Hidden Link

March 6, 2024

By Michael Jonas

It’s been ripped by a panel of federal Appeals Court judges and was cited by Boston city councilors as the reason why they held up millions of dollars in federal grant money. But law enforcement officials say the Boston Police Department’s controversial gang database played a crucial role in the recent federal bust of more than 40 people allegedly connected to a violent street gang that has operated for years out of a Jamaica Plain public housing development. 

The gang database, maintained as part of the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, was not cited in news reports on the February 14 bust. But its role underscores the complicated legacy of the gang roster – which has come in for justifiable scrutiny and criticism, but has also been credited with helping to rid predominantly minority neighborhoods of violent players who have terrorized those communities. 

Critics have charged that young people, primarily Black and Hispanic males, have been incorrectly profiled as gang members and entered in the database. Two years ago, a federal Appeals Court panel sided with a Salvadoran national who said he had been improperly identified as a member of the violent MS-13 gang. The court said the young man had been the victim of a system used to identify alleged gang members based on an “erratic points system based on unsubstantiated inferences.”

As a city councilor, Michelle Wu voted against accepting federal grant money that would help fund the BRIC because of concerns over the gang database. 

But as mayor she has urged the city council to sign off on federal homeland security grants, which they’ve now done, citing “several consequential policy and leadership changes” that mean “the BRIC and police department operate in a significantly different environment today.” 

Wu said new procedures had resulted in more than 2,500 names being removed from the database since 2021. 

The federal bust announced last month charged 41 individuals allegedly connected to the Heath Street Gang with racketeering conspiracy, drug trafficking, firearms, wire fraud, and financial fraud. The US attorney’s office said that “in furtherance of the racketeering conspiracy,” those charged are also implicated in murders and nonfatal shootings, including the wounding of a 9-year-old girl.

The case involved federal law enforcement agents, Boston police, and several other agencies. But Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox gave a shout-out to the BRIC and the police department’s gang unit, formally known as the Youth Violence Strike Force, at the February 14 briefing convened by Acting US Attorney Joshua Levy to announce the arrests. 

“I want to particularly recognize the significant contributions of both our Youth Violence Strike Force as well as the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, who have been critical to this long investigation,” Cox said.

Jim Jordan, the former director of strategic planning at the Boston Police Department, said efforts by BPD to gather intelligence on gang members started in the early 1990s and were instrumental to the city’s nationally-recognized reductions in homicide and shootings in the mid-1990s. 

It allowed us “to increase both justice and safety,” he said. Police were able to target those responsible for the mayhem and more quickly reduce the violence plaguing gang-heavy neighborhoods, Jordan said. 

“I think done correctly, it’s been invaluable to community safety,” he said of the department’s turn toward intelligence gathering and the gang database. “And it’s been a real transformation in how you think about creating public safety – by trying to interrupt and disrupt the behavior of those who are going to try to shoot and hurt other people.” 

At the same time, Jordan said continued scrutiny of how such intelligence gathering is done is a healthy part of current efforts to shine a light on police practices and bring more accountability to law enforcement. “The more we learn about racial bias being deeply embedded in almost everything,” he said, “it’s not only fair to say, but necessary to say we need a wider conversation about how we gather this information and how we use it.”