By Jessica Fargen
Boston Herald
BOSTON — In a remarkable journey, two cops who were part of one of the most notorious episodes in Boston police history will soon teach that era’s lessons to young recruits.
In 1995, several officers savagely beat fellow cop Michael Cox after they mistook him for a fleeing suspect during a Mattapan chase.
Officer Kenneth Conley was not involved in the beating, but was tried for his role as a witness and convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. The conviction was later thrown out.
Now, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis has asked Cox and Conley - both still with the BPD - to present the lessons of the case to police academy recruits, and he says they have agreed.
“Not only will we use this as a case study, but we will have the officers - if they so desire - come in and talk about it from their perspective,” Davis said. The officers had spoken to an academy class one time before Davis became commissioner in 2006.
Davis made the request as he moves forward with a plan to fire any BPD cop who lies under oath or to investigators - this in the wake of several high-profile lying cases that have roiled the department.
The commissioner first publicly discussed his zero-tolerance lying rule with Boston University journalism professor Dick Lehr, who wrote about the proposal in a Boston Globe opinion piece on July 31.
Lehr, a member of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at B.U., recently published a book on the Cox case called “The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide.”
“If you look at the case, you realize how much damage flowed from it,” Lehr said, “and how it could have been prevented if people did the right thing at the start.”
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