E-Mail This Article to a Friend O’Toole feeds the media The Boston Police Department is getting a much-needed image overhaul. Are the changes real or just PR? BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN
	Related links NBC Nightly News report This three-minute report, "Massachusetts Women Make History," featured Commissioner O’Toole. It aired on February 14; you can watch the video or read the transcript here. Boston Police Department This is the BPD’s official Web site. It includes press releases, crime statistics, and other information. Boston Police Department Area B Boston’s Area B — covering Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan — maintains this separate public-information site, although District B-3, the subject of much recent media coverage, does not contribute to it.

IN HER FIRST year as Boston Police Department commissioner, Kathleen O’Toole seldom sought out the media, while frequently lamenting that they gave her no "honeymoon period." She spent plenty of time doing face-to-face public outreach at community forums, but often ignored the need to feed the media beast, out of her own admitted distaste for the task.

That seems to have changed. After a year of enduring the media’s slings and arrows, O’Toole and her department have recently received positive coverage from both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, as well as from national media. The Globe ran a gushing 3800-word profile on February 13, headlined A YEAR IN THE SPOTLIGHT EARNS O’TOOLE RESPECT. It described the commissioner as "able and thoughtful," "generally well-liked as well as respected," and "an ebullient presence." The very next day, NBC Nightly News aired a three-minute "Women Leading the Way" segment about O’Toole, Suffolk County sheriff Andrea Cabral, and Massachusetts Department of Correction commissioner Kathleen Dennehy. "Do you feel like landmarks?" asked the interviewer. "It’s humbling," O’Toole replied.

O’Toole denies that such exposure is evidence of a strategic public-relations shift. "The few positive stories we have received are coincidental," she told the Phoenix. "I think it’s just cyclical." But she acknowledges that she agreed to participate in the Globe and NBC profiles despite her personal discomfort with self-promotion. Her plan for a safe post–Super Bowl celebration in Boston included considerable press outreach. And late last year, she replaced her previous hand-picked communications director, Beverly Ford, with Thomas Sexton, to improve the handling of media requests, she says.

A new PR push is an understandable, and perhaps necessary, response to a serious negative shift in city residents’ perceptions of the police department, as revealed in an internal report finalized last September (see "Reasonable Bias," News and Features, January 7). The death of Victoria Snelgrove after the Red Sox pennant victory in October may have been the last straw. With another potential Super Bowl celebration looming in February, and then the release of reports on Snelgrove’s death likely this spring, O’Toole couldn’t afford to let the department’s image dip any further.

So around that time, even though she tells the Phoenix that "personally, I absolutely despise" being profiled, O’Toole agreed to let reporter Sally Jacobs tag along for a few weeks to write the Globe profile. She also gave the go-ahead for the Spike TV cable network to film her and several officers for a documentary titled Behind the Badge.

O’TOOLE AND her staff also seem to have realized at 2004’s end that they shouldn’t wait for results — or even until implementing a plan — before taking credit for change. Thus on December 18, the Globe ran a story about plans to beef up the homicide unit, the substance of which turned out to be only that the head of that unit was "talking to" O’Toole about adding detectives and technology. On January 1, a Globe story about a new citizen review board — "one of [O’Toole’s] most significant moves since she took office" — turned out again to be purely theoretical.

This trend reached its apotheosis on the January 14 cover of the Herald, which screamed SCORE ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS alongside a photo of District B-3 officers. B-3, which covers Mattapan and Upper Dorchester, had a very, very bad year in 2004; homicides more than quadrupled to 23 — the district’s highest count in years — only three of which resulted in an arrest. The Herald praised the squad for a three-month lull since the last murder in the district. Two weeks later, O’Toole presented that squad with a framed copy of the Herald cover, congratulating them for their fine work — a gesture that was reported by the Herald the next day. Her praise was premature: two murders would take place in the district during the ensuing eight days.

The Herald has nevertheless become a virtual B-3 newsletter. Good-cop stories about that district in the past six weeks have appeared under the headlines GUN-TOTING DUO’S ARREST STOPS BLOODBATH; COPS’ QUICK THINKING SAVES ONE LIFE, MAYBE MORE; and COPS’ SECRET WEAPON VS. CARNAGE: MOMS. A series of articles about an amnesiac reunited with his family by the police did even more for the B-3’s image.

Coverage of the Boston police has not been all positive, to be sure. The Herald reported this month on the department’s backlog of unprocessed fingerprint evidence, resulting from the shut-down of the BPD’s lab last fall. Criticism from minority officers displeased with O’Toole’s reassigning of high-ranking minority personnel during her recent command shakeup has also received prominent coverage. Even there, however, the city dailies generally have given high marks for O’Toole’s housecleaning, with the Globe editorializing in praise of the changes.

But the good press may all come crashing down when the report on Snelgrove’s death comes out, or after the next round of street violence. Because in Boston, nobody’s press honeymoon lasts very long.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com