Fixing the Boston police department’s secretive internal affairs system

Howard is quoted in this article: She hasn’t even started work yet, but Stephanie Everett already has one of the toughest jobs at Boston City Hall. As the new executive director of the city’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, Stephanie Everett must try to fix Boston police department’s secretive internal affairs system.

The police union is likely to resist any oversight by the City of Boston. The union protects its members without regard for the public interest. We now know that former Boston police union leader Patrick Rose was investigated for sexually abusing a child in 1995, was allowed to keep his job and continue interacting with children as a patrolman, and now faces 33 counts of child abuse. As Howard says, “It seems to me hard at this point for the union to say, as their president did recently, that there are problems in other departments but not ours.”