try to pdf a Excel spreadsheet, it doesn't work.
Speaker 7: The disastera diaster.
Speaker 10: So it's like, I understand now what they meant by
Speaker 10: data fidelity, because the Post Commission doesn't have the resources
Speaker 10: to actually go through these things line by line and
Speaker 10: do the copy paste. And you know, I'm sure they
Speaker 10: don't have a coder who use our or something like
Speaker 10: that to create a script. I mean like they're they're
Speaker 10: under resourced for what they need to do, and they're
Speaker 10: coming up against fierce resistance from the chiefs, the police
Speaker 10: who don't want to put their guys in the in
Speaker 10: the way, the labor unions for the police, who are
Speaker 10: problems for any sort of accountability, and you know, a
Speaker 10: public that thinks that the police, you know, one of
Speaker 10: Massachusetts is considered a very progressive state in the grand
Speaker 10: scheme of things. We are pro police to a fault
Speaker 10: here in a lot of ways. You know, it's it's
Speaker 10: very interesting the blind spot we have for policing compared
Speaker 10: to other places that you would think would have our
Speaker 10: sort of blind spot. So when you have the public
Speaker 10: not behind you, and the unions not behind you, and
Speaker 10: the chiefs not behind you, you're up against a lot
Speaker 10: of a lot of stuff. And the Post Commission, you know,
Speaker 10: I feel like they're operating.
Speaker 7: A good faith.
Speaker 10: They're doing the best they can. But they watered down
Speaker 10: the database they put out there. They didn't put all
Speaker 10: of the stuff that's been recorded in there. They only
Speaker 10: wanted to publicize the things that were sustained and the
Speaker 10: definition of a sustained complaint that differs from department to department. Okay,
Speaker 10: And they promised me I actually had an interview with
Speaker 10: the director of the Post Commission that they would have
Speaker 10: aggregate data for us, and that was six months ago
Speaker 10: and they see nothing.
Speaker 7: So it's very frustrating.
Speaker 2: In your view. What needs to happen in order for
Speaker 2: POST to work effectively?
Speaker 10: Post needs more money. We don't have it in the state.
Speaker 10: We've already had to do a bunch of cuts for
Speaker 10: services because tax revenues are not where they need to be,
Speaker 10: and we do not have a population that is willing
Speaker 10: to put any cuts into the police departments of this area.
Speaker 10: It's just not happening. Because the police departments feel like
Speaker 10: they're underfunded. They're not going to then allow for money
Speaker 10: to go to the thing that's overseeing them without a fight.
Speaker 10: And a lot of people in the state House and
Speaker 10: the legislature staked a lot of their political capital on
Speaker 10: getting this first reform through and they've had their bite
Speaker 10: at the apple and they've moved on. They're looking at
Speaker 10: different things now. And you know the nature of legislation
Speaker 10: in twenty twenty four is we flit from one shiny
Speaker 10: object to the next, and history ends a month before
Speaker 10: you're talking about it, right, that's my optimism.
Speaker 7: Yeah, no, I mean I think that that's beautiful.
Speaker 2: But how do we bring this back to slide cop
Speaker 2: is the real question in.
Speaker 10: All seriouss like I've been thinking about this at the
Speaker 10: slide cop incident also distills the lack of transparency in
Speaker 10: this whole charade. One of the arguments that the district
Speaker 10: attorneys are making in terms of disclosure for these post
Speaker 10: reports is that they don't want their officers mocked on
Speaker 10: social media. They specifically call out video on Facebook, TikTok
Speaker 10: Instagram reels as they don't want this information that could
Speaker 10: include interviews that are taped or audio that goes out
Speaker 10: there to be put online, to be remixed, to be
Speaker 10: put upon, mocked, all this stuff. They hate disclosure. And
Speaker 10: you just see them if you read the articles from
Speaker 10: the slide cop era. All these departments circled the wagons
Speaker 10: about keeping this guy's name a secret, and it's like,
Speaker 10: you know, I'm going to be honest with you, that
Speaker 10: was the most humanizing police encounter I've seen online in years.
Speaker 7: And you think that this guy, let him.
Speaker 10: Have his fifteen minutes, let him have his whole thing. Yeah,
Speaker 10: I'm the guy who went down the slide Oops. You know,
Speaker 10: Boston Police had a million ways to go about this.
Speaker 10: They could have leaned into a little bit, had a
Speaker 10: little fun with it, taken to five minutes, and then
Speaker 10: the internet would have moved on. Instead, we still don't
Speaker 10: know this guy is two years later. It's impossible to
Speaker 10: find me any information on it. You're doing a podcast
Speaker 10: about it years after the fact because it's still there
Speaker 10: because they won't tell us anything about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I sort of felt the same way, where it's
Speaker 2: like I think there's a very cynical way that this
Speaker 2: story goes, where you know, slide CP becomes a pro
Speaker 2: policing mascot. But it feels like there is this like
Speaker 2: really you know, jingoistic masculine pride in the police force wards,
Speaker 2: Like we refuse to look silly, even if it would
Speaker 2: behoove us, we refuse to look silly.
Speaker 10: Like to tell me they couldn't get Macgruff the crime
Speaker 10: dog to like stand the thing with the cop and
Speaker 10: talk about playground safety, Like you could have leaned this
Speaker 10: into a community benefit. You know, if they were trying
Speaker 10: to be transparent, it stops being a story. Nobody cares
Speaker 10: because everybody's there every moment that you keep something a secret,
Speaker 10: And you know, there's a part of me that it's
Speaker 10: like they're keeping this guy's name a secret because he
Speaker 10: has a rap sheet and they don't want it to
Speaker 10: come out there. And that's the first thing I think
Speaker 10: of now, because I've seen the post reports that they
Speaker 10: didn't want public, and I've seen how some officers get
Speaker 10: away with, well, let's be honest here, I get away.
Speaker 7: With a little literal murder sometimes.
Speaker 10: And you know, I am not saying that slide Cop
Speaker 10: is a murderer. I'm not even saying that he might
Speaker 10: be a bad cop, but you know what, I'm thinking
Speaker 10: it now because they don't want to tell.
Speaker 5: Us who he is.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much to Jeff, and you can follow
Speaker 2: his ongoing efforts at mass Transparency DOT. I have to
Speaker 2: be honest, I'm pissed off that I was not able
Speaker 2: to figure out whose slide Cop was. I'd made every effort,
Speaker 2: from interviewing reporters to enlisting hackers to contacting the police myself,
Speaker 2: and I failed. And then a few days after Jeff
Speaker 2: Raymond and I spoke, he sent me a convoluted government
Speaker 2: document that offered an answer as to why this search
Speaker 2: has been so challenging. The document is from an appellate
Speaker 2: court on August eleventh, twenty twenty three, just a week
Speaker 2: after the Boston slide Cop delighted people all over the world.
Speaker 2: The question at the center of the case was this,
Speaker 2: and I.
Speaker 3: Quote whether the legislator's grant of authority to the Post
Speaker 3: Commission implies that the Commission has the exclusive authority to
Speaker 3: release the names of police officers whose conduct has been investigated.
Speaker 2: Or trade officers with complaints filed against them. In the
Speaker 2: post report be named. Pretty deep into this document, it's
Speaker 2: explicitly suggested why most props exert their right to refuse
Speaker 2: to be reported. Here's what it says.
Speaker 3: Once deemed to be public records, recordings can be used
Speaker 3: in whatever way the public wishes. The public, however, can
Speaker 3: be cruel and harassing, increasing opportunities to harass and instill
Speaker 3: fear through social media. It is easy to foresee the
Speaker 3: refusal of any public employee to submit to being recorded.
Speaker 3: Ever again, if the public release of the recorded interview
Speaker 3: can be expected to be uploaded to the Internet, modified
Speaker 3: for TikTok, submitted to Facebook reels, Instagram reels, or any
Speaker 3: individual podcast for the purpose of ridiculing or vilifying the interviewees,
Speaker 3: the public disclosure of such interviews likewise could lead to
Speaker 3: retaliation against public employees, creating a danger to them and
Speaker 3: their families.
Speaker 2: Now I'm not saying that the slide cop has an
Speaker 2: on record disciplinary report filed against him, but lowbull asked
Speaker 2: from the poorly resourced post commission do indicate that this
Speaker 2: is very possible. And what this appellate court document tells
Speaker 2: me is that in the summer of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: the company line for the Boston Police was do not,
Speaker 2: under any circumstances become the Internet's main character, because if
Speaker 2: you do, some little bitch is going to vilify you
Speaker 2: on a podcast. A few days before this episode was
Speaker 2: scheduled to drop, Jeff Raymond called me back with some
Speaker 2: new information that a decision had been made that public
Speaker 2: records would be made more accessible in theory at least,
Speaker 2: but that that probably wouldn't apply to Slide Cop still
Speaker 2: because no one was really wronged in the incident except
Speaker 2: the cop himself. That it was classified as a medical thing.
Speaker 2: But Jeff had a lead for me. Okay, Hi, Jeff,
Speaker 2: it is what it's like, almost two months after we
Speaker 2: first spoke.
Speaker 10: I feel like it's been a whirlwind. When we last
Speaker 10: we were waiting on the Supreme Judicial Court of the State
Speaker 10: of Massachusetts to bring down a transparency ruling regarding an
Speaker 10: officer involves shooting in Fall River that came down roughly
Speaker 10: a month ago, I want to say, April twenty six.
Speaker 10: Don't quote me on that, Mac versus a District Attorney
Speaker 10: of Bristol County and of that of note, for what
Speaker 10: I've been working on and to a certain extent, the
Speaker 10: slide cop saga. They came down with two ideas. One
Speaker 10: is that the exemption that the police have been using
Speaker 10: to hide all this information about disciplinary records quote unambiguously
Speaker 10: states that the privacy exemption does not apply to investigation
Speaker 10: of law enforcement and misconduct. To require the investigation to
Speaker 10: end with the finding of a police conduct places the
Speaker 10: cart before the horse and runs counter to the goals
Speaker 10: of police account to be ability and transparency. So here's
Speaker 10: the bad news, because I was really, really really hoping
Speaker 10: that this would open up the open up the slide gates,
Speaker 10: I guess for life of a better term. But what
Speaker 10: I found interesting is I was digging in a little more.
Speaker 10: The incident report for a slide cop makes it a
Speaker 10: medical situation with the officer, which is still not subject
Speaker 10: to disclosure, which means that I don't know if they
Speaker 10: did it display on purpose or it just has to
Speaker 10: be a happy coincidence on their part, but they don't
Speaker 10: need to disclose that person's name or really the fact
Speaker 10: that anything leaked out of it at all is kind
Speaker 10: of surprising, giving that it's a health situation. Now, with
Speaker 10: that said, you know, if there are any police officers
Speaker 10: who are possibly listening to this who might have access
Speaker 10: to clearview AI and might want to, you know, drop
Speaker 10: in a video or two and see if it matches
Speaker 10: anybody in your databases. I wouldn't complain. You know, that's
Speaker 10: going to be a dead end until we can get
Speaker 10: a better picture of who is in there. The good
Speaker 10: news I'll call the good news is that we can
Speaker 10: narrow down the exec precinct that this officer works out of. Wow,
Speaker 10: we know exactly where he works out of what he
Speaker 10: does they do not make immediately public, like you know
Speaker 10: when they worked, they're hours, things like that. But with
Speaker 10: a lot more digging and a lot more research and
Speaker 10: possibly somebody who can do it, who has a who
Speaker 10: doesn't have a full time job and a mortgage, you know,
Speaker 10: you can narrow down who's in the who's in the
Speaker 10: district that area, and you know, at least get down
Speaker 10: to it. But there are tens of thousands of cops
Speaker 10: in Boston and only you know, you're down to hundreds
Speaker 10: in his precinct.
Speaker 2: If I have the precinct number, I have the name
Speaker 2: of this this guy he was with.
Speaker 10: If you can get down to these are one hundred
Speaker 10: and fifty people who are in this precinct.
Speaker 7: It's possible. It's doable with the information that we have.
Speaker 10: It's a question of the time and effort and ability
Speaker 10: of somebody who's able to take that work and do it.
Speaker 7: And we're closer than we think.
Speaker 2: I like those odds. It's it's seven thirty in the morning.
Speaker 2: I just had my first cup of coffee. I'll have
Speaker 2: two hundred more. I don't give a shit well of
Speaker 2: basic Thank you so much. So this was last Thursday morning,
Speaker 2: and I did, in fact drop everything to see if
Speaker 2: I could find this motherfucker. Jeff's careful record collection allowed
Speaker 2: me to narrow down the list of working cops to
Speaker 2: the A one precinct, about one hundred and sixty names.
Speaker 2: Then I narrowed it down by gender, and then for
Speaker 2: two days I looked into who these men were and
Speaker 2: what they did. And I have to say looking at
Speaker 2: pictures of cops for two days bad for my mental health.
Speaker 2: But I was able to narrow down the list by
Speaker 2: a lot. Although you may not be surprised to hear
Speaker 2: after this whole saga that finding pictures of certain cops
Speaker 2: can be extremely difficult, and when you're digging like this
Speaker 2: to find someone through public records, through news archives, through
Speaker 2: social media, the character of these cops comes into sharp focus,
Speaker 2: and to no one's surprise, the BBD is comprised of
Speaker 2: some of the most tremendous pieces of shit to ever
Speaker 2: take breath, but the specifics are brutal. On my journey
Speaker 2: to find mister Slide, I came across a bunch of
Speaker 2: wrong answers with terrible records. There was Zachary Crossin, the
Speaker 2: cop who signed off on the incident report after Stephen
Speaker 2: Canto reported it. He went viral back in twenty eighteen
Speaker 2: for stopping a black man on the street for no reason,
Speaker 2: and the harassment story ended up on Deesus and Marrow.
Speaker 2: I found out about James Carnell, who frequently published editorials
Speaker 2: in the Boston Herald and other periodicals and called black
Speaker 2: teenagers scumbags and intellectually bereft doults. I saw so many
Speaker 2: cops kissing their adult daughters on the mouth in their
Speaker 2: Facebook profile pictures. I found out about Kirk Merrick's, a
Speaker 2: former cop hiding military great explosives in his estranged wive's house.
Speaker 2: I learned about Carl Dugal, who's been ruled against for
Speaker 2: false imprisonment and is currently a side character in an
Speaker 2: ongoing local televised court case revolving around a woman named Karen.
Speaker 2: Reid learned about Thomas Mee, who was charged in an
Speaker 2: overtime fraud scheme. I learned about Brian Lundy, a cop
Speaker 2: who thought he was buying his son a PS four
Speaker 2: for Christmas, but when his son opened the box, it
Speaker 2: instead contained a wooden block with writing that said, from
Speaker 2: cock and balls with love. I hate Boston cops. I
Speaker 2: hate those bitches so much. Of the one hundred and
Speaker 2: sixty four names I looked into, I couldn't find reliable
Speaker 2: images for thirty four cops. Seven of them looked like
Speaker 2: they could potentially be slide cop, and two looked like
Speaker 2: they could likely be slide cop. But try to remember
Speaker 2: finding a white cop in his forties with a gray
Speaker 2: crew cut who's bad at his job is the ultimate
Speaker 2: needle in the ultimate haystack. But two likely options. That's
Speaker 2: not bad. I've got some foyas to file. Reach out.
Speaker 2: If you're good with the stuff, let's talk Boston slide Cop.
Speaker 2: Your sixteenth minute ends when I say it ends. Show yourself, Okay,
Speaker 2: So here's your moment of fun. I was home recently,
Speaker 2: and as a I did my due diligence and I
Speaker 2: got on the fucking slide. And not to be a cop,
Speaker 2: but it was very scary. Okay, this is Jamie. I
Speaker 2: am headed to the slide. It is very steep. It
Speaker 2: does seem like it could potentially kill you. There's like
Speaker 2: a blue block, an orange block, a scary little tube,
Speaker 2: and then the aluminum slide, very steep, a lot of children.
Speaker 2: It's still pretty cold. I'm gonna look like a sicko.
Speaker 2: But I've made it this far. Okay. So I did
Speaker 2: get too scared and turned off my recorder right as
Speaker 2: I was about to go down the first time. So
Speaker 2: now I can tell you with knowledge, with lived experience,
Speaker 2: that this slide, well, folks, it's pretty fast. It's not slow.
Speaker 2: And because Bostonia cannot help but be foolish in public,
Speaker 2: I did end up inspiring my fellow adults. So unfortunately
Speaker 2: I appear to I've inspired other adults to do the same.
Speaker 2: But you know, I'll tell you what. There's a kid
Speaker 2: going up there right now, and it is in fact
Speaker 2: built for them and not us. Looking at these adults
Speaker 2: getting onto the slide, it really makes you think how
Speaker 2: much we were making this about us. Sixteenth Minute is
Speaker 2: a production of fool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, posted,
Speaker 2: and produced by me Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are
Speaker 2: Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans, and our supervising producer and
Speaker 2: editor is Ian Johnson. Our theme song is by Sadie d.
Speaker 2: Queek and I would like to thank my kat's Lee
Speaker 2: and Casper Podcasting leading Queen Dog Anderson and my pet
Speaker 2: Rockbert will outlive us all. Goodbye,