[Danielle Balocca]: Hey, Medford Bites listeners. This episode is being released on the day we're observing Juneteenth. To give a brief summary of the day, Juneteenth, short for June 19th, marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. The troops arrival came a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the longest-running African American holiday. On June 17, 2021, it officially became a federal holiday. Information for this intro came from History.com. Today's episode includes an interview with Sophia Hall, the attorney representing the Medford residents who have submitted a complaint against the Medford Police Department following an incident in July of 2021. This was summarized by David McKenna in a previous episode's introduction. Drawing a connection between Juneteenth and today's topic, I hope to illustrate the ways in which the legal definitions of freedom can be very different than how freedom is experienced across races. I hope you enjoy. All right, thank you all for being here with me today. We're just going to do some quick introductions so folks could say their name, pronouns, and just who they are.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Hi all, it's Chelly. I am chair of the Human Rights Commission, VP at WMCC, and I sit on the board at Method Health Matters. Happy to be here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi everyone, my name is Sophia Hall, I am the Deputy Litigation Director at Lawyers for Civil Rights, which is a nonprofit legal organization that provides free legal representation and education to victims of race discrimination and immigrants in the sort of Boston and greater Boston area, and I use pronouns she and her.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. And thanks for being here, Sophia. A couple weeks ago, one of our introductions, we talked a little bit about this case, kind of what we knew about it. But I'm wondering if you could just summarize what, you know, what's going on with the basis is for this complaint against the Medford police.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure. So, you know, unfortunately, this is not the first complaint or lawsuit that Lawyers for Civil Rights has had to bring in recent years against local municipalities or towns in Massachusetts. You know, one thing I'll share is that despite feeling like a fairly progressive location, despite feeling like somehow we are above and different from groups like Ferguson or St. Paul or other cities and towns on a long list of having a spotlight because of the killing of Black people at the hands of law enforcement, You know, I really would encourage people to reject that notion, and to recognize that in the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts, we still have failed to have any sort of standardized policies and procedures that prioritize and protect black lives. We simply don't. And we have a lot of work to do here, despite the fact that We talk quite a bit at the state level and the local level about being different from other jurisdictions. And so unfortunately, the case here on behalf of two black teens, young people who are originally from the Medford area, are graduates of Medford High School, who are current college attendees, who for all intents and purposes We shouldn't have to say this, but I will, who are just good people, right? They weren't criminals. They weren't engaging in any criminality at the time that they were stopped. They weren't stealing a car. They weren't firing off firearms. There was nothing indicative of criminal behavior when they were stopped. There were two young black people out in the afternoon driving in a car, okay? And so, as some of you may know, Last summer, the two my two clients were stopped by a number of police cars, while driving through the Medford area near the Medford Rotary on High Street and I apologize I'm not from Medford so I don't know exactly what the name of that Rotary might be but the Rotary that's near High Street. And, you know, Jeremiah probably says it best in his complaint where he says, you know, I'm just casually driving down the street and I just start to notice police cars making U-turns. Like, that's the level of attention that law enforcement were placing on these two young people driving down the street doing nothing wrong in their car. Inevitably, as you likely can imagine, they are stopped by a number of cars. They are like roughly instructed to lower your window, you know, open your vehicle from outside your window, exit your vehicle, walk backwards to the back of your vehicle, you know, then handcuffed, held at gunpoint, questioned without any explanation of what's going on. Like, what did we do wrong? So despite a number of comments and questions from my clients about what's happening here, They don't get that information. Instead, they get this behavior that's highly militarized, that is not, in my opinion, community driven, and that is indicative of criminals. You know, you'd almost thought they had just been observed robbing a bank, which they did not, just to be clear. You know, and so, unfortunately, these are two young people. the Black young man is sort of brought out of the car first, again with this behavior of like, you know, walk backwards and walk slowly and keep your hands in sight and things of that nature, while his partner, the young lady in the car, Habak, is told, as she kind of looks back fearfully for her friend, she's told, face forward, keep your eyes straight, don't turn your head, and all of the time remember that there are guns, there are guns, pointed at my clients, these two young people. And so for multiple moments, both these young people are held, they're detained unlawfully, the vehicle is searched, their person is searched. And again, they are very much treated as criminals. After all of this, after a number of attempts to get information when they're not given any information, after the car is searched sort of under duress by Jeremiah, who's like, I mean, I'm standing here in cuffs with guns pointed at me and you want to search my car, I suppose, what else do you say? But yes, you may search my car. The car is searched. And when ultimately all of this fanfare by the police department results in nothing, results in finding no weapons, results in finding nothing illegal, Finally, our clients are removed from the handcuffs and it's explained to them, allegedly, that this is policy, this is procedure, right? There's a brief information given about something related to an anonymous tip, and maybe the vehicle being related to that tip, and eventually my clients are asked, do you think your friend is paying a joke on you? And again, my clients who are, to be quite honest, who are traumatized by this, who are still traumatized to this day, and for people who don't know it, when we're talking about last summer, what we're talking about is not just the wake of George Floyd. At the time that my clients were stopped, we're talking about just about the three-month window after the trial of the murder of George Floyd, which if many people remember happened, the verdict came down on the exact same day that another black man was shot and killed. And shortly in that same week I believe the young boy the Latino boy in New York had been shot in the back of the head so I mean, we're talking about the timing of this incident. despite how any department may call this something that was innocent, was happening in a highly, highly polarized and highly traumatic time for people of color, at least anybody, to be frank, who's watching the news right now. What I like to tell people is that it's very hard to believe as a person of color that officer friendly exists anymore in America, because that is not the lived experience of most people of color when they engage with police. So ultimately, as my clients did nothing wrong, they're, they're like, go. And unfortunately, that's not the end of the story. What follows is then quite a bit of difficulty in terms of gathering any additional information, trying to get documentation of this experience, trying to understand why it happened and what they can do in response to it. And as they sort of struggle to try to do that on their own, they're eventually referred to lawyers for civil rights where I work and so then we with the assistance of a pro bono firm started to sit down with them and put the pieces together and gather documents and information to produce what you guys have now seen which is this complaint that was late last month to support them and to ensure that there's some transparency and some accountability around what my clients experienced. And then to think about what can the, what can the sort of referration material, like steps be, what can we do to ensure that this doesn't happen to other people?
[Danielle Balocca]: And we are curious to hear more about that. I wonder if you could also summarize what is being asked for from your clients, from the city.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, so I mean, I would categorize it in basically in two ways. So there's some dignity asked here, right? They're looking for an apology. At the end of the day, they're looking to be told or acknowledged that their experience was wrong, right? And as simplistic as that seems, you'd find it, it's a very rare thing, unfortunately, for people to receive that. So that's sort of front and foremost for them is that desire to just be treated like a dignified individual. Then they have multiple asks that are related to reforming this process going forward, ensuring that there's structural changes so that other individuals don't have the experience they did. We're looking for some changes to the policies and procedures that are existing that simply did not go far enough to assist the clients, and then the creation of new policies and procedures to ensure that this sort of behavior doesn't continue going forward. And we'd be looking for that to be done in in concert with an expert that we could recommend. So somebody who has the cultural competence to recognize sort of the racial lens that has to be used when thinking through the development of this practice, this practice or this policy or this procedure. Coupled with that, we're also looking for ongoing mandatory implicit bias sort of training to ensure that, again, these officers have some awareness about the context of American history and present day in terms of stopping two young black people at gunpoint with, you know, a dozen cops or half a dozen cops. So thinking through ongoing training that isn't just one-off, you know, because we know that implicit bias training does not do anything unless it's repeated, unless it's mandatory. So not looking for voluntary training and not looking for one-off training, but something that's going to be repeated. And then we're looking for compensation for the clients themselves, for the emotional distress that they've experienced.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. So what does one clarifying question is I'd heard about like a request for so or like when they investigate what happened. How does that like I would imagine it's like who does that, how does that in a way that's like unbiased or impartial.
[SPEAKER_01]: A good question to be quite frank, we don't have good structures in America to ensure that the. that the fact finders and the decision makers for holding people, particularly police departments accountable are very impartial. So in Massachusetts, when, for example, there's a excessive force complaint or a shooting death case even, so a wrongful death case, the officers are typically looked at by the The district attorney's office, but the district attorney's office as you can imagine work day in and day out with police departments, you know with police so I think one would really have to beg the question how impartial that investigator could be. Here we don't even have that strenuous of an investigation occurring because this is not something at this point that has raised the specter of sort of criminal liability, which is why the DA's office would normally look into it. And so as it's just a civil matter, it is being reviewed by the equivalent of the internal affairs division of the police department. And so basically the police are policing themselves, which as you can see, likely would lead to a problem.
[Danielle Balocca]: That was my fear. I think Shelly has a couple of questions.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Yeah, I mean, thank you so much for what you're sharing. And while you're speaking, I am reflecting on a speech I gave to the city of Medford. And for this, this is both so Medford centered and also so global. I gave a speech on policing coming out of slave patrol and coming out of the control and the management of the black body and the sort of inherent fear of sort of resistance and uprising. I'm wondering you were you touched on reviewing existing policies, reform, creating new policy. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on other municipalities that are pursuing this in a really intentional way that's feeling like, you know, folks are making progress and it's strong. Are there places where things are being done well, room for improvement, that kind of thing? And then I also think I'm wondering about, like we mentioned earlier, what can folks be doing to support and at what sort of level of conversation? I think there's a lot of like community handholding, but how are we accessing discussion of actual policy that should be in place to kind of mitigate officer friendly or the narrative of officer friendly?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so good question. So let's talk about sort of what we're seeing across the state and what lessons that can be learned there. I try really hard despite my job, right, to be optimistic. And so the hope is there is somebody out there doing it right. And I don't know about it because those community members are not coming to me in fear and seeking help through a legal process. That's going to be my hope, right? And I believe that exists. It has to exist somewhere. However, what I know for certain is that Massachusetts is very slowly making headway. And what do I mean by that? You know, I don't think we went nearly far enough with our sort of police reform legislation and all the commissions that created, or even the post commission to think about decertification. We were the last, we're literally one of the last four states in the United States to have any sort of decertification process. That's horrendous. We should never have a reputation for being the last of the states to do something right. But we have finally done that, right? We finally now created some oversight through government action to ensure that police officers are held to some standard, the way we do doctors, the way we do barbers, the way we do lawyers, right? So that, I think, is a promising sign. I think that the ideas of accountability are becoming more widely accepted and more widely discussed. I also think the ideas of transparency are becoming more widely accepted you know for years there has been so much debate around public records requests, even something as simple as getting your own incident report about something where you're the victim, and how challenging that's been. For us who are practitioners in this field, it's been so challenging to try to get internal affairs and disciplinary records, like personnel records of officers. Like, you want to know if there's smoke, there's fire, right? If my client's accusing somebody of doing something who's done it 10 times before, that is an institutional problem. And we deserve and should know that information. And we shouldn't have to sue you to get that information. But that has been an ongoing battle for so many years. But, you know, steps have been taken to ensure that more transparency is occurring, just by even producing those internal affair records at the state level, so they're more accessible to people. So I think we are going in the right direction. You know, the reality is that nothing good in life happens quickly. That's just true. I think that in, for myself, when I think about the role I hope to play in the overall community through my work is that I hope I just make things a little less bad. And I hope, you know, that doesn't sound bad, but I think for me, that really, that's a success story, to give people a little more power, a little more accountability, a little more agency in their lives, a little more belief that the law applies to them, that jurisprudence can be something that reflects their real lived experience, it can be something that can help them, that's just never going to happen in my lifetime. But if I make it a little less bad, then that means that I've done something. So, I mean, that's a long-winded way to say we're not there yet anywhere, to be quite honest, because if we were, we wouldn't be turning on the news, looking at the countless number of Black bodies that are constantly being victimized, period. And I just don't think we can pat ourselves on the back anywhere if one little place is doing it right, but the rest of the cities and towns aren't in a state. But I think as a collective, people are starting to get it. People are starting to figure out the vocab and the jargon. They are starting to see where the pressure points are. And they're starting to realize if they don't do this work, people like us are going to continue to sue them. We're going to continue to drain their coffers. We're going to continue to blast them out in the media, just like you guys are. We are not going to sit idly by while people continue to decide that this is going to be policing as usual, because policing as usual is over. It's over. And if it means we have to take down every bad cop through every lawsuit for the rest of my career, then so be it. But it's over. Getting a pass is over. Thank you. Oh, you asked me about what you guys could do. So maybe we switch to that. Sorry. You see, like you get me fired up and then I'll go off on a tangent. So one thing I'll tell you is I didn't really know much about Medford before this case, to be quite honest. I had not had any clients from the area before. I've not worked on any cases against the city or town. I have literally been floored by the outreach from the community, just by people reaching out and calling my office and emailing and phone calls and letters about how much they support the improvements we're seeking to the police department, how much they want to be a place that better reflects sort of progressive ideals. I mean we have been reached out to by city council officials, you know, activists on the ground, just concerned folks, I've gotten to legal events and lawyers and walked up to me and been like, I live in Medford, tell me what I can do to help you know so I think there is really a desire on the ground there, and I think that is a really powerful thing and I think the police department should be really afraid of that, because at the end of the day, you guys are taxpayers, you guys make the decisions about the community that you pay for. And so if they have to respond to you, even in a way that they don't always have to respond to me, you know. And so I think continue to do what you're doing, you know, reaching out at city council meetings. There are people sending letters to the mayor. I understand that you guys recently had a diversity officer that was hired for Medford, and that she's not been there very long but I think really encouraging and pressuring her to do the good work to actually move the needle and ensuring that your city and town is giving her the resources and agency to do that good work. I think that is really important. It may not be a role yet that you guys can see dividends paying from, but the fact that you have that role is such a powerful thing because there's so many cities and towns that don't even have it yet, you know, and so I think there are a lot of pieces on the ground that you like tools you guys have to work with to try to get this message moving forward, but more so than anything you just can't allow complacency. Right, like you can't let the conversation die. Because if you do, then they win. Because that's what they're waiting for. They're waiting for us to, they're waiting for us to sit back and get quiet or move on to the next thing. And that's what we just can't afford to do.
[Danielle Balocca]: It's really helpful. Shelly, I'm wondering if you have any follow up questions.
[Chelli Keshavan]: I mean, I'm loving it. I think we're all having a discussion of lockdown led to a certain level of energy and reflection on everybody's current moment, irrespective of where your politics sit by nature of the experience. And I think I've been part of conversations that say, well, what happened to all that energy? We were all fired up. We were all stuck in the house. We were all thinking. And now we're bleeding back into whatever post-COVID looks like. And I've already felt. kind of a diminishment of that kind of collective energy and how to how to keep on keeping on how to maintain how to capitalize on what was discussed and turn into action, I think are all worthwhile discussions.
[Danielle Balocca]: I'm also not used to hearing lawyers speak so passionately about their work I was worried this might be kind of a dry conversation but I've taken away so much from this conversation, and like I really appreciate your perspective and it's been really helpful to listen to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And I appreciate that, like, at least I try. I try very hard to live that I'm Sophia first, the lawyer second, because I'm a first gen. I grew up in a family of people that look like the people I represent. You know, I get their lived experience because I lived it, and the people who raised me lived it. And at the end of the day, me being a lawyer is the tool. Like, it happens to be the role I play, but we're all playing a role here. And to be quite honest, we need to stop worrying about fanfare. Like, we need to stop worrying about having this, look a certain way or sound a certain way, because the reality is it just is. And it just is wrong. And so we have to think about, I want this to be accessible to normal people. I want what I do as a lawyer, as legal work, to be accessible to normal people, because I want them to know that they count too, that these laws are for them. And so I think that just remembering I'm one of them when I do this every day, for me, is really critical. I believe that I'm here because my clients brought me here. I believe that I followed their leads and not the other way around. So, you know, I hope that we get to a place where they can see their effort payoff. I hope that we get to a place where Medford recognize they have an opportunity right now, the department has an opportunity right this minute to recognize that this could be a catalyst for change, and they could take it. And if they don't. Then we pursue other options. Then we think about dragging people to court. Then we think about making this dirty. But what I hope is that they use this as a moment in time to realize that they could be better. And they have a shot. And so they should take it.
[Danielle Balocca]: I have the same hope. Yeah. Well, thank you. I know you want to be mindful of Sophia, the attorney and your time. So thank you so much for spending time with us today. And we wish you luck on this case and everything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks so much to Sophia. We look forward to future updates about this case. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode, and as always, if you have feedback about today's episode or ideas for future episodes, you can email medfordpod at gmail.com. You can also subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Medford Bites!