A few dozen people met in a parking lot behind the Fall River police station in freezing weather this month to listen to the family of Anthony Harden.
Harden, a 30-year-old Black man who shared an apartment in the city with his twin brother, was killed by police in his bedroom in November, igniting concerns about a potential case of police brutality.
Detectives investigating his death for the Bristol County district attorney’s office said two officers went to Harden’s apartment to arrest him after interviewing Harden’s girlfriend about an argument that she said turned violent. According to the investigators, the police officers say Harden allegedly tried to stab one officer with a steak knife before the other fired two shots into his abdomen.
There is no video of what happened, and the only eyewitnesses are the officers themselves. At the rally, Harden’s family demanded the release of more evidence so they can draw their own conclusions.
“They just want us to take their word for it, that what they said is correct,” said Eric Mack, the oldest of Harden’s five siblings. “That is never going to happen.”
Harden’s death, and the subsequent public outcry, comes as the Fall River Police Department grapples with a series of scandals that have eroded public trust. Two officers have been fired this month for allegedly filing false reports to cover up police brutality. And the Harden family’s concerns have injected a new sense of urgency into stalled negotiations over a plan to outfit many Fall River police officers with body-worn cameras that would record interactions with the public.
Calls for reform
The Bristol County District Attorney ultimately ruled that the police officers were justified in shooting Harden and declined to charge the officers in his death.
Lindsay Aldworth, an activist from the Coalition for Social Justice who was invited to speak at the January rally, said body cameras might have enabled a different interpretation of the shooting.
“Now, I’m not in law enforcement but what I do know is that police manage to safely de-escalate and disarm people in some communities and not in others,” Aldworth said in a speech that called for the police department to embrace the technology.
“The use of these body cameras,” she said, “is shown to improve police accountability and lower reports of police misconduct.”
Studies of police departments across the country tend to support Aldworth’s claims. A researcher from Northeastern University found police officers in Boston equipped with body cameras were 20% less likely to receive a complaint from a citizen than officers without body cameras.
A nationwide study from the University of Pennsylvania found communities that outfitted police with body cameras saw a 41 percent reduction in the number of people killed by police. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says body-worn cameras can be “highly effective resources, providing an unalterable audio and visual record of interactions that capture empirical evidence in the event of a crime, police-citizen interaction, or use-of-force incident.”
And many police departments have embraced them. In 2016, the most recent year the DOJ released data from its national survey of police chiefs, nearly half of local police departments reported they were using body cameras. It’s likely that share has grown significantly since then.
But Massachusetts, which passed a sweeping package of police reforms just over a year ago, is far behind that trend. The state’s Executive Office of Public Safety and Security reports just 10% of police departments in Massachusetts use body cameras.
In December, Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration announced grants to pay for the introduction or expansion of body camera programs in 64 cities and towns, including several on the South Coast.
Fall River received over $200,000. Still, securing the funding to start a program is no guarantee a city’s police force will end up wearing body cameras. Last spring, Fall River received a different grant from the federal government to fund a body camera pilot program, eight months before Harden’s death. It never got off the ground.
Union-city negotiations hit a snag
Fall River Mayor Paul Coogan was one of the pilot program’s strongest advocates.
“We ran up, got all the gears in place, everything ready to go, and we hit negotiations with the union, which turned out to be a stumbling block,” Coogan said.
He said the police supervisors’ and patrolmens’ unions in Fall River sought pay increases as part of the deal to introduce body cameras. The presidents of Fall River’s police unions did not respond to requests for comment about body cameras.
Police Chief Paul Gauvin said some officers are concerned the technology could affect the willingness of citizens to help them investigate cases in “high crime neighborhoods.”
“If we do end up recording full time,” he said, “are they still going to be open with us in providing information to the police?”
Gauvin is also worried about the cost of the program. The state’s grant pays for a yearlong rental of enough body cameras to outfit every police officer in Fall River, but Gauvin said it will cost another $200,000 to pay for cloud storage to archive the footage.
Then there are personnel costs: creating video footage of most arrests means lawyers will want that footage in court, and so will citizens and journalists who file public records requests. Gauvin said he might have to hire one or two new employees to respond to all the requests.
Still, the chief said he wants his police force wearing body cameras, and that many officers are looking to the technology “as a tool to help us.”
“We’re obviously aware that there’s a frayed relationship between the police and the public,” Gauvin said. “I think it’s going to help us really mend that frayed relationship and build on our public trust here.”
The Baker administration grant also comes with an expiration date: officials in Fall River have five months left to strike a deal with union leaders before the $200,000 disappears.
A string of controversial cases
Public relations with the Fall River Police Department were strained before Harden’s death. In 2020, investigative reporters from the television station WPRI published videos of the department’s then-chief, Albert Dupere, meeting officers at a bar on several Friday afternoons they reported working. The sergeant in charge of internal investigations at the time, J.T. Hoar, reportedly crashed his car after leaving one of these bar meetings in 2018. He was allowed to leave the scene without taking a sobriety test, according to WPRI.
Hoar’s replacement lost the job last June over a social media post about Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction. The post, which was accidentally published on the Fall River Police Department’s official Facebook page, suggested George Floyd was responsible for his own death.
The controversies and the subsequent turmoil in the department’s top positions have left more people in Fall River second-guessing the police force’s credibility, making moments like Harden’s death even harder for the community to reckon with.
At the rally outside police headquarters earlier this month, protesters brought up another fatal police shooting from four years ago.
In November 2017, a police officer breaking up a drag race at the Fall River Industrial Park approached a 19-year-old named Larry Ruiz-Barreto, who was starting his car with his father in the back seat.
The officer, Nicholas Hoar, later told investigators Ruiz-Barreto pumped the gas and knocked him onto the hood of the car, causing him to fear for his life. Hoar shot Ruiz-Barreto six times before handcuffing him. After a four-month investigation, the Bristol County District Attorney deemed Hoar’s shooting of Ruiz-Barreto justified.
Ruiz-Barreto’s father, Demix Ruiz Hernandez, shared his side of the story through a translator at the rally for Anthony Harden. He insists that his son had stopped the car as Hoar approached and was reaching to put the stick shift into park when Hoar fired his gun. Ruiz-Hernandez said neither of them could understand the orders the officer was shouting because they didn’t speak English.
Later, after his son was pronounced dead at the hospital, a fight broke out between Ruiz Hernandez’s family and the Fall River police.
“When we went to the hospital the day my son was killed, they beat all of my family,” Ruiz Hernandez said. “They gave us such a beating my brother’s head was fractured. They hit my wife.”
One of the officers involved in the fight, Michael Pessoa, is now the subject of a criminal case and several lawsuits alleging he lied in official reports to cover up police brutality. Pessoa was fired earlier this month, and criminal charges against Ruiz Hernandez and several relatives have been dropped.
The family of Larry Ruiz-Barreto is now suing the city for excessive use of deadly force and other alleged violations of their rights, seeking a payment of $34 million.
Both activists and police alike who support body cameras say that footage of either of these events — the killings of Harden and Ruiz-Barreto — would shed light on what happened and who was responsible. At the very least, the footage may have provided a sense of closure to two grieving families.
For now, the families of Larry Ruiz-Barreto and Anthony Harden say they are still fighting to find out the truth.
Ben Berke is the South Coast Bureau Reporter for The Public’s Radio. He can be reached at bberke@thepublicsradio.org. Follow him on Twitter @BenBerke6.
