Police-involved shootings require more transparency, not less

On a November evening in 2021, Anthony Harden, a 30-year-old Black man, was shot to death in his bedroom by one of two Fall River police officers called in to investigate a domestic dispute that had occurred two days earlier. Those are among the few facts not in dispute. A month later Bristol County District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn III issued a report concluding that, “The fatal shooting of Mr. Harden by a Fall River police officer was justified and was the result of Mr. Harden’s violent and armed assault on the male police officer. There is no basis to conclude that either Fall River police officer committed a crime.”

Harden’s brother Eric B. Mack, an attorney, isn’t so sure about that and has been fighting for the past two years to get photographs, videos, and other evidence collected by State Police attached to Quinn’s office during the course of their investigation. Even the names of the two officers, including the female officer identified as the shooter, were redacted in Quinn’s final report — although they are identified by name in Mack’s court filing.

A superior court judge has already ruled that nearly all of the materials Mack is looking for are matters of public information to which he is entitled.

Quinn, however, is not only fighting to keep those records from the public but has now invoked the state’s landmark 2020 Police Reform Act to help do so. His interpretation of the very law legislators passed to bring transparency to allegations of police misconduct would instead allow it to be used as a shield by every police department in the Commonwealth to protect their own investigations of potential wrongdoing from public scrutiny.

The state’s Supreme Judicial Court, which heard the case Wednesday, is being asked to decide, in part, whether in fact lawmakers meant what they said when they passed a law aimed at achieving “justice, equity, and accountability in law enforcement in the Commonwealth.”

The Harden case itself is a thicket of contradictions. The police-fired shots were recorded two minutes after the officers arrived on the scene. Quinn’s report insists Harden attempted to stab Officer Michael Sullivan with a steak knife as he pinned the officer against the wall. Sullivan’s partner, Officer Chelsea Campellone, fired two shots after seeing a “metallic and pointed” object. She was not equipped with a taser; her partner was.

Quinn’s report said a stainless-steel knife was found underneath Harden when he was lifted onto a gurney by EMTs. Other paramedics said they did not see any weapon under Harden, according to the brief filed on behalf of Mack. One crime scene photo shows a knife on a table behind a TV amid other debris.

The Harden case will likely be sorted out by a civil lawsuit the family has given notice it intends to file against the City of Fall River and its police department. It’s not the only such suit Fall River police face. Also pending is a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Larry Ruiz-Barreto who was shot and killed in 2017 by Officer Nicholas Hoar who was attempting to break up a drag race in an industrial park. Hoar was cleared of wrongdoing by Quinn’s office in that case but now faces federal charges for lying in another case involving the 2020 beating of a suspect with his baton. Last year, another officer, Michael Pessoa, was fired after being indicted for allegedly assaulting four different suspects and falsifying police reports.

Fall River’s obvious policing problems are exactly the kind of situation the Police Reform Act, passed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, was designed to address with its creation of the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission. But Quinn turned the new agency’s purpose on its head when he argued that the POST Commission has the “exclusive” authority over the release of officers’ names — a charge so legally ludicrous that even the POST Commission’s general counsel felt compelled to file an “amicus letter” to the court.

“The Legislature clearly did not intend to create a new exemption that would excuse all agencies other than the Commission from disclosing the names of investigated officers,” the letter states. It notes that the act “promotes disclosure in specific ways” including by “carving out an exception for ‘records related to law enforcement misconduct,’” from public records privacy exemptions.

“It is too hard to accept that the Legislature that developed such a balanced and precise set of disclosure provisions also intended to make a substantial quantity of information unavailable, based solely on which agency possesses it.”

Superior Court Judge James Budreau had it right when he ruled in the Harden case earlier this year that, “The failure to disclose this information would raise questions amongst the public about why this information was being withheld, which would only serve to undermine the integrity of the law enforcement departments and those reviewing their conduct.”

The law aims to open up the process for weeding out police misconduct by promoting public disclosure — not foreclosing it. It created the POST Commission as a fail-safe mechanism to assure that officers found guilty of egregious conduct were, in fact, decertified for good — never to return to policing.

Quinn’s interpretation is a perversion of that notion — and contrary to everything police reform was supposed to be about.

Fall River’s obvious policing problems are exactly the kind of situation the Police Reform Act, passed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, was designed to address.