Worcester City Manager’s Homeless Strategy: Lock ‘Em Up

Get ready for rampant arrests of homeless people.

City Manager Eric Batista revealed his new strategy (although it is not new and I will address that) with an ordinance that includes a general anti-camping ordinance. Like Gavin Newsome before him, Batista often waxes poetic about trying to help people who are in dire circumstances.

He has given awards and plaudits to the city employees who have been on duty as the homeless population in Worcester surged (just like the rest of the nation). He seems concerned.

Yet, this Tuesday’s proposed ordinance is a direct result of the 2024 Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson. This decision made is easier for cities to criminalize homelessness. At the core of this decision was the ordinance in Grants Pass, Oregon that made it illegal for anyone to camp on public property. This is not a new form of municipal government.

Most studies have shown that this policy has failed in every city it has been tried in . In, ‘Anti-Camping Ordinances, State Preemption, and the Arrest of People Experiencing Homelessness: Evidence from Orange County, Florida’ authors Andrew Sullivan and Jennifer Royce lay out a detailed study showing that anti-camping ordinances have one universal result: arrests of homeless people rise dramatically.

In California, which was a party in the Grants Pass case, arrests surged across the state, as municipalities encouraged by Newsom started enforcing laws like the one our City Manager is suggesting to the City Council. These arrests were not scattered in conservative bastions, they ripple out across all types of political situations. San Francisco saw an increase of 500% in arrests. The news media is covered in quotes like this one:

The people making the case for enforcement argue it’s a type of “tough love” that’s sometimes necessary to get people off the street. If someone refuses multiple offers of help, the threat of arrest might make them finally say yes, said San Diego Police Department Capt. Steve Shebloski.

“I hope nobody has to go to jail, and I hope everybody takes services,” he said. “I just dont think that’s the reality of where we’re at with certain individuals.”

Compare this with the paragraph at the bottom of City Manager Batista’s letter to the council supporting the new policy:

“Makeshift encampments in public outdoor spaces pose serious health risks to the unsheltered individuals living there and create public fire risk and environmental degradation. We must act, but at the same time, I want to be clear that being unhoused is not a crime and will not be treated as such. Rather, in the full context of ‘Disrupting the Cycle’ the order will provide an enforcement system with the necessary teeth to make outreach, connection to services, and voluntary compliance more attainable.”

Gotta love that ‘voluntary compliance.’ At least the cop above had the guts to say he knows a bunch of people are going to go to jail because of this. You may have read This Week in Worcester’s article on September 1st where I pointed out that city leaders were not including people with lived experience in this conversation. Present at that meeting were Police Chief Paul Saucier, District Attorney Joe Early, and Sheriff Lew Evangelidis.

If you were planning a new ordinance that would help people get services and not get arrested, why would you have the leader who arrests people, the leader who prosecutes them, and the leader who incarcerates them all at the same table? Could it be that Eric Batista, as he is now known for, just thinks we are all idiots who can’t see through his plans?

To be honest, it makes sense that he would plan for a surge in arrests and that he would include those three men. All three have publicly talked about a new police station and a new jail for years. They think, like most law enforcement people, that the way to convince the public about new law enforcement apparatus is to ‘show’ how much work they are doing. To lock ’em up! The current data (lowest crime in years) doesn’t reflect the need to ‘clean up’ downtown or get those new digs. So, here comes yet another anti-homeless measure couched as a ‘caring’ approach.

This policy has failed everywhere in America it has been applied. Unless, of course, the goal is to make the people go out of sight. In that case, Batista is leading the way.

Nothing to see here. No one to notice. Just lock ’em up.

This City Council will pass this ordinance 8-3 (at least). Not one of the 8 will ask about the fact that this does not work. While it is nice that the City Manager admitted that the policy has not worked for the last 15 years, he leaves out the most important factor: lack of affordable housing. You can’t ‘house first’ without real housing.

In the end, talking at the podium doesn’t work. I will make my dutiful trip to City Hall and say these words, and no one will listen. The only thing that I know works is a non-governmental community approach. Leave them out of it, because they just want the money that comes with arresting the most vulnerable. Believe them when they tell you who they are.

Now, before the cabal comes for me, let me direct and clear: I am not against a new police station or a new county jail. The police station is decrepit, ugly, horribly maintained, poorly designed, poorly located, and majorly unsafe. It needs to be replaced, and so should the other 9 fire stations yet to undergo the process that South Division is now undergoing.

The county jail is an absolute disgrace. It is dangerous for the guards, the nurses, the staff, the volunteers, the families, and of course the inmates. The fact that the state has consistently denied funding because they don’t like Sheriff Lew Evangelidis is a joke, and that joke falls on our local delegation. This is not a new issue.

But the willingness to ride the money needed on the backs of the vulnerable is a bridge too far! Batista’s plan to arrest people and stack legal trouble on them is not only untenable, it is the single worst choice of all the choices he has. It is my opinion that he hates the homeless population, just like the angry hordes of townies. Sure, he will throw a winter coat onto a pile to give away, but to truly invest in the housing first approach involves courage. Courage that he, nor the mayor, have. The cabal wants development, and the homeless are the easiest scapegoat. Who is going to stand up for them?

Well, I will. With facts. This policy approach is riddled with lies, but for the sake of the argument lets look a few cities that have managed to have success.

The Transformational Model

Several U.S. cities have shown that moving people into permanent housing does in fact work. Worcester has failed in this model because it does not in fact possess the housing stock needed, nor is it inclined to convert existing unoccupied spaces at the speed and cost needed to make major impacts in this area.

Two cities stand out: Houston and Denver.

Houston has reduced its homeless population by 63% over the last decade. Several other Texas cities have had similar drops. Notably, they have not employed an ‘enforcement’ model like the one described by Batista above. They utilize a model called The Way Home, a coordination among hundreds of agencies. They have housed 32,000 people since 2012 with a 90% success rate. That rate means that the person does not return to homelessness within 2 years. Almost all models agree that 24 months of being stable leads to long-term stability for the vast majority of all people the system encounters. One of the major accomplishments of this system includes eliminating almost all veteran homelessness, something that Worcester continues to struggle with.

Denver has reduced its homeless population by 45% moving almost 800 people into permanent supportive housing. Denver’s population is close to four times the size of Worcester with 740,613. Interestingly, Denver’s budget is only about 1.6 times Worcester’s at 1.68 billion. With a much larger area and population, Denver is able to manage resources well enough to reduce homelessness.

Both of these models focus on using existing housing stock that is underutilized and moving people into those units. Worcester lacks those programs, and in the case of the 50 Oriol Drive project, it has been met with public resistance and a lack of developers with serious capital.

Several other cities like Chattanooga, TN, Bakersfield, CA, Philadelphia, PA, and the State of New Jersey have had serious success in reducing veteran homelessness. These programs all involve including permanent housing and resisting the carrot and stick approach that enforcement models use.

What City Manager Batista avoids in his letter is that the homeless community in Worcester is afraid of the Worcester Police Department and the Quality of Life team. They have visceral fear of city services, and it has created the unfortunately named ‘whack-a-mole’ phenomenon. People are forcibly moved, and their property destroyed and confiscated. They move further into invisibility and further away from the services.

One would hope that there would be a majority of city councilors who would do the bare minimum and read the research available. I know at least one councilor loves Google. The enforcement model is a failure on arrival, and frankly it is just more of the same. The police are being put in a bad position here. As much as I believe in a strong accountability model, this is a poor move by the manager. If I were a police officer, I would resist this terrible, horrible, and very bad policy.

I won’t hold my breath on that hope.

Ex-Northborough Man Pleads Guilty to Steroid Trafficking

WORCESTER — A Las Vegas man formerly of Northborough pleaded guilty in federal court on Thurrsday, Sept. 10, to running a scheme to distribute anabolic steroids and methamphetamine and to illegally possessing firearms, federal prosecutors said.

Mark Taslakian, 52, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to possess with intent to distribute and to distribute schedule III anabolic steroids, one count of possession with intent to distribute 50 grams or more of methamphetamine and anabolic steroids, and one count of being a felon in possession of seven firearms.

U.S. District Judge Margaret R. Guzman set sentencing for Jan. 11, 2027.

According to prosecutors, Taslakian and others ordered multi-kilogram quantities of raw steroid powder from China and synthesized it into injectable and oral products, which Taslakian marketed under a brand name he created, “Nex-Gen Pharma.” A search of his former Northborough residence turned up more than $500,000 in cash, a gold bar, jewelry, large quantities of anabolic steroids and methamphetamine, packaging materials, ledgers, and seven firearms stored in a basement safe.

The charge of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute, and to distribute Schedule III anabolic steroids provides for a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, at least two years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $500,000. The charge of possession with intent to distribute 50 grams or more of methamphetamine and anabolic steroids provides for a sentence of no less than five years up to 40 years in prison, at least four years of supervised release and a fine of up to $5million. The charge of felon in possession of a firearm provides a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine.

Coalition Demands Independent Review of Toomey Crash Response

WORCESTER — A local advocacy coalition is calling for an independent investigation into police handling of a Sept. 2 crash involving City Councilor-at-Large Kathleen Toomey, along with her removal from the council’s Public Safety Committee, arguing the department’s internal review cannot be trusted to police itself.

The Worcester Civilian Review Board Coalition, which has pushed for civilian oversight of the police department, says in a statement that officers’ response to the crash violated internal protocols and a state conflict-of-interest law barring elected officials from invoking their position to seek preferential treatment during a traffic stop. The group is asking the city manager and mayor for a full written timeline of the crash response, unredacted body-camera footage, and documentation of what sobriety testing officers considered.

Toomey struck an unoccupied car parked on Harrington Way around midnight Sept. 2, with her vehicle coming to a stop in front of the car she hit, according to police reports cited by the Telegram & Gazette. Both cars were towed from the scene, and police said there were no injuries.

Police said an internal investigation began the same day as the crash “to ensure that no preferential treatment was provided and that all departmental policies were followed,” a police spokesperson told the Telegram. The department did not publicly confirm the crash until Sept. 11, after a Telegram reporter inquired that morning, and body-camera footage was not provided to the paper until that evening.

Body-camera footage from four responding officers, each about 16 minutes long, shows Toomey remaining in her car for the duration of the footage provided, as the crash’s other driver and bystanders gathered nearby.

Asked by an officer what was going on, Toomey said, “I had an issue. Thank you, sir.” A different officer asked where she was coming from; she said a restaurant. Asked whether she had sideswiped the parked car, she said, “I was driving down the street and that’s all I remember. Thank you.” Toomey then spent several minutes searching for her driver’s license, at one point handing an officer a different card, which he declined, telling her it needed to be her license. An officer had her spell her name for his notepad before she eventually located the license. She does not identify herself as a city councilor at any point in the footage.

Police did not say what caused the crash but said impairment was not suspected.

In separate clips, Toomey is heard asking, “Can you call the chief?” — a request no officer is shown responding to — and saying she was trying to reach Worcester police Sgt. Anthony Petrone. Officers asked her to arrange a ride home from the scene.

The recordings were muted at points, including while officers spoke among themselves, and continued as police directed traffic around her car until a tow truck arrived, where the footage provided to the paper ends; it does not show Toomey leaving the scene.

Toomey’s attorney, Michael Wilcox, told the Telegram that the car she struck had been illegally parked on the sidewalk. Asked what caused the crash, he said Toomey may have had “an issue” while driving but declined to elaborate, citing an ongoing insurance claim. He said his client had been cooperative with police and was thankful no one was hurt. “There is nothing to this story but a woman driving home alone late at night,” Wilcox said. “There is nothing nefarious about the situation, it was simply an accident.”

The coalition also drew a comparison to a July crash involving a UMass Chan Medical School campus police lieutenant, which it says involved a supervisor overriding a standard arrest protocol; that incident has not been independently verified for this article.

Toomey has chaired the Public Safety Committee, which oversees matters involving the police department, since 2016. The coalition’s demand follows a Sept. 9 City Council vote rejecting the creation of a civilian police oversight board. Toomey, who opposed the measure, said at the time that Worcester should pursue an oversight system that is “independent, transparent, timely and grounded in professional expertise while preserving due process for our officers and protecting the public,” rather than a new review board.

Worcester to Add 22 EV Charging Ports at Five City Sites

WORCESTER — The City of Worcester announced on Monday, Sept. 14, that it will add 22 electric vehicle charging ports at five municipal sites by the end of the year, a roughly 75% increase over its current network of 30 public ports.

The new Level 2 chargers will go in at:

• 69 Sever St., four ports;
• Russell Street near Elm Park, four ports;
• Providence Street near Vernon Park, four ports;
• 98 Woodland St. at Oberlin Street, four ports; and
• Great Brook Valley Park, six ports.

Once complete, Worcester’s public charging network will total 52 ports. The city said the work is funded mainly through state grants, with limited use of municipal funds; Worcester has previously drawn on Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and Department of Environmental Protection programs for similar charging projects. Each site will carry a charging fee and an overstay fee, both to be posted on-site.

Construction begins the week of Sept. 14 and is expected to wrap by the end of December. Four of the five sites require work in the public right-of-way, meaning parking, sidewalks and traffic will be temporarily restricted near each site. The city will post no-parking notices posted 24 hours ahead and pedestrian detour signage the day of construction.

The most disruptive phase at each site is expected to last one to two days. The Great Brook Valley Park site sits within a parking lot and won’t affect the public.

“Expanding EV charging access is a major goal of our Green Worcester Plan. Transportation accounts for nearly a third of Worcester’s community-wide greenhouse gas emissions, so this work is one of the most direct ways we can address climate change while making the city more livable,” said Chief Sustainability Officer John Odell. “These new stations will make it easier for residents, especially those without a driveway or garage, to choose an electric vehicle.”

New stations will be listed on the PlugShare app and the federal Alternative Fuels Data Center’s charging locator once operational.

Worcester Weighs Camping Ban as Part of Homelessness Plan

WORCESTER — City Manager Eric Batista has asked the City Council to adopt a strategic framework called “Disrupting the Cycle” for addressing homelessness in Worcester, along with a new ordinance banning unauthorized camping on public property, according to documents submitted to the council this week.

The city council will take up the camping ordinance at its meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 15.

The framework, developed by the city’s Department of Health and Human Services under Commissioner Seema Dixit, rests on three components.

• a citywide camping ordinance;
• expanded shelter capacity; and
• stronger data-sharing and coordination among the roughly nine municipal departments and outside agencies involved in homelessness response.

Batista wrote that after a decade of pursuing a Housing First model and expanding seasonal shelters, “government has ultimately failed” to solve the problem, though he credited those efforts with helping many individuals.

Worcester County’s homeless population reached a record 3,110 people in the count conducted in January 2025, according to the Central Massachusetts Housing Alliance, before falling to 1,187 in this year’s count — a decrease of about 62%. Batista’s letter to the council cited a different, lower 2025 figure of 2,862 and described the decline as 56%; the city’s own attached report elsewhere cites the 3,110 figure, consistent with the housing alliance’s published count.

The proposed ordinance would bar camping, sitting, sleeping, or storing personal belongings on public property, streets, sidewalks and other public rights-of-way. It would also prohibit living in a parked vehicle on a public way for more than 24 consecutive hours.

The city would be required to conduct outreach and offer shelter or services before clearing a campsite, then post a notice at least 72 hours before removing tents, belongings or other camp materials, except in emergencies. Violators who don’t comply with a notice to vacate would face a $25 fine per day.

Enforcement would be led by the health and human services department, with police, fire, public works, and parks and inspectional services also authorized to act.

Batista’s administration pointed to a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, as the legal basis for the ordinance. That ruling overturned the Ninth Circuit’s 2018 decision in Martin v. Boise, which had held that enforcing camping bans against people with no access to shelter violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The Grants Pass decision cleared the way for cities nationwide to enforce public-camping restrictions regardless of shelter availability.

Dixit’s memo states the ordinance is “not intended to criminalize” homelessness and instead aims to prioritize voluntary compliance and service connections.

Worcester currently has 197 permanent shelter beds year-round, according to the city’s report, supplemented by temporary winter shelters that added 136 beds last winter. The framework calls for expanding shelter capacity, building a real-time bed-availability dashboard, and creating a “coordinated entry” system to standardize how people are referred to services.

Independent research on the effects of clearing encampments elsewhere has found mixed to negative health outcomes for displaced individuals. A 2023 study published in JAMA modeled the effects of encampment sweeps on people who inject drugs in Massachusetts and found that sweeps resulted in more deaths and fewer people retained in treatment than leaving encampments in place.

A separate study of Massachusetts drug users published in the Journal of Urban Health found that people who had been relocated after a sweep were more likely to report worse mental health symptoms and difficulty accessing health and social services afterward.

Other researchers, including at the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, have linked encampment displacement to increased hospitalizations and overdose risk, while some city officials have disputed those findings as based on limited data.

AGs Drop Suit After HUD Concedes on Fair Housing Funding

BOSTON — A coalition of 16 state attorneys general, including Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, has agreed to dismiss a lawsuit against the Trump administration after federal housing officials agreed to drop contested funding conditions, Campbell’s office announced.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development confirmed it will no longer seek to impose or enforce the conditions, which applied to Fair Housing Assistance Program funding for state and local agencies that enforce fair housing laws. HUD also said the conditions will not apply to fiscal year 2026 funding and will not appear in future guidance, prompting the coalition to drop the case.

The coalition sued in March, arguing HUD’s fiscal year 2025 funding guidance for the program could limit state and local agencies’ ability to enforce fair housing protections, including by restricting reimbursement for certain complaints and threatening agencies whose protections extend beyond federal law.

“Stable housing is an essential need for any family, and this victory ensures that the Trump Administration cannot withhold or place unlawful conditions on funding that helps us protect our residents from housing discrimination,” said AG Campbell. “Federal funding should never be used as leverage to undermine our civil rights protections, and I will continue to stand up for residents and preserve the integrity of our fair housing enforcement system.”

Attorneys general from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and the District of Columbia joined Massachusetts in the lawsuit.

U.S. Sen. Warnock to Keynote UCC Conference in Worcester

WORCESTER — U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., will deliver the keynote address at the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ’s annual meeting Sept. 26 at the DCU Center, conference organizers announced.

Doors open at 3:30 p.m. for the 4 p.m. keynote, which will also be available via livestream. Tickets for the general public cost $35 and include either in-person admission or the livestream link, available at sneucc.org/warnock-tickets. Warnock will preach at a separate worship service the next morning at 10 a.m., which is free but requires advance registration due to limited space.

Warnock, senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, became Georgia’s first Black senator after winning a January 2021 special election and was reelected to a full term in 2022. He grew up in public housing in Savannah as the 11th of 12 children and has served on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, where he helped shape provisions in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act addressing housing supply and affordability.

Rev. Darrell L. Goodwin, the conference’s executive minister, said the moment calls for reflecting on shared responsibility and the future communities are working to build together.

The Southern New England Conference includes 556 churches and more than 100,000 members across Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Image Courtesy of the office of Sen. Warnock

Worcester Arts Council Opens FY27 Grant Application

WORCESTER — The Worcester Arts Council opened applications Wednesday, September 9, for its fiscal year 2027 grant cycle, offering more than $250,000 to local artists and cultural organizations ahead of an Oct. 15 deadline.

Applications must be submitted online by 11:59 p.m. that day, and late submissions will not be accepted, the city said. Grant guidelines and application instructions are posted at the city’s Arts & Culture Grants webpage. The council plans to review applications from November through December, with funding decisions announced by late January 2027. A virtual grant workshop for prospective applicants, aimed especially at first-time applicants, will be held over Zoom; details are being shared through the council’s Instagram account.

Based on feedback from the council’s annual funding priorities survey, the city said this year’s review will favor applications tied to arts education, public art and musical performances for all ages; projects that elevate historically marginalized groups through a diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility lens; and projects benefiting historically underserved parts of the city.

The council offers two grant types. Project Grants support arts, humanities, and interpretive-science programs that benefit Worcester residents, and require applicants to hold a residential, commercial, or studio address in Worcester County, with funded projects taking place in Worcester. Fellowship Grants support individual artists developing work outside a specific project, and require applicants to be based in Worcester.

“Supporting artists is essential to a vibrant and life-giving culture,” Worcester Arts Council Chair Chris Michelotti said in a statement, adding that the grants are among several resources the council offers Worcester’s arts community.

“When we fund the arts, we invest in the people and ideas that give our city its character, tell our stories, and bring our communities together,” said Cultural Development Officer Fabian Barracks. “Sustained investment in creativity is essential to ensuring Worcester continues to grow as a vibrant arts city where bold ideas can take root and thrive.”

The council’s most recent cycle awarded 54 grants totaling roughly $250,000 to Worcester artists and organizations, following a review of 163 applications.

The council operates as one of 329 Local Cultural Councils that the Massachusetts Cultural Council funds across every city and town in the state, together forming what the state agency describes as the largest grassroots cultural funding network in the country. This year, the state is providing Worcester’s council with $244,500, up from $236,500 the previous two years. The Greater Worcester Community Foundation is contributing another $15,000 toward fellowship grants, an increase from the $10,000 it has given in recent years.

City View Discovery School Awarded $2.73 Million for Heating System

WORCESTER — The city announced Wednesday that City View Discovery School has been awarded a $2.73 million state grant to overhaul its heating system, the largest energy-efficiency grant Worcester has received for a single school building.

The award comes through the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s Green School Works program, which distributed $19 million in May across nine school districts statewide to modernize aging school infrastructure. The program is funded by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Worcester’s grant, awarded jointly to Worcester Public Schools and the city’s Department of Sustainability and Resilience, will fund a phased project replacing City View’s original 1991 heating system with an electric air-water heat pump system, along with insulation and airflow upgrades. Existing gas boilers will stay in place as backup during extreme cold. The project is expected to wrap up by the end of 2027.

“This project will make a real difference for the students, teachers, and staff at City View Discovery School — giving them a healthier, more comfortable place to learn and work every day,” said City Manager Eric D. Batista. “This is the first project of its kind for Worcester and serves as an example of how we can modernize our schools with the right support.”

“We are grateful for the substantial and continuous support of our local and state partners to provide this energy efficiency upgrade at City View Discovery School,” said Brian E. Allen, Superintendent of Worcester Public Schools. “This project helps meet our district’s strategic plan priority of modernized and safe facilities to benefit our students and staff.”

The city said the pre-K through sixth-grade school serves an environmental justice community with an asthma rate among students above the state average, a figure that could not be independently verified. City officials said the heating and air-quality upgrades are expected to reduce classroom disruptions and improve conditions for community programming held in the building after school hours.

The Police Reform Plan Worcester Government Refuses to Produce

On Tuesday, Sept. 8, the Worcester City Council will vote to accept the recommendation of City Manager Eric Batista’s administration and decline to establish a civilian review board (CRB) as an independent oversight mechanism for misconduct at the Worcester Police Deparment.

The vote to accept the administration’s recommendation will probably fail by a significant margin. Based on previous public statements, At-Large Councilor Khrystian King and District Councilors Robert Bilotta, and Louis Ojeda are expected to vote in favor of a CRB.

Mayor Joe Petty and At-Large Councilors Morris Bergman, Satya Mitra, Gary Rosen, and Kate Toomey, and District Councilors Tony Economou, John Fresolo, and Jose A. Rivera are expected to vote against establishing a civilian review board.

None of those expected to vote against a CRB have provided any alternative suggestions.

That vote will probably mark the end of what was never a serious effort at police reform in the city. An effort to undermine the two-year U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) pattern or practice investigation of the Worcester Police Department began hours before the release of the DOJ findings report.

The Trump administration abandoned the DOJ’s investigations of police departments across the country since the beginning of its second term. Even with the Trump administration’s extremely low effort, it applied more scrutiny to Worcester than other cities.

The DOJ released a report on the Mount Vernon, New York Police Department on Dec. 12, 2024, just three days after the DOJ released its report on the WPD. In May 2025, the Trump DOJ rescinded the findings in the reports in Mount Vernon and five other cities, ending the federal processes there. Worcester was not one of those cities.

Instead, the Trump DOJ says it reviewed policy changes and incident reports and closed the investigation. The DOJ did not rescind its findings report on the Worcester Police Department.

Even the weak-on-civil-and-constitutional-rights Trump administration treated Worcester differently than nearly any other department in the country.

The biggest lie of this campaign to undermine police reform in Worcester is by omission. City officials continue to suggest that the WPD has complied with the recommendations in the report, so the job is done, despite some of those items remaining incomplete. They do this knowing that one criticism of the report upon its release was those same remedial recommendations.

In reality, the release of the report is just the second of a four-part process used by the DOJ since its first investigation in 1996 until the end of the Bided administration. After the DOJ issues its findings report, the third part of the process is a negotiation between the DOJ and the police department it investigated. Once the DOJ and the department reach an agreement reforms, the DOJ frequently brought that agreement to a federal court, which led to court ordered oversight of the fourth part of the process, implementation.

The implementation process often takes many years, ranging from five years to, in the case of the Oakland, CA Police Department, 20 years.

Once the Trump administration had clearly abandoned the process, city officials suddenly started promoting the same remedial recommendations they initially criticized as the holy grail.

A responsible government that valued the individual constitutional rights of those who live in, work in, or visit Worcester would have looked to past agreements between the DOJ and police departments across the country and evaluated what applies to Worcester.

Neither the city administration nor the eight-member majority of the city council will do that. They are insistent on preventing meaningful oversight and prohibiting any independent review.

Since the city government refuses to do the work, I did.

I produced a proposal for the city council that spans 30 pages and includes 45 provisions. The vast majority of those provisions were sourced from past agreements between the DOJ and the departments which it departments it previously investigated and implemented reforms within.

I didn’t reinvent the wheel. I simply looked at past DOJ practices and applied when relevant. It wasn’t very hard, it just took effort.

See the full proposal here.  

I will petition the city council to take up this proposal during its Sept. 15 meeting, but they will never take it up. Instead, they’ll continue to hide behind a selective interpretation of the rules, as they can’t be bothered with residents. It will never make the agenda based on some spurious reason that really just means the mayor doesn’t want it, because his majority has cowardly prioritized running from tough votes whenever possible.

UPDATE: In a shocking but welcome surprise, the proposal appears on the City Council agenda for its Tuesday, September 15 meeting as item 7z.

I’m sure everything in this proposal isn’t perfect; maybe some of it is dead wrong. That said, here’s the scoreboard for reform proposals produced:

• Idiot with a computer and a news website (me): 1
• Mayor Petty’s eight-councilor majority coalition: 0

Here is a selection of provisions included in the proposal.

Use of Force and De-escalation

• Canine deployment beyond crowd control. Policy 400’s canine restriction currently reaches only crowd-control deployments. WPD shall extend bite-ratio and contact tracking to all canine deployments, consistent with the Albuquerque Police Department’s settlement agreement, and report canine-contact incidents in the same annual summary Policy 400 § O.6 already requires for other force types.
• Duty-to-intervene discipline parity. Policy 400’s duty-to-intervene provision requires an officer able to safely do so to stop another officer’s excessive force, but leaves the consequence of failing to do so at the same general “up to and including termination” range that applies to most misconduct. WPD shall amend Policy 400 so an officer who fails to intervene is disciplined at the same severity as the underlying use of force, not assessed independently under the general range — modeled on Minneapolis’s 2025 Consent Decree ¶ 33. Under the § 5.9 disciplinary matrix, a sustained failure-to-intervene finding is assessed at the underlying violation’s severity category, not a separate, generally lower one.

Officer Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Assault Investigations

• A sustained finding of officer sexual misconduct involving a member of the public carries a presumption of termination, rebuttable only by the City Manager in a written, public determination stating the reasons for departure from the presumption.
• WPD shall remove any policy or practice — including any requirement that a complainant provide identifying information as a precondition to investigation — that discourages a victim of officer sexual misconduct from reporting, consistent with DOJ’s remedial measure 10.

Department Response to Reports of Sexual Assault

• WPD shall adopt a trauma-informed sexual-assault investigation policy applicable to patrol officers, Bureau of Professional Standards investigators, and Sexual Assault Unit detectives alike, with trauma-informed interviewing training for every officer in each role. Consistent with Baltimore’s 2016 consent decree § XI, the policy shall at minimum require:

Bias-Free Policing and Racial Equity

• Stop, search, and citation data. WPD shall expand the disaggregated data-collection and public-reporting model Policy 400 now applies to use-of-force incidents to cover all investigatory stops, searches, and citations, including stops that do not result in an arrest or citation — consistent with DOJ’s remedial measure 12 and modeled on Newark’s 2016 consent decree stop-data compliance-review cycle. WPD shall publish, within one hundred eighty days of Council adoption, an interim methodology for collecting and reporting this data using existing records systems ahead of the Hexagon system’s deployment, consistent with the forcing function § 2.4 already establishes for use-of-force data.
  
• Juvenile arrest policy. WPD’s juvenile arrest policy, nineteen years old as of the 2024 audit and lacking juvenile-privacy protections, shall be revised within one year of Council adoption of this proposal.

Accountability

• Evidentiary standard for sustained findings. WPD Policy 500 defines a “Sustained” disposition only as “sufficient evidence to clearly prove the allegations,” naming no recognized legal standard. WPD shall amend Policy 500 to require the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard for a Sustained disposition — consistent with Baltimore, Chicago, Louisville, Cleveland, and New Orleans, and with WPD’s own Policy 211, which already names an explicit “clear and convincing evidence” standard for POST decertification proceedings. 
• Investigation regardless of complainant cooperation. A complaint of serious misconduct shall be investigated to completion regardless of whether the complainant continues to cooperate, consistent with DOJ’s remedial measure 16.

Supervision

• Specialized-unit eligibility and audit. WPD shall establish written eligibility criteria for assignment to specialized units, including the vice/undercover unit implicated in Article III’s Finding B, and shall audit specialized-unit assignments and conduct on a regular cadence — consistent with DOJ’s remedial measure 19 and modeled on the Early Intervention System structures in Baltimore’s and Chicago’s consent decrees, configured per those decrees to flag units for elevated risk, not only individual officers.
• Supervisory span of control. WPD’s FY27 staffing includes 59 budgeted sergeant positions against 366 budgeted patrol officer positions. The Commanding Officer’s office shall review this span-of-control ratio at least annually to confirm patrol supervisors retain the capacity to conduct the use-of-force, BWC, and complaint reviews this proposal and Policy 400 already require of them. Where the review finds a unit or shift’s ratio is impairing timely review under Article II or Article V, WPD shall report that finding, and any staffing request needed to correct it, to the City Manager as part of the ordinary budget process.