Pax Centurion Pheonix Coverage July 9

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http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/140923-shit-boston-cops-say/?page=1#TOPCONTENT

Shit Boston Cops Say The Boston Police Patrolmen's Association maligns blacks, Muslims, gays, and women — in plain sight, backed by some of the region's wealthiest brands By CHRIS FARAONE |  July 9, 2012

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For at least six years, the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association (BPPA) has published a boldly bigoted official union newsletter, the Pax Centurion. Full of screeds against minorities, women, progressives, gays, Muslims, and even crime victims, its pages have long drawn ire from activists and union members alike. Last week, though, the mostly obscure paper finally broke into the spotlight: Mayor Tom Menino called the Pax "garbage," Boston Police Superintendent Ed Davis condemned the rag on Twitter, and several big-brand advertisers yanked their sponsorships.

(Hours after this story went to press on Tuesday morning, the .pdf archives of Pax Centurion – which had been publicly hosted on the BPPA website, suddenly disappeared, without explanation. We are republishing the files on our site so that the public can scrutinize Pax Centurion’s twisted legacy.)

These recent developments show that neither the general public nor the paper's corporate underwriters had previously realized the breadth of its proudly vile content. The Phoenix reviewed the newsletter's archives, finding countless spiels that read like a Klan fanzine scribbled by a chimp pushing a crayon. A few examples (see "Conduct Unbecoming: The Worst of Pax" for more):

ON PREGNANT HOMELESS WOMEN: "And now the city, in its infinite wisdom, will be acting to enable these little trollops to have exactly what they want simply by getting knocked up."

ON MURDER VICTIMS: "I'm so sick of hearing how each gang member that gets shot is 'turning his life around' . . . because I have never actually seen one turn his life around."

ON MUSLIMS: "They want to kill you. Do you understand? THEY WANT TO KILL YOU."

In one editorial from 2010, Pax managing editor James Carnell attacked the mother of Manuel DaViega, who died in a police shootout that April. Carnell wrote: "All due respect to motherhood and fully understanding a grieving mother's attempts to put blame anywhere but where it belongs, but your son was a maggot and a scumbag."

The tirade incensed black and Latino community leaders, as well as officers of color like detective Larry Ellison. "I have to brace myself to read [Pax] every time there's a new one," said Ellison, the president of the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers (MAMLEO).

The powder keg finally popped soon after the release of the May-June issue of Pax, which features, among other highlights, a rant against "racial huckster" Deval Patrick, and an article slamming "Disgusting J.P. Liberals." But it was an evisceration of an Occupy Boston activist that seems to have lit the fuse. As Carnell's latest carnage bounced around the Internet — even making its way onto jezebel.com — offended Occupiers and their allies alerted the tract's many advertisers, among them such major companies as Merck, Converse, Safety Insurance, Harvard-Pilgrim, and Legal Sea Foods. Some sponsors have already backed off, claiming that they were unaware of the newsletter's toxic content. Others told the Phoenix they are investigating, trying to figure out how their logo wound up funding so much race-baiting and gay-bashing.

As far as Ellison is concerned, it's a reckoning that's long overdue. "I'm all for people having the right to free speech," he says. "But in the position we're in as police officers, we have to be careful about how we characterize people — especially when it comes to Carnell and his blanket indictment of people of color. I'm glad to see people pushing back. I'm disturbed by the comments in there, and I can understand why others would be, too."

THUGS AND SCUMBAGS

It's unclear how long Carnell has been writing and editing the Pax Centurion — the BPPA did not return phone calls on this story — but he started on the force back in 1982. It was a simpler time, when cops "let the gang-bangers and street maggots know that we — the police — owned the streets, not them," Carnell wrote on the American Police Beat Web site last year. In his rookie years, according to the same nostalgic entry, "police officers enforce[d] the law and arreste[d] scumbags." If that wasn't dandy enough, the department in those days didn't force officers to worry about racial-profiling checks, which Carnell deplores since he considers himself "'of color,' as tawny pink and lobster red are both colors, too, you know."

Politically, most of Carnell's rhetoric is far-right-wing boilerplate, a stance complicated by his staunch pro-union bent. According to Pax's masthead, the "opinions expressed in [the newsletter] are not necessarily those of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association." But Carnell has no problem speaking for for the whole team. He responded to a 2011 Boston Herald story titled "Mom Forgives Cops Who Beat Son" — referencing a 16-year-old who was pummeled by authorities, on camera, at Roxbury Community College — by labeling the minor a "scumbag," and writing, "on behalf of the police officers involved in the incident . . . no forgiveness or apologies are needed or accepted."

It's hard work being so angry, and Carnell has a chorus line to back him up. One Pax regular is Jay Moccia, who once starred in a 2004 Bush-Cheney radio ad in which he joked, "I'm a law enforcement officer in the greater Boston area. And for the record, I think you guys have a funny accent, too." The newsletter's resident funnyman, Moccia quipped in a January-February 2012 Pax column, "I saw a fat woman wearing a fur coat, and one of those stupid animal hats. I thought she was a bear and shot her." His joke starts to sound sinister when you consider that Moccia is devoutly anti-gun-control. In his view, liberal threats to gun ownership are comparable to racial segregation. "Jim Crow is alive and well," Moccia wrote in the November-December 2011 Pax, "and he's after your 2nd Amendment Rights!"

Whether Muslims, women, or gays, no pedestrian is safe from Moccia's rhetorical wrath. In the March-April 2011 issue he questioned, "Are we breeding the fight out of American males?" He opined, "Men have become feminized, these 'metrosexuals' indulge in manicures, pedicures, yoga, and all sorts of other sissified pursuits." Green-lighting all this chest-pounding is tireless BPPA president and member advocate Thomas Nee, whose name appears atop the Pax masthead. Nee also presides over Carnell's condemnation of young offenders as "thugs" and "scumbags" in Pax — this while his own son Joseph was convicted in 2008 of conspiracy to commit murder for plotting a school shooting at Marshfield High School.

In a diverse department, proclamations like Moccia's "Jim Crow" riff have sparked fury among BPPA members. Two years ago, after Pax ran a doctored pic of Barack and Michelle Obama saluting Old Glory with their left hands — over a caption that read, "Americans?!? Are they really?!?" — dozens of MAMLEO members signed a letter to the editor decrying the image. Speaking to BostonGlobe writer Maria Cramer, MAMLEO's Ellison noted, "there is a huge racial divide in this department, and the Pax Centurion is a large part of the problem." In character, Carnell responded with a judo flip: "Larry," he wrote, "any 'huge racial divide' exists only in the fertile imaginations of real racists, and not in the pages of the Pax."

'JUVENILE'

With his current newsletter, Carnell hit a particular Occupy nerve by ripping Bil Lewis, a progressive activist and school teacher who wrote to Pax in response to anti-Occupy sentiments. "Bil(L)," Carnell wrote, parenthetically arguing "men" spell the name B-I-L-L, "let me cut to the chase: you are a hypocrite and a fraud, as are all of your fellow 'Occupiers' . . . They see a free meal and a dumb-liberal sucker offering something-for-nothing, and they're going to take full advantage, just like a seagull or a pigeon." Never mind that Carnell himself collected nearly $52,000 in sick pay last year for a total salary of $97,729 (down from his 2010 take of $155,399).

Carnell has been gunning for Occupy all along, ever since working several details at the group's Dewey Square encampment last year. He and other Pax scribes have used their columns to viciously deride Occupiers, the lot of whom, according to Carnell, are "losers," "anarchists, socialists, communists, graying hippies, level-three sex offenders, paroled criminals . . . fakes, frauds, phonies and nitwits from affluent communities . . . [who have] never worked a day in their privileged lives." (Carnell is not against all protests. In 2003, for example, he was quoted in the Globe, warning officers from outside Boston not to cross a planned picket line at the Democratic National Convention.)

Rallying around Lewis, Occupiers last Tuesday alerted roughly 50 of the newsletter's sponsors to the content that appears beside their ads — not just the anti-Occupy screeds, but all of it. They also contacted Davis, who tweeted back, "This juvenile conduct is wrong and not rep of today's officer." The first advertiser to react was Simmons College; in an e-mail to activists, the school's Vice-President for Marketing and Admission Cheryl Howard wrote, "While Simmons has no control of the editorial content in any of the publications in which we advertise, I really regret our inclusion in this publication."

In a follow-up interview, Howard told the Phoenix that her office had intended to support the BPPA Scholarship Fund for the children of Boston police, not the Pax. She also said that Simmons would never intentionally advertise anywhere that "does not support inclusion." At the time of this writing, LoJack and Harpoon Brewery have also pulled support from the newsletter, similarly citing that they meant to support scholarships, and were unaware that the BPPA peddles polarizing hatred.

The BPPA did not respond to interview requests. At the BPD, spokesman Mike McCarthy said, "The First Amendment applies to police officers," but emphasized that Pax content does not represent views of the department. That's been the BPD's position for some time. But for many, including everyone from fellow cops to lawmakers to activists — and now blue-chip advertisers — denial of ownership is no longer an adequate response.

"This speaks to the need to have greater ethnic and racial diversity and training not only at the patrol level but in command staff as well," says Dorchester State Representative Carlos Henriquez, who is particularly critical of Pax editorials in favor of racial profiling. "This is an issue that I and others have tried to speak with Commissioner Davis for years now, but we have yet to be truly heard."

"I'm glad to see Occupy Boston doing something about this, because the black community has been screaming about this forever and no one cares," says Jamarhl Crawford, a Roxbury neighborhood organizer and past target of Pax slander. "It's the Boston Police Department's dirty little secret. They talk about gays, about Muslims, and everything else you can imagine. It's that Archie Bunker outer-space banana-cake type of thinking that people don't even realize goes on anymore."

Reach Chris Faraone at cfaraone@phx.com or follow him on Twitter @fara1.