The sun had already set as three teenage boys wrapped up a basketball game at the Harbor Point apartments, a housing complex that juts out into Dorchester Bay.
As they walked home on that cold night in February of 2022, they noticed an unmarked black Ford Explorer following them. They got nervous, the group told investigators, and ducked into the basement of a nearby building.
When they exited from the other side, three more black cars “cornered them,” according to an investigation by the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency (OPAT), Boston’s police oversight body. Police jumped out with guns drawn, the report says, yelling “do not move or we will f—ing shoot you.”
One of the teenagers said an officer then tackled him to the ground and handcuffed him. When he sat up he had a large cut across his right eyebrow. In transcripts of body camera footage included in official reports, the detaining officer, Matthew Conley, said, “I literally had the gun in my hand, so I punched him in the face with it.”
The oversight agency recommended that Conley be terminated. But Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox refused to fire him.