Behind the blue wall: Claims of bias in the State Police force
Jim Jones hadn’t been a State Police trooper long when his commanding officer threatened to sell him to a different plantation.
The captain who reveled in those racist taunts died years ago, Jones said, and the kind of overt bigotry that was common in an earlier era is mostly buried. But a more subtle bias remains very much alive in the barracks of the Massachusetts State Police, said Jones, who was the department’s highest-ranking African-American when he retired last September.
Jones, whose career and credentials should have left him well-positioned for the department’s highest ranks, quit the force in frustration after he said the department failed to punish a major who ostracized him. Instead, the commander promoted Jones to a dead-end desk job, a move designed, Jones believes, to persuade him to abandon his discrimination complaint.
“I couldn’t stomach it anymore,” said Jones, who retired as a major at age 49. “I left the State Police because my heart was broken.”
Inside the overwhelmingly white and male barracks of New England’s largest police force, women and minority troopers say they must navigate a workplace culture that can be hostile or even discriminatory toward them, according to a Globe investigation.
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