Boston Police Department

The Boston Police Department’s overtime budget is on track to reach a record-breaking $100 million this year, city officials say, despite several years of focused attention on reducing police spending.

On the campaign trail in 2021, a majority of candidates for city offices supported shuttering the Boston Police Department’s controversial gang database and ending the department’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

The Boston Police Department recently announced that it has joined the 30x30 Initiative, a commitment to have women make up 30% of sworn recruits by 2030. But officials did not say how much of that figure would include Black women and other women of color.

In September 2020, the Banner asked the Boston Police Department why their records appeared to show officers collecting overtime for court duty while simultaneously making arrests and traffic stops sometimes miles from the nearest courthouse.

With a deadline looming, Boston City Council members gave reluctant approval to a report detailing the use of various kinds of surveillance technologies by the Boston Police Department (BPD) and other city departments.

A City Council hearing on the idea of using civilian flaggers instead of police details on some construction projects got heated Monday as Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association President Larry Calderone refused to surrender the microphone after exceeding the five-minute limit for testimony, prompting councilors to walk out of the hearing, held at the Bolling Building in Roxbury.

Michael Cox spent 30 years in the Boston Police Department before leaving to head the Ann Arbor, Michigan force. Now he’s returning as commissioner of the BPD.

Last week several progressive lawmakers, led in part by Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, urged the federal government to end the transfer of military weapons to local law enforcement through administrative action.

After a six-month search process, Mayor Michelle Wu has announced that Michael Cox, formerly of the Boston Police Department and most recently head of the Ann Arbor Police Department, will take the helm as Boston’s next police commissioner.

In April Patrick M. Rose, Sr., a former Boston Police officer and former president of the patrolmen’s union pled guilty to molesting six children in a period of more than two decades –– raising questions of how a department tasked with protecting the public could let one of their own get away with such blatant misconduct all while remaining on the force.

Mayor Michelle Wu rejected the Boston City Council’s amended budget Monday, responding with her own revised spending plan that shrinks the council’s proposed multi million dollar cuts to the city’s police and fire departments.