Walsh: ‘Foolish, foolish video’ hurtful
Mayor Martin J. Walsh expressed deep disappointment yesterday over a “foolish, foolish” racially insensitive video now under investigation by the Boston Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, but said he’s not prepared to pre-judge the police officer who is depicted in it.
Walsh said he has not seen the video in its entirety. And it was still unclear to him yesterday whether the video was made by or with the knowledge of anyone in the department.
“It’s under investigation. ... I don’t want to be the prosecutor here,” Walsh said.
The mayor confirmed no one had been disciplined as of yesterday.
“It’s an active internal investigation, but we’re going to be quick on it,” Walsh said. “There’s a little bit of trying to find out what’s going on here. We have to take swift action to find out what happened there and then take the appropriate disciplinary action, whatever that will be. We’ll figure out Monday or Tuesday exactly what happened there, but we still have some work to do on that.”
The crudely shot clip, as reported by the Herald on Saturday, describes a cop partnered with a “dog with a limp ... in the fight between good and evil.” It also names the officer and shows him in uniform.
The video concludes with the screen text, “Black people have met their match.”
Walsh called the video “a serious matter. You are a police officer both when you’re on duty and when you’re off duty. You take that oath of office and you have to act responsibly and respectfully. We can’t tolerate anything other than that.
“People look up to our police officers as role models,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of work over the last several years to build that trust and community relations, and we’re not going to let any video take that apart.
“You do so much around racial sensitivity and diversity and working on these issues every day and working on community-police relations every single day, and then to have a foolish, foolish video like this ... that can be hurtful, quite honestly, to a lot of people,” he said. “It’s unacceptable. I’m not going to have somebody videotape something and rip down all the work we’ve done for the last three years.”