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  • February 18, 2025
Key insights from the DOJ report

Key insights from the DOJ report

But local officials haven’t gone far enough, researchers say.

“Our extensive investigation has revealed that the Worcester Police Department used excessive force and allowed undercover officers to have sexual contact with women suspected of being involved in the commercial sex trade,” said the department’s Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke Department of Justice Civil Rights. This is evident from a statement released on Monday.

Brian T. Kelly, who represents the city of worcester and the Police Department, responded to the DOJ’s findings in its own statement on Monday.

Although local officials had cooperated with the investigation, DOJ released “a dishonest, inaccurate and biased report that unfairly smears the entire Worcester Police Department by alleging that there is a pattern or practice within the WPD of engaging in excessive use of force and sexual harassment of prostitutes.”

Here are some of the key takeaways from the DOJ report.

Worcester police violated women’s constitutional rights and sexually assaulted them under threat of arrest

According to the report, there is no legitimate government basis for sexual contact between police officers and people alleged to be commercial sex workers.

But Worcester police, acting as undercover officers, have allowed officers to have sexual contact with women suspected of working in prostitution, the report said.

“This sexual contact served no legitimate law enforcement purpose. Despite being aware of these issues, WPD failed to establish the policies, training, and oversight necessary to ensure that officers do not violate women’s constitutional rights, but instead allow that a problematic culture and unlawful behavior continues unchecked,” this report said.

According to the report, a woman said an officer gave her drugs in exchange for sex in his police car while he was on duty several times in 2019, including once when he responded to a call while she was still in his cruiser.

Several women involved in the commercial sex trade said they had been sexually assaulted by officers, but did not report it at the time because they thought they would not be believed. A woman said an officer pulled up in a rental car in 2019, flashed his gun, showed her a bag of drugs and threatened to arrest her on drug charges if she didn’t perform oral sex.

Another woman said an officer forced her to have sex two to three times a month in 2015, when she was 19. A third woman said an officer took her to the hospital in 2015 after she got into an argument with a man trying to traffic her, but once she got into his car he forced her to perform oral sex.

The Worcester Police Department does not have policies in place to address reports of sexual assault and does not hold officers accountable

DOJ investigators said multiple women shared stories of Worcester officers having unwanted sexual contact with them.

In 2019, community members and local advocates alerted Worcester police to alleged sexual misconduct by officers during a prostitution sting and were wrongly told by an unnamed Worcester police captain that sexually touching the women was not illegal.

During these meetings, the captain approved of the sexual touching of women during stings, saying the touching was consensual and not sexual assault because “the prostitutes have been doing it for a while” and that it is not necessarily unwanted, the report said.

The captain also denied the allegations and denigrated the women involved, the report shows. “They are not very attractive women that my boys like to have in their car, they want them out, they are dirty, they are sick, they don’t want to touch them, they are not sexually aroused,” according to the account of what happened during the meeting was said.

The Worcester Police Department is using excessive force and violating the Fourth Amendment

In its report, the DOJ said it has “reasonable grounds” to believe that the Worcester Police Department is engaged in a pattern or practice of using excessive force, including the use of Taser stuns, striking people in the head or face, and allowing police dogs to bite. people.

Officers quickly escalate situations and use excessive force during encounters for minor infractions and sometimes no crime at all, including interactions with people with behavioral health conditions or who are experiencing a mental health crisis, the report said.

Worcester police are using Tasers “unreasonably” to gain compliance from people who do not immediately comply with officers’ demands, the report said.

“WPD officers do this without first attempting to de-escalate the situation or, if necessary, use less force,” the report said.

Police dogs bitten people at least fourteen times between January 2017 and November 2022. Police “use police dogs to cause unnecessary harm that is disproportionate to the level of resistance or threat officers face,” the report said.

The harmful effects of WPD’s use of force hit Worcester’s Hispanic and Black communities the hardest, the report said. For example, nearly 80 percent of all police dog bites involved Hispanic or black people in Worcester, according to the DOJ.

Police enforcement in Worcester disproportionately affects Hispanic and Black people

DOJ investigators said police enforcement practices in Worcester raise concerns about “potentially discriminatory” policing after finding that Hispanic and Black individuals are more likely to be targeted than white people. subject of a traffic stop that ends in an arrest or written warning.

Similar disparities exist for Hispanic and black youth, who are more likely to be arrested for crimes than their white peers, the report said.

While the disparities themselves don’t necessarily prove racial discrimination, the data shows a disproportionate effect on people of color, the report said.

“WPD’s inability to track and analyze critical data prevents it from understanding what contributes to the long-standing racial disparities in its enforcement data and from working to address these disparities,” said the report, which was included in the report. police urge to improve data collection. and review its enforcement data.

The report noted that the city commissioned a racial equity audit of the Worcester Police Department, and in March 2024, the audit concluded that Black and Hispanic individuals, including youth, are overrepresented in arrests.

Shelley Murphy and Dan Glaun of the Globe staff contributed to this report.


John Hilliard can be reached at [email protected].