Hidden Link

June 14, 2024

By gintautas dumcius and jennifer smith

A constant on TV and in some corners of the Internet in recent weeks has been the livestreamed unspooling of a trial inside a Dedham courthouse. 

The fairly run-of-the-mill case, involving a 44-year-old woman accused of killing her Boston cop boyfriend, morphed into a media circus and obsession for some, with true crime fanatics and people declaring themselves part of a “Free Karen Read movement” closely tracking each development.

But the trial has now crashed into a longer-running Massachusetts storyline, this one involving a top law enforcement agency. The State Police have had federal investigators handing out indictments involving overtime theft and troopers allegedly selling their integrity for a new driveway and bottled water.

A state trooper who is the lead investigator in the Karen Read case took the stand and was forced to acknowledge texts he sent to friends and fellow troopers, making vulgar and disparaging remarks about the woman he was investigating.

A reporter asked Gov. Maura Healey about the trial last week, before the trooper took the stand; she said she’d been following it but deferred to the State Police.

Healey didn’t hold back when asked days later about the trooper’s testimony. “It does harm, frankly, to the dignity and the integrity of the work of men and women across the State Police and law enforcement,” she said. “So as a former attorney general and governor, I am disgusted by that.”

The latest black eye for the agency comes as it searches for a permanent new leader. Less than a month ago, we asked, “After years of scandals, have the State Police turned a corner?” 

The answer out of the Karen Read trial is no.

A transit beer (or wine) summit? 

For more than a year, a Massachusetts native has overseen New York City’s subway and bus system, while a New Yorker has run the MBTA. That’s about to end as Rich Davey, who grew up in the Boston suburb of Randolph, is returning to run Massport, which oversees Logan Airport.

Davey, who once helmed the T and served as Gov. Deval Patrick’s transportation chief, in May 2022 became president of New York City Transit. (The last ex-MBTA chief to take on the mammoth New York subway system was the late Bob Kiley, a former CIA agent and Boston City Hall operative.)

Davey, once spotted on video capturing a MBTA fare evader, brought his brand of transit vigilante justice with him. The New York transit agency posted to Instagram a video of him handing out tickets to drivers blocking bus lanes. He also puckishly sparred with Whoopi Goldberg over congestion pricing. 

Like Davey in New York, MBTA general manager Phil Eng has settled into life here, marching in last weekend’s Pride Parade and recently attending a musical poking fun at the agency he now runs. 

Previously the president of the Long Island commuter rail for four years before coming to Massachusetts in 2023, Eng got together with Davey for drinks while both were working in New York.

Asked about a possible Boston beer summit with Davey, Eng didn’t rule it out. (Eng, a Long Island native and homebrewer, lives near Lamplighter Brewing in Cambridge, though Davey is known to prefer a California Chardonnay.)

“Rich and I do keep in touch, mostly by text, given how busy things are,” Eng said this week. “I guess it’ll be a lot easier to talk to Rich very soon as he makes his way back to Massachusetts.”

Ranked choice hits Boston City Council

Boston’s non-partisan elections may seem an odd place to pilot ranked choice voting, which is generally pitched in partisan elections in largely single-party areas as a way to avoid crowded primaries that someone can win with a small slice of the vote before sailing virtually uncontested through an often perfunctory general election. 

But Boston was one of the municipalities that voted in favor of an unsuccessful statewide ballot measure on the subject in 2020, and a targeted pitch to bring ranked choice to the capital city is on the move.

Ranked choice voting is a system where voters rank candidates by preference. Generally, if a candidate is the first choice of more than 50 percent of the voters, that candidate wins. But if no one clears that threshold, the candidate who did the worst is eliminated and their voters’ ballots go to their second-choice pick, with continuing rounds of eliminations and reallocation until there is a candidate who has the majority of votes.

CommonWealth Beacon reported last summer on the new Boston effort, which is being championed by the group MassVOTE. On Wednesday, City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune introduced a home rule petition that would retool the city’s election system by incorporating ranked choice into the general elections for city councilor and mayor.  

Under the home rule, the threshold for ranked choice at-large election would be the total number of votes divided by five, rounded down to the nearest whole number, and adding one. If any candidate receives enough first choice votes to clear that threshold, the “excess part” of each vote for that candidate would then be reallocated to the voter’s next preferred candidate, and so on through subsequent rounds until there are four candidates to clear the threshold and be elected.

Speaking on the online radio show Java With Jimmy on Wednesday, Mayor Michelle Wu said she had not yet seen Louijeune’s proposal. While she is “open to ranked choice voting,” the mayor noted the nature of Boston’s existing non-partisan and two-phase election structure.

“I think it’s helpful for Boston to have two opportunities to understand what the choices are,” she said. “I heard all the time from people who say, ‘It’s too overwhelming in the prelim, too many choices, I’m going to wait until it gets down to the final, and then once there’s two options then I’ll make a decision.’ Now I always encourage people to vote from the very first time, but I do know that it gives extra awareness and accountability when you get to a stage where people really have to be clear about what the difference is.”