Racism in the Ranks
Pax Centurion, the newsletter of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, was criticized this summer for running racist and sexist comments. Tonight, a group of minority police officers claim it’s a larger issue that the city has tolerated far too long.

View the video here.

Coming up on today’s show, we have Larry Ellison from the Massachusetts Association Of Minority Law Enforcement Officers [MAMLEO] here to discuss how their attempts to draw attention to the BPPA newsletter were ignored and how Boston Mayor Tom Menino has a less than stellar record on race relations with the police.

Read more and listen here.

•••

Steve Annear at BostInno:

A local minority group that represents law enforcement officials has called out the city’s mayor for allegedly failing to act on other instances of discrimination in Boston after he took a staunch stance against a fast food chain’s anti-gay sentiments.

The Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers (MAMLEO) composed a letter to Mayor Tom Menino, following his recent comments against Chik-Fil-A for looking to set up shop in Boston.

Read more.

•••

Patrick Rosso at the Boston Globe:

Residents and activists at a recent Dorchester forum criticized what they say is the slow pace to create a police department that better represents the city’s growing diversity, and raised fresh concerns about the content of a Boston police union newsletter that has come under fire as hostile toward racial and religious minorities.

The forum Sunday at the Global Ministries church in Codman Square drew several dozen people, who were white, black and Latino. It was sponsored by the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers.

…

Sunday’s forum included Allison Nevitt, a Roslindale resident, stay-at-home mom and member of the group Clean up BPPA, which has ties to Occupy Boston; Juan Cofield, president of the NAACP New England Area Conference; James Gilden, chief counsel for MAMLEO; and Will Bradley, the director of safety and security for Randolph Public Schools and former member of BPD.

Read more.

A number of people were livetweeting the event, which has been Storified here.

Additionally, it was broadcast on Boston Praise TV and is viewable here:

Thank you to MAMLEO, NEAC, and all who made it out last night for an incredible and important discussion. As Larry Ellison concluded, “To be continued.”

The Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers is hosting an open meeting tonight, to discuss its recent open letter to Mayor Menino and the Boston Police Patrolmens Association Pax Centurion newsletter.

It starts at 8 p.m. at the Global Ministries Church, 670 Washington St. in Dorchester.

MAMLEO has also noted that they will be broadcasting the event.

We will be on Bostonpraiseradio.com and 1330 AM (WRCA) hosting a Public Forum to discuss our letter sent to Mayor Menino at 8pm tonight.

— MAMLEO Inc (@MAMLEO_MA) August 5, 2012

@axb21 will be livetweeting the event on Twitter using hashtags #MAMLEO #BPPA #mapoli and #bospoli. Follow @cleanupbppa for highlights.

Hope to see you there tonight! You can find more information on our blog or our Facebook page.

Steve Annear at BostInno wrote a story about the letter within a context of the larger Clean Up BPPA issue.

The Boston Globe wrote about the letter, providing response quotes from Menino spokesperson Dot Joyce and Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis.

Boston Metro wrote about it, and the blog African American Pundit commented on the Metro article, as well as the wider issue.

Outside of the MAMLEO letter, Clive McFarlane of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette wrote about the Pax Centurion and how it relates to Leominster Police Officer John Perreault’s recent use of a racial slur against Red Sox center fielder Carl Crawford.

Please join us! RSVP on Facebook.

What: Town Hall meeting
Why: To discuss discrimination in the City of Boston
When: Sunday, August 5, 2010, 8-10pm
Where:  Global Ministries Church 670 Washington Street, Dorchester Ctr, MA 02124

Directions:

Global Ministries Church is on Washington Street between  Brent St and Welles Ave, approximately 1/2 way between Talbot and Ashmont.

By Bus: per the MBTA site the 18, 22, 23, 26, 215 all stop nearby on Sunday evening. Use the MBTA trip planner to enter your starting address and the destination and see your bus route options.

By T: Take the Red Line to Shawmut Avenue, follow Clementine Park to Centre St. Take a right onto Centre. Follow Centre until it ends (approx 1/3 mile) at Talbot Ave. Turn right on Talbot. Take the next left onto Washington. The church will be on your left after Brent St. (the walk is approximately 12 mins.)

Driving: click on “directions” above the “A” marker in the Google Map above. Once there enter your starting address and click “get directions”.

]]> http://cleanupbppa.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/mamleo-to-host-town-hall-on-discrimination-in-boston/feed/ 2 bppacleanup http://cleanupbppa.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/an-open-letter-from-mamleo-to-boston-mayor-menino/ http://cleanupbppa.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/an-open-letter-from-mamleo-to-boston-mayor-menino/#comments Sat, 28 Jul 2012 18:14:37 +0000 cleanupbppa http://cleanupbppa.wordpress.com/?p=578 Continue reading →]]> We have received a copy of a letter sent from the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers to Mayor Menino, in response to Menino’s public statements regarding intolerance for discrimination in the City of Boston. The letter also includes a few words about the Pax Centurion.

Below we have reproduced the text, formatted for this blog, but the original PDF is available, as well.

AN OPEN LETTER TO MAYOR THOMAS M. MENINO

Dear Mayor Menino,

In an article in the Boston Herald dated July 20, 2012, you are quoted as saying, “You can’t have a business in the city of Boston that discriminates against a population. We’re an open city, we’re a city that’s in the forefront of inclusion”. We agree that any kind of discrimination should be unwelcomed in the City of Boston.

We, the undersigned, would like to commend you for the strong statements that you made regarding “Chick-Fil-A” because you felt that its practices were discriminatory.

Although we applaud the ideals you espouse, the facts don’t comply with the rhetoric. If you feel so strongly that discrimination is wrong, you should look to all of the discriminatory practices that you have allowed to exist in the City during your reign. Let us point out a few facts:

The City of Boston has a population that is more than 50% people of color (black, Latino and Asian) but, during your long term in office, the agencies under your control don’t even come close to reflecting the ethnic population of the City. Your record of appointing managers and middle managers in the city is even worse.

During your long reign as Mayor, there has been much construction going on in Boston but you have failed to strongly enforce the City Ordinance that requires that women and people of color are proportionally represented in the workforce and that a percentage of city contracts are to be awarded to companies owned by people of color.

During your long reign as Mayor, you have allowed developers to purchase City owned properties and build houses, apartments, condominiums and office buildings. Rather than requiring that housing be built for low and moderate income families, which would help to preserve neighborhoods, you allowed the construction of so called “affordable housing” where only a minimal number of units were actually affordable while the majority of the units were priced so high that most city residents could not afford to rent or purchase, forcing city residents to move out of the city and allowing whole neighborhoods to be displaced. The office buildings that were built were so costly that many of the small business were unable to afford the rent and were forced to move out of the city or close.

During your long reign as Mayor, you have caused to be built a number of City buildings and buildings that will be built to house City agencies in the Roxbury, Dorchester or Mattapan districts. (Police Headquarters, Police Stations, School Committee Building, etc.) This construction is being done by non-minority run companies and the occupants of these buildings are just being moved from other existing city offices. These new buildings and offices will result in little or no net gain of employment for the community. While this is happening, you blocked Wal-Mart from building in Roxbury with the excuse that Wal-Mart would harm neighborhood businesses, which had validity, while ignoring the fact that the elders and youth in the community were in desperate need of any kind of employment.

During your long reign as Mayor, you allowed the former Superintendent of Schools to eliminate Black History from being taught in the Boston Public Schools. Over 85% of the Boston school population is made up of students of color and yet, all students are denied the opportunity to learn of the contributions that people of color have made to the City and the country.

During your long reign as Mayor, you appointed a Police Commissioner despite his reputation of poor racial relations while Police Chief in Lowell. His behavior was such that he had to be sued by minority officers in the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination in order to get fair treatment. Why is it that all police districts are under command of white males and those members of the command staff of color are without any actual command authority? Why is it that while violence in the community of color is rampant, you refuse to even meet with the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers, an organization representing police officers that live in the community and are intimately aware of the problem? Why is it that you have never appointed, or allowed to be appointed , officers of color to occupy the 2 top spots in the police department (Commissioner, Superintendent In Chief) while other law enforcement agencies have chosen Boston officers for leadership positions : Randolph Schools, Transit Police, Harvard University Police, Environmental Police, City of Newark Police, to name a few?

During your long reign as Mayor you allowed the Pax Centurion, the newspaper of the Boston Police Patrolman’s Association, through its Boston Police officer editor, to spew racial, homophobic and culturally hateful remarks without any comment, which editor is supported by the leadership of the Union. At the same time, the mayor of Leominster, based on charges by the Chief of Police, terminated a police officer who made a few racially offensive comments.

Mayor Menino, if you truly believe that discrimination has no place in the City of Boston and that Boston is an open city, we call upon you, while you are Mayor, to take steps to make your claim a reality: Improve your communication between groups in the community that express divergent ideas from yours.

Promote housing construction that doesn’t price out neighborhoods, Clean your house; reach out to the multitude of highly qualified people of color to fill positions of authority in your administration, use your prestige and the power of your office to insure that Boston Schools meet the needs of the community, take steps necessary to insure that the Boston Police Department is actually representative of the community it protects and insure that jobs are brought into the City in numbers that truly represents the diverse population in the City.

SIGNED:

Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers, Inc.(MAMLEO)
Larry Ellison, President

Massachusetts Association of Nubian Retirees, Inc.
John Wells, President

N.A.A.C.P., Northeast Region
Juan M. Cofield, President.

Minister Don Mohammed

The [Blackstonian] newspaper
Jamahl Crawford, Publisher/Editor

Massachusetts Association of Minority State Police Officers
Carmello Ayuso, President

Rev. Bruce Wall

Episode 138 of the Matthew Filipowicz Show is now available to stream and download.

Coming up on today’s show, we have artists Anne Elizabeth Moore and Nicole Boyett from Ladydrawers here to discuss the shocking amount of sexism and gender discrimination in the comics industry.

We also have journalist Steve Horn here to discuss hisTruth Out series on the other ALECs that are corrupting our democracy.

We’ll also discuss the latest updates in the BPPA’s racist, sexist and homophobic newsletter scandal.

Read more and listen here.

•••

So, I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the scandal here in Boston regarding the Pax Centurion. The Pax is the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association’s newsletter.

It has also recently been exposed as being full of racist,sexist and homophobic content.

What’s especially frightening is that when confronted with this hateful garbage, the BPPA hasn’t apologized, or even faux-pologized. You know, a fake apology like “I’m sorry if anyone happened to be offended.”

Read more and watch the video at the Huffington Post.

Our sponsorship of the Boston Police Patrolman’s Association provides financial assistance to the BPPA’s Scholarship Fund – which supports the children and families of police officers and emergency medical responders in the city.

Heath Properties and its’ affiliates have no control over the editorial content of the BPPA Newsletter and were not made aware of the offensive content until after the publication was released. After careful consideration we have decided to refrain from printing our best wishes to the families of the BPPA Scholarship Fund but we will continue to support the fund in the form of a direct donation.

We thank you for bringing the issues to our attention and look forward to finding additional avenues where we can continue to support the City of Boston, its’ children, residents and workforce.

Simmons College featured on Channel 7 WHDH-TV NBC evening news and WHDH.com June 29, after being the first advertiser to pull an ad from the Police Patrolmen’s Association newsletter due to sexist and racist content. Simmons was also featured on Bizjournals.com, UnverisalHub.com, Metro.us/Boston, Bostonoccupier.com, ThePhoenix.com, Digboston.com and in a Dollarsandsense.org blog post.

Later, The Phoenix published a letter it had received from James Carnell. They also wrote a blog post about the topic and included the email in its original state. (See our response to this letter here.)

Finally, the Universal Hub also noted the letter, and commented,

OK, it’s a letter from Pax Centurion editor James Carnell, who can’t understand why people would object to the content in the newsletter he edits, except that they must be tofu-eating “cyber terrorists” and “thugs” and that people who object to “jokes” about Egyptian men having sex with the corpses of their dead wives are no better than the people who accused women of being witches in colonial Salem. Really, you need to read the whole thing.

Carnell also calls the people behind the Phoenix “the penultimate hypocrites,” which, of course, makes you wonder who the ultimate hypocrites are.