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