Michael Cox (police officer): Difference between revisions

 

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==Personal life==

==Personal life==

{{as of|2024|4}}, Cox was married with three children.<ref name=Pennington/> One of his children is former [[UMass Minutemen football|UMass Minutemen]] and [[New York Giants]] running back [[Michael Cox (running back)|Michael Cox]].<ref name=Pennington>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/sports/football/a-lesson-in-perseverance-for-giants-running-back.html?hpw&rref=sports&pagewanted=all |title=A Lesson in Perseverance for a Giants Running Back |last=Pennington |first=Bill |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |date=November 16, 2013 |access-date=July 1, 2020 |url-access=limited}}</ref>

, Cox married with .<ref name=/> children former [[UMass Minutemen football|UMass Minutemen]] and [[New York Giants]] running back [[Michael Cox (running back)|Michael Cox]].<ref name=Pennington>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/sports/football/a-lesson-in-perseverance-for-giants-running-back.html?hpw&rref=sports&pagewanted=all |title=A Lesson in Perseverance for a Giants Running Back |last=Pennington |first=Bill |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |date=November 16, 2013 |access-date=July 1, 2020 |url-access=limited}}</ref>

==Notes==

==Notes==

American police officer (born 1965)

Michael Cox
Assumed office August 15, 2022
Mayor	Michelle Wu
Preceded by	Dennis White Gregory Long (acting)
In office September 2019 – July 31, 2022
Preceded by	Jim Baird[1] Robert Pfannes (interim)[2]
Succeeded by	Andre Anderson[3] Aimee Metzer (interim)[4]
Born	(1965-06-17) June 17, 1965 (age 60) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Children	3 (including Michael Jr.)
Years of service	BPD: 1989–2019 AAPD: 2019–2022 BPD: 2022–present
Rank	BPD: all ranks from Officer to Superintendent AAPD: Chief of Police BPD: Commissioner[a]

Michael A. Cox Sr.^[5] (born June 17, 1965) is an American police officer, currently serving as the commissioner of the Boston Police Department.^[a] He previously was the chief of police in Ann Arbor, Michigan from 2019 until 2022.

Cox was raised in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. Before being appointed as Ann Arbor’s police chief, Cox served approximately 30 years as an officer in the Boston Police Department until 2019. In 1995, Cox (working in plainclothes) was mistaken by fellow officers for a suspect during a chase, and was seriously beaten by fellow officers in a notable police brutality incident. Cox reached a financial settlement with the department, and continued to work an officer. He worked his way up to Superintendent, the second highest rank in the department before departing for Ann Arbor in 2019. He departed Ann Arbor to return to Boston in 2022 as the department’s chief.

Mike Cox was born in mid-1965 at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and raised in the Roxbury neighborhood of the city.^[6] He was the youngest of six children in an African-American family born to David and Bertha Cox.^[6][7] Cox’s father, David, was the first Black person to own a Boson-based landscaping company. His mother, Berta, worked for thirty-years as a wire sorter at Raytheon in Waltham, Massachusetts. Cox’s parents had originally met and married while living in Tennessee, but had resided in Boston for more than a decade by the time of Cox’s birth. They were middle class and the homeowners of a relatively large two-family residence which housed both their nuclear family as well as Cox’s grandparents.^[6]

Cox’s family home was located in Dudley Square (today known as Nubian Square), an area which in the 1970s and 1980s was experiencing high levels of unemployment, homelessness, and frequent crime. In the early 1970s, the city built a new police station and courthouse serving Dudley Square on a lot which abutted the Cox family’s backyard. As a youth, Cox became acquainted with some of the officers who worked there. This, combined with his affinity for television shows about police, inspired him to later pursue a career in law enforcement.^[6]

Cox attended private school in Brookline, then the private Milton Academy for one year, where he faced class-based discrimination. He moved to Wooster School in 1981 and was admitted to Providence College in 1984. Cox frequently saw his differences from other private school students as the result of a class-divide and not a race-divide.^[7] He was further educated Moorehouse College, an HBCU in Atlanta, before taking a civil service exam to begin his career in law enforcment.^[6]

From 1989^[8] until 2019, Cox spend approximately 30 years as a policeman in Boston Police Department (BPD).^[9] Over the course of his initial tenure at the department, he rose through the ranks; ultimately becoming Deputy Superintendent in 2013.^[8]

Cox joined BPD in 1989.^[8] When he joined the Boston Police Department, he befriended many white officers and was regarded as “color-blind” in his own views on race.^[7]

In the early 1990s, around the time Cox first joined the Boston Police Department (BPD), crime was high in minority neighborhoods, and among BPD officers, loyalty overruled training, resulting in widespread brutality and a code of silence. BPD officers frequently used stop and frisk tactics on black men and women, and beat black men with impunity. Lying under oath was common. A mayoral blue-ribbon commission to reform the police and a permanent injunction placed by a judge had both failed to change police culture. As a plainclothes officer, Cox was mistaken for a suspect and briefly beaten while still in training, and once purposefully hit by a police vehicle and pinned to a wall. He recovered quickly both times so did not file complaints.^[7]

In 1995, while Cox was working in plainclothes,^[8] his car was at the front of a high-speed chase in pursuit of gang members suspected of homicide. The chase involved several cars from the BPD and other departments.^[7][6][8] Cox continued the chase on foot, but was again mistaken by other officers for a suspect. He was badly beaten by four officers and hospitalized, suffering a serious brain injury. After the officers realized his actual identity^[7] (upon one officer noticing the police badge under Cox’s jacket),^[6] they quickly abandoned him to bleed on the sidewalk.^[7] It took Cox six months to recover from many of the physical injuries he incurred.^[6]

Cox learned only from newspaper reports that the other officers had failed to report the incident.^[7] He has recounted having become upset at efforts the other officers to hide what had occurred.^[6] He began receiving harassing phone calls from other officers even before he had decided whether he would file a complaint.^[7] For the next four year, Cox sought acknowledgement of what had taken place, hoping for at the very least an apology.^[6] In pursuit of this, he ultimately brought a lawsuit against BPD for the incident, which broke years of internal silence within the department on such misconduct, defying what was considered a “blue wall of silence“.^[8][6] While seeking to receive some justice for his beating, Cox was rendered a social pariah within the department, and faced threats and harassment from others in the department. However, he remained committed to his job as and officer and refused to leave.^[6] The lawsuit Cox brought ultimately led to BPD settling with him for $900,000 in damages, as well as $400,000 in attorneys’ fees.^[5] No officer admitted to the beating. Following the battle in court, three of the officers were eventually fired, but one, Dave Williams, successfully sued for unjust termination and was returned to the service in 2006. Williams was again fired for brutality in 2009, and again reinstated. As of 2023, Williams was assigned to domestic violence cases.^[10] Additional involved officers did not face firing.^[9]

The incident and its aftermath was the subject of the book The Fence, written by author and former reporter Dick Lehr of The Boston Globe.^[7] Lehr has opined that, in Boston, the incident of which Cox was the victim was “one of the worst cases of police brutality in modern times”.^[6]

After the lawsuit was settled, Cox remained in the BPD, and continued to work his way up in the department through promotions.^[6] In 2013, Cox was promoted to Deputy Superintendent in the BPD.^[8] By 2019, Cox had advanced to Superintendent, the second highest rank in the BPD.^[11] As a bureau chief, Cox headed the as Bureau of Professional Development and the Boston Police Academy from 2018 until leaving the department in 2019 to accept a position in the Ann Arbor Police Department.^[11][12]

In June 2019, Cox had received the recommendation of Ann Arbor, Michigan‘s Independent Community Police Oversight Commission to serve as the Ann Arbor Police Department’s new chief of police. Two other candidates were seeking also the position. In July 2019, his appointment was unanimously confirmed by the Ann Arbor City Council.^[12] He was sworn-in as chief in September 2019.^[13]

During his tenure, Cox faced the challenges of leading the department in navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide George Floyd protests.^[14]

Increasing the department’s transparency with the public was a central focus of Cox during his tenure in Ann Arbor.^[8] When he had been interviewed for the position in March 2019, Cox had expressed his support for public transparency and opined that Ann Arbor’s Police Oversight Commission played an important role in bridging Ann Arbor’s divide between police and the public.^[12] The Ann Arbor City Council tasked Cox with expanding the city’s community policing initiatives,^[14] and Cox worked to re-engage and grow citizen crime watch groups.^[8]

In February 2020, Cox was temporarily placed on administrative leave due to a personnel concerns^[12] involving Cox facing allegations of creating a hostile work environment and that employees feared retaliation ; as well as a separate accusations of insubordination.^[9] The concerns primarily emerged from a dispute between Cox had a department employee over the firing of a department colleague.^[8]

A review judged the accusations overlal to have been unfounded.^[8] The investigation commissioned by the city concluded that there was no evidence of Cox behaving in a manner that would have created a hostile work environment, but did find that (regardless of Cox’s intent) there was evidence that some employees feared retaliation by him with a legitimate basis. After the conclusion of the investigation, Cox was reinstated.^[9]

Cox admitted he had made some mistakes in communicating with others in the department. He cited his failure to adjust to the difference in the culture surrounding communication in the Boston Police Department (located in a large East Coast city) versus that of Ann Arbor (located in a smaller Midwestern city). He acknowledged that he needed to better his communication.^[8]

Cox’s tenure in Ann Arbor ended on July 31, 2022, when he left for Boston.^[4][14] While Cox had, as chief, sought to repair the department’s relationship with the city council,^[8] The Boston Globe reported that by the end of his tenure he lacked support from several members of the city council. The newspaper also reported that Cox lacked support among some members of his own police department staff. However, Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor expressed that he was sorry to see Cox leave the department.^[14]

In July 2022, Cox was announced as the incoming commissioner of the Boston police by the Mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu.^[15] His selection as the new police chief came after a seven month search process for a new chief,^[8] which included community feedback, interviews with candidates. A five-member search committee (headed by Geraldine Hines, former justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court) first narrowed the field to four finalists, before selecting him as their recommendation to the mayor.^[8] Cox was officially sworn in on August 15, 2022.^[16]

While a student at Moorehouse, Cox met Kimberly Nabauns –a student at Spelman College (an HBCU and women’s college, also located in Atlanta). The two began a relationship and married. During their relationship, both entered demanding jobs, with Michael working in medicine and Kimberly working in medicine (beoming an anesthesiologist at a hospital in Brockton, Massachusetts).^[6] Together, they had three children,^[6][5] including One former UMass Minutemen and New York Giants running back Michael Cox.^[5] As of April 2024^[update], Cox and his wife remained married to eachother.^[5]