LYNN — Amid global conversations and protests over racial violence, inequity, and the role of policing, The Item invited four law enforcement officers — three African-American and one Hispanic — to share their unique perspectives on race relations and the current climate. They are Lynn Police Officer Oren Wright, MBTA Transit Police Chief Kenneth Green, Swampscott Police Officer Joel Pimentel, and Lynn Police Officer Mark Williams.
This conversation has been video recorded and is available on The Item‘s website, www.itemlive.com. The moderator was Carolina Trujillo, director of community relations for Essex Media Group (EMG), which publishes The Item, and publisher of EMG’s Spanish-language newspaper, La Voz.
Trujillo: Welcome, thank you for accepting our invitation, and if you don’t mind, please introduce yourselves.
Wright: My name is Oren Wright with the Lynn Police Department. I’ve been a police officer for going on 24 years. I’m currently assigned as the school security and emergency planning liaison with the Lynn Public Schools.
Green: Hi, my name is Ken Green. I am a proud product of Lynn, I went to Lynn Public Schools, I’m the chief of the MBTA Transit Police Department. I’ve been a police officer now for 37 years, chief of police for five and a half years.
Pimentel: I’m Officer Joel Pimentel, Swampscott Police Department. I too am a product of Lynn, downtown Lynn. I went to Lynn English, I’ve been a police officer now for two and a half years, I spent two years with Transit Police, and I’ve now been with Swampscott for about six months.
Williams: I’m Officer Mark Williams. I was born and raised in Lynn, and I’ve been with Lynn PD now for approximately six years. I’m proud to be here.
Trujillo: Thank you so much for accepting this invitation. Let’s start with what I’m pretty sure everyone has on their mind, which is what does it feel like to be a person of color and wearing the uniform right now, when there’s so much hatred for the institution with the murder of George Floyd?
Green: I just want to speak about the murder of George Floyd and what that did to me. Watching that was very painful to watch. Before anything else, I’m a black man, and what that murder showed me was that that white police officer held no value in the sanctity of a black life, and it really made me angry. Then, I became fearful, because George Floyd could have been any one of my three sons, and that really enraged me. I can’t believe after what we’ve been through with the murders of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, and that list goes on and on and on, that we are still talking about and looking at the murder of an unarmed black man. It really upsets me. Now, putting on my law enforcement hat and viewing that murder, I was astonished at the coldness that that officer showed as that man lay dying underneath his knee.
Wright: I’ll go next, and I think I have to preface it with saying I’m a black man first at heart. It hurt because — and this kind of sums it up for me — blatant racism never went away, it’s just now being filmed. It makes doing this job a struggle now, putting on my police hat. And I know and have worked with several fantastic law enforcement officers from several departments, including my own, that are white, and I can’t imagine them doing anything like that. Something about police officers is we don’t agree on a lot of things, and this topic, this specific topic about George Floyd, every single police officer that holds life dearly and cares about this job is in full agreement that everything that happened in that moment was beyond wrong.
Williams: One of the things I took out of it, as far as the department, is I haven’t spoken to any officer or seen any officer who hasn’t expressed utter dissatisfaction, utter rage, for what happened. Exclusive of race, anyone I spoke to said, ‘This is just bad, this is just evil. Period.’ And I could see in the conversation and in their eyes they were enraged by it. I was enraged by it. And we saw it as a bad police act, whoever saw it. That, to me, shows that there is a camaraderie among us that believes there is good and evil, and that was just evil, and we look at it as a group. That was complete evil.
Green: I have to agree. We have about 800,000 police officers in the U.S. and the majority of police officers want to do what’s right. They want to treat people with respect and show them respect, but with any organization, there’s going to be a few that make us all look bad, and that’s exactly what’s happened, but it’s been happening a lot.
Trujillo: I was going to point to that. The frequency, it’s not helping, and it’s exacerbating the situation.
Green: It is a problem, and that’s why we’re having these mass demonstrations around the country, around the world, because people are sick and tired of being sick and tired of unarmed black men, unarmed black women, and sometimes unarmed black children being murdered at the hands of police officers — the same people that wear the same uniforms we wear, the same people that took the same oath of office and the same oath of honor and like vows that are committing these atrocities. It’s got to stop. People are demanding change, and change is coming. It’s coming.
Wright: This isn’t quieting down, and it shouldn’t. The other piece of this is there is so much outrage in all walks of life regarding this situation and the ongoing situation with the blatant violent racism. And it’s tough being a police officer in the sense that we’re as a whole being looked at as being wrong. They are calling for different things to happen to police forces, and I’ll say this about the city of Lynn, and I have to say this about the city of Lynn, and I can say this for myself, and I think for our department, that we are beyond proud of how the citizens have conducted themselves with protests. We stood, Mark (Williams) stood next to me in front of our department a few weeks ago when the first protest happened in Lynn, and we’re feeling the same pain that the people are feeling, because I’ve experienced blatant racism. I’m the second oldest here, and I know that you (Williams) have been through it, and I know you (Green) have been through it before, and it all comes back. It all comes back, and you can never forget it.
Trujillo: Can we talk about that a little bit right now? Apparently all of you have been through episodes of racism. Can you expand on that?
Pimentel: I can mention a couple things. I myself am not a black man. I am Dominican and Puerto Rican — my mother’s Puerto Rican and my father’s Dominican — but I have experienced racism in my life, at a young age in the city of Lynn. I think that being from Lynn, we’re truly blessed with how diverse it is. And being from a low-income community, coming from downtown Lynn, I could see different things that others may not have the chance to see in different cities and towns, and I think what we need to do is find a level of understanding between people. Coming from downtown Lynn, I was able to see friends of mine who face different things that others did not, and they were put in different situations and were more vulnerable to a life of delinquent and criminal activity, but those same friends of mine were good kids. They still are good kids. I’m only 25 years old, and I still see them out in the streets. And I still have that mindset, that I don’t interact with them as a criminal, I look at them like my friend that’s still my friend, and they treat me with the same respect, even with all this going on. I still have that relationship. So that being said, I think that, first, as police officers, we need to understand where they may be coming from. They might have had different circumstances growing up and weren’t as fortunate as yourself, or had different backgrounds, so I think us wearing a badge, being armed, and being in an authoritative role, we have to understand first, but I think as we do that, at the same time, the public has to understand that as police officers we take off this badge, go home, have families, and deal with problems just like anybody else. Once that level of understanding is met and changes are made, I think we can move on and make progress.
Green: I think you just made a great point. We’re all from Lynn. I grew up in America Park projects, which is now King’s Lynn. It was a dilapidated project I grew up in, and if you come from the projects, you know what that entails. There are a lot of people I grew up with who aren’t as fortunate or as blessed as I am right now to have chosen the path I’ve chosen, but they’re still my friends, they’re still good people, they have just taken a different path than I have. They’re amazed that I still treat them as my friends. They think I’m over here, up here, but no, I’m still Ken Green from America Park, so I treat everybody as they treat me. Now, as far as racism, I’ve been through it too as a kid. As young as 13 years old I saw racism. I remember going to MDC Arena over here on the Lynnway, me, one of my best friends, and a cousin, we’re 13 years old, and it’s freezing outside. We’ve got our skates in our hands, and it’s packed, and we’re trying to get inside the ice skating rink so we can get warm before it opened up, and a white police officer pointed us out and said, “You guys have to wait outside.” Why do we have to go outside? We’re mumbling this to ourselves. They have all these white people there, why don’t they have to go outside? So, my cousin being the way she is — she’ll let people know — said, “Why do we have to go out? Why are you letting all these white people go in? Why do we have to go out? It’s freezing out there.” He took her by the neck, slammed her up against the wall, slammed her on the ground, put handcuffs on her, brought her to the back room there, where you could hear her screaming, right, and placed her under arrest. She’s 13 years old, five-foot-nothing, 13. This is a grown man. We went to court and nothing happened. And I’ll give you another, same type of scenario. A year later, I went to Breed Junior High School … and one of the big things to do in the morning was get into Dunkin’ Donuts and get some hot chocolate. It was cold. We packed in there, and again there was a Lynn cop. He told all us black kids, “You’ve got to go outside and wait.” I’m not making this up, I was there. One of the guys said something, 13 years old — I’m 14, he was 13 — grabbed him, slammed him up against the wall, slammed him on the ground, handcuffed him, because he had the gall — he had the gall to speak up. He locked him up. That was a grown man treating little boys, black boys, like they were criminals. That happened. Now, being chief of police, I’m not immune to racial biases. I’m not immune. I’m not going to name the town, but I was down on the Cape, a pretty popular place. I was in my shorts, flip-flops and whatever, and I had to use the bathroom. Now, I could have walked further and used the bathroom, but there was a police station there. At this point, I’ve been a cop for 36 years. I’m comfortable around police, so I went in there, showed them my credentials, and they just looked at me and said, “This is a secure facility. No, you can’t use our bathroom.” I said, “What? If you came to Boston, and showed me the right credentials, absolutely you could come in there.” “Uh, sorry.” “Well, let me speak to the chief.” “He’s not here.” “Let me speak to the commanding officer.” “He’s out on the road.” You know, all these impediments. Well, OK. I walked out of there. They reminded me that before all these titles, before all these positions I held, you’re a black man, and what we see is black, threat, can’t-be-trusted. Now, me and the chief talked the next morning. He gave me the usual lip service, but I knew how I felt. I knew how I felt. I could go on and on, but I’ll let somebody else speak.
Wright: I’ve had several instances. I moved from Lynn in the third grade to Peabody, so going into a classroom where I was the only black kid. You had different things happen to you, from kids, from parents. You get a little older in middle school and you want to date a white girl, you know. You know that when you meet someone, the first thing they see is the color of your skin. I’m not going to bore you with the many indignities I went through there, but it was refreshing to come back to Lynn on the weekends because of the diversity. And, granted, things did change by the time I was ready to get into high school, but it was a tough road initially. And, flash forward to being a police officer, in my first eight or nine months of being a police officer, and when you’re working with a partner, half the time you’re driving the other half of the time you’re taking all the reports, and I remember knocking on the door of someone who had called the police, the person opened the door, and I’m the first person standing there, and them walking right past me, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with me, and speaking to my white partner, who’s right next to me. And, God bless him, he said, “Excuse me, that officer’s talking to you.” In that moment, that very moment — I hadn’t thought something had miraculously changed because I became a police officer and wear this uniform — that told me a lot. There’s still people out there, and this person wasn’t much older than me, which was another tough thing.
Green: I was a supervisor and that happened to me. You have people coming up and asking questions and they’re talking to the white officer, and they’re not even acknowledging me, and I’m the supervisor. And you see the white officer, “Well, um, um, you might want to talk to him first. That’s my supervisor.” It happens.
Trujillo: I think we can stop this part of the conversation now, and address the second part of the conversation. I’m glad you guys are being very open about your own experiences within your roles as police officers experiencing racism among your own peers, and we can expand a little bit upon that in our next segment.
Trujillo: We’re going to continue our conversation about race and having a job as a police officer, and I just want to pick up on the last part of our conversation, which is you’ve already expressed you have experienced racism within your own department, which is supposed to be a family. The police department is supposed to be a family, so can we talk about that a little more?
Wright: Can I just clarify one thing? I just want to make sure it’s clear. I have not witnessed racism toward me or toward anyone within my department. I don’t know about you Mark (Williams), and I want to know about it if you do, but I haven’t. For me, I’d be heartbroken if someone I’ve worked with over the last almost 24 years was like that and I didn’t know about it. I haven’t personally, and I’d be shocked. Stereotypes, we were talking about off camera. When I first started there was an officer, I was working dispatch on overtime, which was a night shift, and over those six months he would not talk to me, just would not talk to me. And he was an older man, had retired later. And I’m thinking to myself, “What? It’s because I’m black.” And I’m sitting there and he’s working with me and another couple of people in the room and we’re talking about college basketball, and he turns to me. That person turned to me, who I thought was possibly racist, and he said, “Kid, you like college basketball?” And he became my best buddy. He didn’t stereotype me as a black man liking college basketball. He was doing the rookie hazing, he wanted nothing to do with the rookie except tell me what to do, and God rest his soul, he passed away a couple years ago, and I still write on his Facebook wall, “Happy birthday in heaven. Rest in peace.”
Trujillo: So you’ve never experienced racism in…
Wright: Not within my department. Working in plain clothes, and maybe there’s another agency, when my partners and I are walking out and we’re going to use an informant to do a job with us, and it was all white officers, myself, and an informant, who was Dominican, and one of the other agency people came and put his arm around me and started giving me the play-by-play of what they wanted to do. I pulled my badge out, and said, “Really?” And, needless to say, they stumbled over themselves a little bit, and we went about our business, but I never forgot that. My supervisor then, to say he corrected that person would be an understatement.
Trujillo: I’m glad. I’m glad that happened.
Pimentel: I have a comment to make. Prior to working in Swampscott, I worked for Transit Police, and there was a situation at North Station one day, and I don’t know if you want to call it racism, but there was a Puerto Rican male who recognized I was Hispanic, and I saw him do what I thought was drug business, and I stopped him to talk to him, and he became irate and was calling me a traitor, being that he knew I was Puerto Rican and he felt angry that I was stopping him, and the fact that I was Puerto Rican and a police officer, that shows that stereotyping happens among your own ethnicity as well. It shows that among generations this is ingrained in individuals’ heads. They see a Hispanic police officer and can’t believe he’s a police officer.
Williams: A caveat to that, that’s right on. I was on for six years, and I kind of expected it, because it’s policing and even though you’re a black man, you’re still going to get some blowback because you’re an officer. One of the biggest things I noticed — I can’t really count how many times — I remember a specific time we arrested this gentleman and we brought him in for booking and he became irate for no particular reason, and he said, “I don’t want to talk to you, I want to talk to that officer.” And he specifically said, “That white officer.” He was drunk and everything but he was articulating what he was saying, and he said, “You guys get worse when you become officers, because you’re against us.” He went on this diatribe, and I thought, “Wow,” and there have been several instances I can think of. And most of the times when slurs were thrown out, ironically, it was my own race and they were saying, like you (Pimentel) were saying, “You’re a traitor.” And some of the worst things I’ve heard, our approach was good, no one got hurt, and it was a victory all the way through, but some of the things I noticed were the words being thrown out were, “You’re a traitor to your race.”
Wright: Uncle Tom.
Williams: Uncle Tom, you’ve got to throw that out there. There were other slurs, but it’s unfortunate in my mind, because I’ve been personally blessed. I had my dad in my life, and he told me stories about what he went through and said, “I don’t want you to go through this,” and steered me on the right path. But it’s kind of fortunate, because I think I haven’t experienced what my dad experienced or what my mom experienced before me, but I can try to reverse the trend and be a part of this and be a police officer and reach out a little bit, and I get this blowback and I was kind of shocked by it — not everybody, not everybody, but more times than often, and that was kind of a shocker.
Trujillo: I’m glad you point that out, because, as you were saying, there are two forms of doing this. So, the first part is, within your organization, trying to right these wrongs, and you were saying there are all these stories that are negative stories with police officers, and right now they are just portraying these experiences into any officer, and so there’s some work that needs to happen within the organization, and so we can talk a little about that. And the other part is, within the community, how do we repair those bonds? And how do we start building that trust, as you said, “My father has told me, ‘You need to do right within your authority, you need to do the right thing.'” That’s a two-way question.
Green: I’d like to back up for a minute, because I think your question was have you experienced racism within your department, and I didn’t get to answer that. So, if I can, I’d appreciate it. Listen, there’s institutional racism. There’s racism within every institution, every large institution, whether it’s education, housing, healthcare, and, yes, it’s in law enforcement. And, yes, there are people in my department, there have been people in my department, who harbor racial biases. They just do. I’ve lived it. I’m living it now. I’m being sued right now, in federal court, by three middle-aged white guys who I had to discipline, terminate, and the funny thing about it is how easily they can bring these lawsuits. I terminate them, it goes through arbitration, arbitration confirms that I was right that they hold those firings up, but, “OK, let’s try and get them in federal court.” So, it’s one of those things you’d think they were cutting and pasting their same complaints — “He doesn’t like white people,” “He doesn’t like veterans,” “Never mind that I was putting in overtime when I wasn’t entitled to, never mind I was stealing money, never mind I was going AWOL multiple, multiple times, hours, hours, hours, never mind I was covering up a civil rights violation and submitting false reports, never mind what I did, look at him, he’s a black man, look at what he’s doing to me. He doesn’t like white people, he doesn’t like” — it’s crazy, and what’s even more crazy is the courts are letting this go through. And another thing I want to hit on, you don’t see racism until you become a threat. You’re a police officer, they can’t do anything to you, until you start climbing — you become a supervisor, deputy, on the command staff, chief, you’re competition, and that’s when you really see it. You know, “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s black, he only got the position because he’s black. I should have got this position” — even though he’s not nearly as qualified as I am. I’ve lived through it. I’m living through it now. You know, this one guy, I became interim chief and there was a guy on the command staff and he was undermining me, “He’s stupid. He’s only a junior guy. He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” and I finally got so pissed off I put him back down to a Civil Service rank. And what’s that guy doing now? He’s a lieutenant doing the midnight shift. So, I had to get rid of him, get him off my command staff, so those are some of the things I go through. But, again, you have to have thick skin, you have to have big shoulders, you have to drown out the noise, but again, as chief, and I’m not trying to brag about this but, the patrol plan we put together and the hard work of the men and women of the Transit Police, we got crime down to historic lows, historic lows the MBTA has never seen — not for one year, not for two years, not for four years, but for five years straight — that’s the job we’ve been doing.
Trujillo: Thank you so much for getting that question back on track. Going to my original question, from a department perspective, how do you guys feel that this can be resolved in way that it ends?
Wright: What ends?
Trujillo: Racism.
Wright: I don’t know that we’re going to see that in our lifetime. As a matter of fact, we’re not. And I’m not OK with that, but those voices, that noise the chief has talked about a few different times, it’s been understood for some years now it’s not going to be tolerated, but there’s always some underlying, someone who has these thoughts and still has these ways about them. As far as getting through this current situation — I almost don’t have words to describe what’s going on now. Some people are using words like revolution, defund the police, and all these other things — I can speak for the city of Lynn, and I can speak for me personally, what I’ve been involved with, and we have to continue with how we reach out. We work with the clergy, we work with the kids. This summer, except for COVID happening, it would have been my 22nd year with Essex (County Summer) Day Program, where we run a camp with 10 other communities and we all meet in one place in do field trips and we’re sneaking in some learning at the same time — anti-drug, anti-gang. And, there’s so much that can be done. Almost every department is doing something or has been doing something, and that’s why the protests went the way they did. Yes, like Officer Williams said, there’s been some nasty things being said but among the four or five hundred people standing in front of us at the police station, they are maybe 20, 30, and yeah, they stick out because they are saying the opposite of what was being said by the masses. Even with the anger in the crowd, it was not about violence, it was about being sick and tired of being sick and tired, accountability, what are you going to do, what are we going to do, because this doesn’t end with just black voices. We need every voice. The majority voice is still white in this country, and if everybody believes that all lives matter, that black lives matter, that blue lives matter, that white lives matter — pick a color, that all lives matter — and everybody needs to speak up. We can’t just be protesting every week. What are we going to do. I’m not going to get into the specifics of what my department is doing, and what I would personally like to see happen, but we’re looking to make some things happen along with what we already do. Because with the people, no violence occurred. The people demanded it be peaceful, even with the noise, the bad voices in the mix. The people demanded it be peaceful.
Trujillo: Before I go to you chief, I know Officer Pimentel wanted to say something about what can be done.
Pimentel: I just wanted to make two quick points here. It was said earlier that to make progression we have to make encounters. There’s always going to be crime, but with officers on the street, maybe you can deter some. We need encounters that change the mindset of how officers engage with black citizens and officers of color engage with white people and change that mindset. I think we can make a progression. With the hiring process, if you get more in depth, I think you can weed out those that have these biases within a department, not just having individuals who have a GED or diploma, but maybe looking more into having an investigation. Right now you can put down a couple references, but maybe talk to guidance counselors, teachers, find out who this officer recruit really is. By doing that and finding that, you can weed out officers who are being hired with certain biases.
Trujillo: Thank you. Chief, you have the closing comment.
Green: Listen, I’m a little bit older than everybody here, right? A little more experienced. Discussions about racism have been going on for years, way before my time, and nothing changes. Now, with all these demonstrations and the protesters and the demographics of the protesters, white, black, Latino, Asian, from all walks of life, they’re demanding change, change has to happen. This is not going to go away. Now, how do we change within the police department? We change policy. MBTA Transit Police Department made two great changes in the use-of-force policy: We added valuable language that the use of chokeholds, strangleholds, neck restraints are prohibited. That’s in our policy. Another thing we added in there — and this is big-time for law enforcement officers, because we usually take care of each other, right? — all officers that witness another officer use excessive force, regardless of rank, have a duty and obligation to intervene and report that activity immediately. And, because we’re talking about unarmed black people being murdered, we have to hold officers accountable for their actions, not just charged when we see this gross misconduct, not just charged, but be put in jail, and not just jail, but prison for a long period time, and when other people see that, hopefully that will help them from doing the same thing and going down the same road.
Trujillo: I agree 100 percent with you, and I want to take the time to thank you for having this open discussion with us and sharing with us your history within the department. We really appreciate and all our readers really appreciate hearing your voices, because like you said, “We’re black men, and we go through these motions like every other black person in this country.”
Green: We’re wearing two hats.
Trujillo: That’s so, so powerful. Thank you so much, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.
