Boston Police sergeant sues department over demotion following appointment to police oversight panel
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The command staff, composed of deputy superintendents and superintendents, are appointees of the commissioner. These ranks are separate from the civil service ranks, which including officer, sergeant, lieutenant, and captain.
Chrispin said he was told that he 'couldn't serve two masters.' Chrispin is the former president of the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers, and he and Cox are both Black.
Chrispin did not step down from POST. Cox removed him from the command staff last July, returning him to his previous rank of sergeant detective.
'I was deeply honored to accept Attorney General Campbell's appointment to the POST Commission which allows me to weigh-in on cases of misconduct and enlighten POST on matters of policing that come from firsthand lived experience as a Haitian immigrant, a Black man, and a veteran member of law enforcement,' Chrispin said in a statement Thursday.
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Attorneys at Lawyers for Civil Rights and Conn Kavanaugh Rosenthal Peisch & Ford filed suit against Cox in the commissioner's personal and professional capacities, according to a copy of a lawsuit. Chrispin is seeking to be reinstated to deputy superintendent and awarded back pay.
Chrispin remains on the POST commission, according to its website.
The Boston Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Last summer, a police department spokesperson said Chrispin's account was 'not accurate,' but declined to comment further. A department official also said that serving on the state panel would give him access to sensitive internal information about BPD officers he wouldn't otherwise have.
At the time,
'I believe that for our leaders to do well, in any organization and what I've seen in the public sector and in city government, management matters, organizational health matters,' she said.
Sean Cotter can be reached at
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The L.A. Distortion Effect
One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive. The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil ('I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,' The American Prospect 's David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. 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What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown. Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what's happening in L.A. varies considerably. Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one's impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of 'mostly peaceful protests' as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It's likely that my grasp of the events and their politics are shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption. Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump's wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.) I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble. On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they're cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as 'CIVIL WAR ALERT' and 'DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!' All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it. I've written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user's TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it's not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country's largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives. On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I've seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers' market—and lots of pictures of the city's unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it's hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it's unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters 'to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.' In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn't matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to 'Send in the Troops' to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline 'Send in the Troops, for Real.' (For transparency's sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.) There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration's second term. The administration's policies are more extreme, and there's a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody's even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government's deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not. This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump's second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are. The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.
