MBTA police unit questioned

When Samuel Goldberg, a criminal defense lawyer for the Boston firm Altman and Altman, saw that a Beverly man had been arrested for allegedly groping a plainclothes officer on the Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority’s Blue Line on Jan.16, he thought the arrest occurred too quickly. He took to his blog on Tuesday to write his reaction.

‘Perhaps there was a sudden stop, and you did touch the complainant in [a] private place accidentally,’ Goldberg wrote in the Boston Criminal Lawyer Blog. ‘Whose version do you think law enforcement will go with? What will look better in the media later that day . . . that a groper was caught, and so the T is safe, or that the police did not feel they had enough to make an arrest?’

Goldberg said he knows sexual assault is a serious crime, but he thinks people are often falsely accused of crime because of the pressure from the media. Especially when the alleged assault occurs on a crowded train, he said.

‘One criticism that I have in general is that once an accusation is made against the person, the police are very quick to decide the accusation must be true,’ Goldberg said. ‘They make the arrest. They are never going to be accused of being too tough on crime.’

MBTA Police Lieutenant Detective Mark Gillespie said the MBTA is making every effort to investigate alleged crimes and prevent sexual assault. One of the measures used to prevent assault is a group of undercover officers that deals directly with sexual assault.

‘We go out there and look for trends that we’ve defined to identify possible perpetrators,’ Gillespie said. ‘We put a plain clothes unit out there and make sure there are several witnesses.’

Goldberg said he was pleased the MBTA was working to prevent assault, but does not agree with the initiative. He said the MBTA should have more officers working instead of spending time on such a specialized unit.

‘The idea of having an undercover officer is a good one . . . rather than putting a unit together with a name that sounds good for publicity,’ Goldberg said. ‘It would be more important to have bodies out there.’

The MBTA uses many officers and technology to investigate all claims of assault before arresting anyone, Gillespie said.

‘We launch investigations that last weeks and sometimes months,’ Gillespie said. ‘The investigations are going on all the time.’ The arrests are not as frequent as the assaults.’

Liz Metzger, events coordinator for Boston University Women’s Resource Center, said it’s difficult for women to go to police after they have been sexually assaulted, and false accusations are very rare.

‘It’s not like women go around saying ‘he touched me’ for fun,’ Metzger, a Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences senior, said.

Sarah Sullivan, also an events coordinator, agreed with Metzger. She said she understood that it can be difficult to identify a perpetrator on a crowded train.

‘I can understand the argument,’ Sullivan, a College of Arts and Science sophomore, said. ‘The subway is really crowded. There’s a mysterious hand. You don’t know where it comes from. That’s not how most sexual assaults happen.’

Carrie Chiusano, Co-Director of the BU Women’s Resource Center, said people who are grabbed on a crowded train are not likely to report that as sexual assault. She added that these ‘gropers’ are not the people the MBTA is targeting.

‘They are not looking to indict someone whose hand flies out and grabs someone’s butt,’ Chiusano, a College of Communication senior, said.

All three women agreed that the specialized unit will help protect women from sexual assault, but that it is only a step.

‘It is a societal problem, not an MBTA problem,’ Metzger said. ‘I’m glad they’ve taken notice, but things aren’t going to change from a few undercover police officers. Things change when society decides it’s not right to treat someone like a piece of meat.’