A two-year investigation by the Justice Department found patterns of “outrageous” conduct by the police in Worcester, Mass., including excessive use of force and sexual contact between undercover officers and women suspected of prostitution.
In a report released on Monday, the department’s civil rights division detailed police misconduct dating back at least five years in Worcester, a city of 207,000 in central Massachusetts. It corroborated repeated reports by women’s advocates in the city that officers had “tricked or misled” women suspected of being prostitutes into providing sex acts and “offered less, or no, punishment in exchange for sex.”
Federal investigators found that the Worcester Police Department’s “inadequate” policies, training, supervision, investigations and discipline “fostered these unlawful patterns.” They also raised “serious concerns” that the department’s enforcement practices could result in biased and discriminatory policing of Black and Hispanic residents, who were disproportionately arrested and subjected to force, according to the report.
Brian T. Kelly, a lawyer representing the Police Department, criticized what he called “an unfair, inaccurate and biased report which unfairly smears the entire Worcester police force” instead of targeting individual officers “who could, and should, be prosecuted if these serious allegations are true.”
Mr. Kelly said that the report was “riddled with factual inaccuracies” and that it ignored information provided by the city that “debunks many of the anonymous claims.”
Worcester is the second city in Massachusetts where the Justice Department has found a pattern of police misconduct in recent years. An investigation of the narcotics division of the Springfield Police Department concluded in 2020 that officers there had used excessive force because of deficient policies and a lack of accountability.
That department agreed, through a consent decree in 2022, to improve its policies and training.
In Worcester, examples of excessive force included “unreasonably stunning people with Tasers, striking people in the head, using police dogs to bite people and escalating minor incidents, including during calls related to behavioral health,” according to the Justice Department report.
The report cited multiple examples of Worcester officers hitting people in the head and face, including one instance in which an officer punched a handcuffed man three times in the face when he resisted an escort to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.
Another officer responding to a mental health call, who had previously received 40 hours of training in crisis intervention, hit a man in the face while he was restrained and lying on a hospital stretcher, the report said. The officer described his action as an “open hand distraction technique.” He did not report his use of force against the man, who had spit at him, until a bystander’s video later attracted public attention.
The report noted repeated failures by Worcester police officers to “appropriately handle minor incidents,” and their tendency to escalate such incidents through force instead of well-established de-escalation strategies such as giving people in crisis extra space, and speaking slowly and calmly.
Though the Police Department has a crisis intervention team, with three trained officers, it does not prioritize sending them on calls, the investigation found.
Hundreds of residents protested in Worcester, the state’s second-largest city, in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, to demand changes in local policing. A year later, the city commissioned a racial equity audit of the Police Department; the audit, released in March, found that Black and Hispanic residents were being disproportionately arrested.
About 61 percent of Worcester residents are white, while 25 percent are Hispanic, 13 percent are Black and 7 percent are Asian, according to recent census data.
In its report released on Monday, the Justice Department credited the city for changes made since the audit began, including requiring all officers to wear body cameras starting last year. Worcester agreed to pay each rank-and-file officer an annual stipend of $1,300 for wearing the cameras after the police union demanded it.
Still, despite longstanding complaints about inappropriate sexual conduct by officers — and “multiple credible accounts that W.P.D. officers have sexually assaulted women under threat of arrest” — leaders of the Worcester police failed to develop responsive policies or training, the Justice Department found.
In addition, officers who admitted to sexual misconduct were never disciplined, according to the report.
The Justice Department said it was seeking input from the Worcester community on “remedies to address the investigation’s findings.” Federal investigations like the one conducted in Worcester often result in legally binding improvement plans, or consent decrees, that are agreed on by both sides.
The department is scrambling to finish several other investigations into police conduct around the country before President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration in January. Republican administrations have historically been far less aggressive than Democratic ones in pursuing such inquires.
After the Justice Department announced findings from its investigation of the Memphis Police Department last week, that city’s mayor expressed reluctance to agree to a consent decree, saying it would be “bureaucratic and costly.”
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