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Next Boston police commissioner will be Michael Cox, Ann Arbor police chief and former Boston cop

Michael Cox speaking after he was named the next commissioner of the Boston Police Department at a press conference in Roxbury on Wednesday. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Michael Cox speaking after he was named the next commissioner of the Boston Police Department at a press conference in Roxbury on Wednesday. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu selected Michael Cox, a longtime Boston police officer and current police chief in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to run the Boston Police Department.

Cox, 57, worked for the Boston Police Department for three decades before leaving in 2019 to become the Ann Arbor police chief. Early in his career, he also sued the department after he suffered a vicious beating by his fellow officers while working in the department’s plain clothes gang unit.

Cox will start on Aug. 15. The city has said there were four finalists for the job, but would not disclose the other names.

In a briefing with reporters Wednesday morning, Cox said it was an emotional homecoming for him. And he vowed to ensure the department protects the public while also supporting the employees who are doing the work.

“The officers need someone to help support them,” he said, noting that officers face a difficult job. “I’m going to be their biggest cheerleader.”

Wu said she had never crossed paths with Cox when he was working for the department. But she said she knew their priorities and values aligned as soon as she starting talking to him during the interview process.

“There was just such a sense of hope and excitement and joy about what we could get done together, even tackling very complex and quite entrenched systems,” Wu said during the briefing.

The Boston Police Department has not had a permanent commissioner for over a year.

In early 2021, former commissioner Dennis White was put on leave after only days on the job and later fired⁠ when the Boston Globe unearthed old allegations of domestic violence against him. Superintendent-in-Chief Greg Long has served as interim commissioner, but said he was not interested in staying in the role permanently.

Cox first joined the Boston Police Department in 1989 and eventually rose to become the superintendent overseeing the agency’s bureau of professional development. That includes the division that investigates officers accused of misconduct.

But long before that, he successfully sued the department for violating his civil rights after he was beaten by fellow officers.

Cox, who is Black, was working in a plain clothes gang unit in Boston in 1995 when he responded to a shooting in Roxbury.

But after Cox chased a suspect over a fence, some officers say they mistook him for a suspect and violently beat him. He was left on the ground until members of his unit called for medical help. Cox suffered kidney damage and head injuries in the attack. He also faced retaliation by fellow officers, starting in the days after the beating, when the assault became public and before he’d said anything about what happened.

The city agreed to pay Cox $1.3 million to settle the lawsuit. And Cox’s story was described in the 2009 book “The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston’s Racial Divide,” by Dick Lehr, a journalism professor at Boston University.

Cox told reporters Wednesday it was a struggle to decide what to do after the beating. He decided to stay in the job, because he loves public service and wanted to make sure something like that never happened again.

I have dedicated my life to making sure that both the Boston Police Department and policing in general has grown and learned from the experiences that I went through,” he said, “to make sure that we have structures and mechanisms to never repeat that kind of of an incident.”

In Ann Arbor, Cox oversaw 150 police officers. The city briefly put Cox on paid leave in February 2020, while they conducted an investigation that found employees feared retaliation from Cox, according to a copy of the investigative report. Local media reported that Cox was required to apologize to staff, and he wrote a letter of apology to the city council.

Cox told reporters in Boston Wednesday that there was a misinterpretation about how his actions were perceived, complicated by the fact that he was working in a new department far different from the one in Boston.

“I’ve learned from that,” he said. “I wish it didn’t happen, but it did.”

Some advocates for police reform in Ann Arbor said Cox is leaving the city too soon, just three years after he was hired.

City Councilor Ali Ramwali, who served on the hiring committee that he said unanimously selected Cox, credits him for leading the Ann Arbor police department in the tumultuous wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

But Ramwali said he’s not sure how much progress Cox was able to make in improving the relationship between police and the community.

“I don’t think he’s going to have a lasting legacy because he wasn’t here very long,” Ramwali said. “I don’t think he’s going to have the impact that we were hoping to have with him.”

But others say Cox did bring about change in the department, for example, in making traffic stop records available to the city’s Independent Community Police Oversight Commission.

Frances Todoro-Hargreaves, vice-chair of the oversight commission, said the department took steps to become more transparent under Cox’s leadership.

“We’ve gone from not being able to view body camera footage to receiving body camera footage for every officer complaint,” she said. “We’ve gone from not being able to see officers’ names to reviewing officers’ names [in the wake of incidents].”

Boston police officer Larry Ellison, a member of the state’s police oversight commission and former head of the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers, said Cox will have to adjust to changes implemented since he left in 2019. But Ellison praised the selection.

“He’s very soft spoken but I think people shouldn’t misinterpret that as he’s someone who won’t get the job done,” he said.

Carol Rose, head of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said she looks forward to seeing a Boston Police Department that works more collaboratively with the communities it serves.

“Improving the culture of this department will not be easy,” Rose said in a statement. “But Boston now has the opportunity to realize transparency, accountability, and public safety for all people.”

Larry Calderone, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association says Cox faces some immediate challenges, including staffing levels and officer morale.

“Morale is the worst I’ve seen it in my 28 years,” he said. “They feel underappreciated. They have a lack of respect from their elected officials, not all of them but a handful on the city council. So there is a big morale problem in the department. So I think Commissioner Cox has his hands full with lack of personnel, lack of morale.”

Last year, Cox was also one of three finalists to run the Detroit Police Department.

In Boston, Cox will immediately face a number of challenges as the new commissioner. That includes an overtime scandal at the evidence warehouse, fallout from an investigation into how the police department allowed a child rapist to stay on the force for two decades, and a push by the city council to cut back on overtime⁠ — all amid national calls for overhauling policing.

Cox said his earliest priority is letting the department sworn and civilian staff know it has a leader again. After that, he plans to reintroduce the department to local residents and listen to what they have to say.

Wu said the list of finalists included both internal and external candidates. The mayor’s office gave conflicting information about the search. The city denied a public records request on July 6 for the application materials, saying it didn’t have the resumes, cover letters, or other written materials for any of the finalists. Instead, a spokesperson suggested all that was handled by a search committee and Wu just received a verbal briefing.

But Wu told reporters Wednesday she read the applications for all four finalists, including the resumes and cover letters. WBUR has appealed the decision to withhold all the documents to the Secretary of State’s office.

WBUR’s Simón Rios and Fausto Menard contributed to this report.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2022 WBUR. To see more, visit WBUR.

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