Newly unearthed body camera footage captured by Boston police during the demonstrations protesting racial injustice and police brutality in May shows officers using force against nonviolent protesters, pepper-spraying crowds, and, in one instance, speaking about hitting protesters with a car.
The clips are at the center of a report published Friday by The Appeal, a national online news and commentary website that focuses on how the legal system, policies, and politics affect the country’s most vulnerable populations.
The footage was an exclusive for the outlet, which says it was given the videos by Carl Williams, an attorney representing some of the protesters who were arrested during the protests overnight between May 31 and early on June 1. Williams received 44 videos — over 66 hours of body camera footage — as part of a discovery file, according to the publication.
The demonstrations — an outcry after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis — in downtown Boston that day were largely peaceful until later that night, when the situation grew aggressive with cases of looting and vandalism reported. In all, 53 people were arrested by police, 18 bystanders were hospitalized, and nine officers were treated for nonlife-threatening injuries.
Police Commissioner William Gross, the following day, remarked that some protesters “came hellbent on destroying our city.” He praised officers who “said, ‘No one is going to take over our city and burn it to the ground.‘”
The videos published Friday show officers pushing nonviolent demonstrators to the ground apparently unprovoked, spraying pepper spray on individuals and into crowds to force them back, and one department member explaining how he possibly hit people with a car on Tremont Street.
In that instance, the officer whose camera is recording the remarks walks away so his colleague is no longer in frame and says, “This thing is on!”
“It’s this mob mentality,” Williams told The Appeal regarding the police behavior. “And I use ‘mob’ as a sort of a double entendre—mob like the mafia and mob like a group of a pack of wild people roaming the streets looking to attack people.”
Several local officials and advocates have raised questions about and condemned the actions depicted on video, including Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins.
“I have not watched the entire video, but the snippets that I have seen are incredibly troubling,” Rollins told the outlet.
She said the clips have been shared with her team of special prosecutors.
Boston Police Sgt. Det. John Boyle told Boston.com Friday the department has opened an internal affairs investigation on “what the report brought to our attention” but could not provide additional comment because of the ongoing probe.