Behind the Bastards - boston slide cop

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

In the summer of 2023, a Boston cop humiliated himself by tumbling down a public slide in the most embarrassing way possible. This week, Jamie tries to find his pig ass, and admits her background as a Terminally Boston Woman. Interviews with Molly Conger and Jeff Raymond. Follow Molly: https://x.com/socialistdogmom  Follow Jeff: https://www.masstransparency.org/author/jraymond/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey fam, I'm Simone Boyce. I'm Danielle Robay. And we're the hosts of The Bright Side, the podcast from Hello Sunshine that's guaranteed to light up your day. Like our recent episode with Melissa Joan Hart. LL Cool J gave me some great advice. He had all those gold chains and I was like, wow, look at all these diamonds. And he said something to the effect of don't waste your money on something like this. Buy a house. Like he gave me like solid investment advice where I was like, save my money. Got it. Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone, this is Molly and Matt, and we're the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts. It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting. Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more. Let's learn about all of it and then some.

Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff. work I heart open your free I heart app and search grown up stuff. Mother's Day is right around the corner and in true she pivots fashion. We're highlighting moms who've dedicated their lives and their pivots to supporting mothers. The iconic Christie Turlington will join us to talk about launching every mother counts after pivoting from her 90s supermodel days.

And later the co-CEOs of baby to baby will share how they're addressing the launching Every Mother Counts after pivoting from her 90s supermodel days. And later, the co-CEOs of Baby2Baby will share how they're addressing the needs for millions of babies and moms. So tune in and subscribe to She Pivots. New episodes out every Wednesday. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cool Zone Media. If you don't know that the cops in Boston have a bad reputation, it's possible you just haven't seen many movies.

There's The Town, The Boondocks Saints, Black Mask, Spotlight, Mystic River. I'm pretty sure even the cops in Ted and Ted too are incompetent. As a rule of thumb, any movie where a grown man is shouting, my daughter, probably takes place in Boston and is a result of the war between the Boston cops and the white working poor. What I'm saying is, if you're not familiar with the police of Boston's reputation, that's a cinema problem. My name is Jamie Loftus,

and my neighbors who are always arguing just moved. And this is 16th Minute, the podcast where we take a closer look at the internet characters of the day and what that says about us and the internet and us on the internet. So let's play Sadie's amazing theme song about it. ["Sick of It"]

Welcome. ["Sick of It"] Then give me one more minute I can't 16 minutes of fame 16 minutes of fame 16 minutes of fame One more minute of fame Today's subject hits close to home for me because it takes place within a 20-mile radius of my entire family. For all of the characters of the day that stick with us, it's a little unusual for the person we talk about

and the place where they are as equally important. But this week's story takes that even further because we're cruising the entire spectrum of what a noun can mean. The person, the place, and the thing are all critical as to why this story made the splash, or if I'm being unkind, the nearly lethal tumble that it did. The place, as you may have guessed, is Boston. I'm from that area. The fact that anyone from there is legally required to tell you within 20

seconds. And if you're really from there, you have to be more specific so people know that you're not from some hoity-toity place like Duxbury, or as my mom calls it, Deluxbury. Ooh. No. I'm from Brockton, Massachusetts, which was ranked as one of the 100 worst cities in America when I was in high school because that list was very racist. In fact, people are still giving Brockton shit. A radio station I used to work the overnight shift at published an article in 2016 that said, You're ugly Brockton, why it was voted the ugliest city in Massachusetts. And in that article, they cite no reason for why it has that distinction. Because people in Massachusetts are both perfect

and evil. The point I'm talking around is that there is a media pattern of how people from the Boston area are shown, and because I'm from there, I am not allowed to shut up about it. I had the accent. This is the before, because I'm going to come out a completely changed person. This is a documentary of my life, Jamie Loctus, the E true Hollywood story. Good for her. And the only reason I don't talk that way now is because I realized from a very young

age that this accent would be mocked and quote unquote sounds poor. But when I say poor in that context, what I mean culturally is poor meaning undeserving of respect. And that's horse shit, right? I wish I hadn't let the world convince me that the accent was unworthy of respect. But I do have these very specific memories of that idea calcifying in my mind

to the point where it ended up coloring my perception of my own parents. I mean, the moms on TV sounded like they were from nowhere. And the only thing I thought was more chic than sounding like you were from nowhere was being from somewhere wealthy. I have so many strong memories of this. My dad would do this very soft class code switching when he got home from his job where he worked at a local newspaper. When he was around journalists from other states, he did his reporter voice, hit the Rs,

no problem, Chuck. But when he came home, he dropped that and he'd sound like the class and place he was from. And this was all mostly involuntary, but I internalized it. And by the time I moved to California when I was 22, the accent was fully gone because I wanted to be a performer. I wanted to sound like I was from nowhere at all. This is why I feel sure that cultural stereotypes around Bostonians are thoroughly ingrained,

and not completely without reason. There is some truth to it, as stereotypes can go, but these stereotypes lack context and don't take individuals into account. As far as pop culture is concerned, going to tell all of you at Harvard why I'm going to make an amazing lawyer. Or in like three square blocks of Southie, which is just one neighborhood in Boston. Meg and Uncle of yours Tommy Korsakian's another goof. He gets busted selling guns to federal officers, among many, many, many other departures from a normative behavior.

What's this got to do with me, huh? Why are you pretending to be a cop? Or, bonus points, if you want to win an Oscar, both. You dropped 150 grand on a fucking education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late chat at the public library. Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip. That may be. My boys wicked smart. That's from Good Will Hunting. It's a good movie, but you see where I'm going with this.

And as many people from that area will tell you, even when these movies are good, they're not necessarily an accurate representation of the area. Most media about Boston suggests that the area is extremely racist, which is true, but it rarely shows any non-white character that lives in that same city. And that's because most popular media about Boston is based on stories about a neighborhood of majority low-income white people,

and often just all-white mobsters. So for the record, yes, the Boston area has a history of Irish and Italian gangs. Yes, racism is still extremely persistent in Boston and Massachusetts on the whole. But no, not everyone who lives in Boston is white. In fact, that erases over half the population of the city today, and that's fucking weird to me. But still to this day, the characters that come out of Boston tend to follow a very certain type.

Today we are talking about a recent legend in the internet character of the day Pantheon. A person and an incident that makes me sad I cannot show you the video in question. This character exists at the intersection of many things. Yes, stereotypes around Boston, one of which is rightfully that Boston cops are particularly racist and particularly incompetent. And just as importantly, the internet's view of American policing

at the time the story went viral on an undetermined date in the summer of 2023. Return with me, if you dare. Summer 2023. All over the world, global temperatures were being broken. Just one symptom of our rapidly dying planet. And we had recently weathered the phenomenon that was Barbenheimer, a symptom of the human need to feel good about something, even when half of that was a three-hour movie about the atomic bomb. This character manages to scratch both of these itches. A flailing institution's attempt to convince the public that summer is a beach party and not an incinerator that failed so spectacularly that the good

people of the internet got a worthy adversary to laugh at for months to come. A character so baffling that I regret this is mere audio because this viral video clip has to be seen to be believed. Oh my god. Boston Slidecop, your 16th minute of fame starts right now. On August 2nd, 2023, Twitter, ex whatever, Twitter user RyanWhitney6 posted a video filmed at a relatively new playground in front of Boston's City Hall. The clip itself was quickly deleted. Ryan Whitney, who co-hosts

a podcast on Barstool Sports, had over 400,000 followers when the tweet was posted though. He followed up when people asked why it was deleted and said, I just deleted what I think is one of the funniest videos of all time. I was begged to take it down. Sad. Who begged him? I don't know. He didn't answer my DMs.

In any case, it was already too late. The video was already doing numbers over on TikTok, prompting comments like, I'm crying. Why did he fly out like a corpse? And Bro looked dead. The public had spoken, it was funny. The City Hall Plaza playground, where the famous slide lives, opened in November 2022.

And it's pretty impressive. By far the flashiest part of a $70 million renovation of City Hall Plaza by Boston-based architecture firm, Sasaki. The renovation created what I feel was a much-needed friendlier feel in a historically hostile vibes area surrounding City Hall's brutalist architecture. According to an article in Boston.com from 2023, City Hall is the fourth ugliest building in the world, which I think is maybe a little dramatic. But it's not beautiful. Regardless, this new playground was kind of the crown jewel of the

renovation, at least far as the general public was concerned. I actually got my first taste of it in spring 2023 when my friend Tori had two glasses of wine in the north end and then climbed up and ricocheted down a truly massive steep covered steel slide sometime around midnight and for the playgrounds many attractive qualities It is this slide that is the star of this story No Internet cinema you should be able to log this on Letterboxd because in it, a Boston police officer absolutely eats shit.

I mean like really eats shit. Take a listen to the video again. Okay, so let me attempt to walk you through what I just saw for easily the hundredth time. The slide is what I described my friend taking this drunk trip down in the spring of 2023. It's steep, it's steel, it's in the middle of this very, very public area. And then that loud bizarre sound of like nickels being shaken in a tin can is the cop who seems to be banging against every square inch of this fucking thing. And then finally he emerges from the tunnel of the slide somehow ass-first backwards on his stomach shooting out of the slide, somehow ass-first, backwards, on his stomach, shooting out of the slide

at Formula 1 speeds onto the pavement, and to make matters worse, a weapon seems to fly out of his belt as well, because this is an American cop we're talking about. So of course, he didn't go unarmed to a playground. And because some stereotypes are true, and this is an older white guy in Boston, you hear him say, Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Like my uncle stubbing his toe, right? So the cop stands in a daze and quickly grabs his stuff and turns from the camera.

But who is holding the camera? Not Twitter user at Ryan Whitney Six, who said that he was reposting the video. So that's still a mystery. So we get a quick look at Slidecop's face, but the quality of the video is pretty low. So you only really get a flash of what seems to be a pretty stereotypical Boston cop. He's white, he's older, he's got a crew cut, and he just did something massively incompetent in broad daylight. And just to, could we listen to the clip one more time?

Now if you need to pause the podcast and watch this video yourself, I encourage you to do so, because I'm finding it hard to explain exactly how wrong this man has gone down a slide. There is a weird amount of momentum, like he was pushed ass-first by a middle school bully. So if this like happened to a 12 year old and not a middle aged man protected by the Commonwealth, it would be life ending.

So what I'm trying to say is that this clip rocks. It's amazing, it's confusing, it's funny, and it's punching down from the perspective of both society and gravity. For a large corner of the internet internet of which I am a member this is the marriage of two tried and true viral video genres a Hatred of cops and a love of people falling down It would be patronizing of me to explain to you why the only thing funnier than a regular adult falling down a terrifying slide

For children is a cop doing that same thing falling down a terrifying slide for children, is a cop doing that same thing. Cop hate has been around for as long as cops have in the US and has become more and more common in the last few years following the murder of George Floyd. Cop hate is just common sense. And here's where, in a just world, I'd tell you who's slide cop is

and the adorable press cycle that surrounded them. But that's one of the weirder elements of this story. For all of the clickbait that this clip generated, Boston cop slide turns up on John Oliver. How the playground slide defeated the Boston cop. I went down the Boston cop slide. It was so tame. I have no idea how he went flying. It was so tame, I have no idea how he went flying. Okay, kind of not like other girls on that last one. The slide cop has still not been identified. And that's weird this far into internet sleuthing history. There are plenty of main characters that become so against their will.

Some regular person thinking they're tweeting to no one. Or worse, someone who's filmed in public without their consent. But it rarely takes the internet more than a few hours to find out who someone is regardless of ethics, particularly if they work for a prominent institution, like, I don't know, the Boston police. But that never happens after the clip went viral, and while the original tweet was removed, it had already spread to TikTok. The media doesn't jump to the who, they jump to

the why. One of the early examples of meaningful curiosity into Slidecop's identity was from Boston Fox 25 in a piece from reporter Carrie Kavanaugh. She got responses for comment from the police department and current Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. Here's a piece from that article. I don't know what the circumstances were or what happened said Mayor Wu, but I will definitely check in and make sure the officer is okay. If it looks like there needs to be more signage that this is for children or something, we can do that too. Boston 25 also asked the Boston police about this video.

The department says the officer was hurt, used his personal insurance for care, and did not charge the city. BPD says the officer did not miss any time and he's not facing any disciplinary action. Everything has a chance to be viral these days, said Mayor Wu. Okay, I'll bite a couple questions. What would the officer have charged the city for? Would he have sued the maker of the slide? Would he have sued the slide? And furthermore, I'm confused about the use of the phrase

personal insurance. I mean, presumably, a cop's health insurance would be through their job, but this quote implies that their health insurance came from somewhere else. All we really learn from this story is that the Boston Police Department did confirm that Slide Cop was their employee, not some cosplaying internet stunt person or freaky AI, and that Mayor Michelle Wu is kind of funny for a mayor. Outside of that, only questions. And while I do find it weird that there didn't seem to be much public interest in the who,

I can't blame the interest in the how. I mean, I wanted to understand myself, and most reporting from the time elected to ask local physicists how eating shit this hard was even humanly possible. I cannot overstate how many minutes of my one human life I have spent watching physics YouTubers trying to unpack the slide cop's descent. I've seen equations. I've seen attempts to determine the length of the slide from Google Maps aerial shots.

I've seen it all. And this is as close as someone has gotten to a cogent theory. This is from YouTube channel dot physics, which is run by the resident physicist for Wired, Rhett Elaine. We'll come back to that again. Theta. And I have this distance Lx, that's Ly, and that's the total length L. I know theta, I know Lx, that's what I measured. So I can find Ly.

Tangent of theta is opposite over hypotenuse, So that would be LY over LX. If I solve that for LY, I get LY is. So no, I don't really know what any of that meant, but clearly people have thought a lot about it. For my listeners who also got Cs in high school physics, the reality kind of boils down to what Red Elaine wrote for Wired back in 2022 about the increased popularity and danger in these kinds of steep steel slides.

He was inspired by one at Belle Isle Park in Michigan, and not just because it was big, but because people moved so fast on it that they were completely airborne and the slide had to close temporarily. Said one child to a local news affiliate, gravity hurts. Two true childs, one of the many difficult realizations of child. Anyways, here's what Professor Elaine had to say about why people often move freakishly fast on these slides. Friction depends on the two surfaces interacting, so if you have a metal slide and it's in

contact with skin or cotton clothes, you have a certain coefficient of friction. And if you change the material, maybe do something stiff, it could make it a lot slipperier. So the fact that the cop is an adult and the slide is intended for children actually doesn't make that much of a difference. Even if it's really funny when Meriwoo implies that it is. Think back to your freshman year in high school. If there is no external force acting on an egg and a bowling ball, they will propel forward at the same rate.

So theoretically, if slidecop wasn't pushed, he would have come careening down the slide at the same rate as the two to twelve-year-olds that the slide is actually intended for. Alternatively, Elaine suggests that it's feasible that the uniform fabric might be a contributing factor. Polyester interacts with steel very differently than cotton does, but that really wouldn't account for someone eating shit as hard as Slide Cop does. Which makes me believe the Slide Cop had an external force acting on him.

So who the fuck is he? Mother's Day is right around the corner and in true She Pivots fashion, we're highlighting moms who've dedicated their lives and their pivots to supporting mothers. The iconic Christy Turlington will join us to talk about launching Every Mother Counts after pivoting from her 90s supermodel days. And later, the co-CEOs of Baby to Baby will share how they're addressing the needs for millions of babies and moms. So tune in and subscribe to She Pivots.

New episodes out every Wednesday. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. This is Molly and Matt, and we're the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts. It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting. Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more.

We're back with season two of the podcast, which means more opportunities to glow up and become a more responsible and better adult one life lesson at a time. And let me just tell you, this show is just as much for us as it is for you. So let's figure this stuff out together. This season, we're going to talk about whether or not we're financially and emotionally ready for dog ownership. We're going to figure out the benefits of a high yield savings account. And what exactly are the duties of being

a member of the wedding party? All that plus so much more. Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Grown up stuff. Danielle Moody here hosted the Woke F Daily podcast. We've been with iHeart's Outspoken network for a year and what a year it has been. Every weekday I navigate our rapidly changing world alongside our series of fabulous expert

guests. As we head deeper into 2024 and yet another life-changing election cycle, Woke AF Daily is here to keep you sane and woke. Woke not just to the latest headlines but also to the collective power we all have. Woke to the need to build community with those around us. Woke to how to avoid burnout and woke to the ways we can all find joy in the madness. Make Woke F Daily with Danielle Moody, your podcast destination for 2024 election news and analysis and tune in to hear the ways I am working to stay

grounded amidst it all. Listen to Woke F Daily season five on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was beside myself trying to figure this out because it was starting to look like I was going to have to file a FOIA report. And listen, I'm a doofus. I'm a clown. I lack the discipline and the jargon type knowledge

to make such an attempt on my own. I needed help. And fortunately, I have producer Sophie Lichterman to point out the obvious, that we already know one of the greatest foyer for good minds of our age. And so, Sophie connected me to Molly Conger, a brilliant anti-fascist journalist, FOIA expert, and the mother of two beautiful dog sons. And she guided me

through how to approach this search. I am Molly Konger. I am a local journalist here in Charlottesville, Virginia, sort of a busybody about town. And unlike Alex Jones, I actually do have the documents, right? I'm a documents guy. I love my documents. And one of the ways that you can get documents is with the Freedom of Information Act request. So when people say they FOIA'd something, they're referring to the Freedom of Information Act. That's the federal law governing public access to government records. Every state has their own version of it. Sometimes it's literally called FOIA as well. Sometimes it's called something else.

In Pennsylvania, it's called Right to Know. In Massachusetts, which we're talking about today, I think it's called just the Massachusetts Public Record Law. And they vary state to state, right? The kinds of exemptions that exist, the statutory time limits vary, the kinds of things that they will give you the runaround on vary. So like, for instance, in my state, Virginia, only Virginia residents can request

public records, which I think is, it's one of only nine states that has a residency requirement for a four-year request. Interesting. So do you have to like send pictures of your mail to get records? It depends on like what kind of bug they have up their butt, like different jurisdictions are more uptight about it. Like they'll ask you your address. Sometimes they will ask you to prove it. Or if you're a representative of news media,

but the outlet has to have demonstrable circulation within the Commonwealth of Virginia. And that's interpreted in a variety of ways that can be pretty harmful to independent journalists or online outlets. So like, you know, if you have a very popular blog, they're like, well, can you prove that anyone in Virginia reads it? Really? So wait, you have to like, it's like being an Instagram model, like you have to also prove that people are looking at stuff. That's, that's crazy.

Very subjective, right? Because the law was originally written with newspapers in mind. So it's like, do people in the state receive this physical newspaper? But that's not really how we do news media anymore. And so the response times can vary. Like in Arkansas, by law, they only have three days to respond, which is like one of the one of the tightest timelines in the country. 12 states don't have a statutory time limit, which means that like, you have no recourse, and they just never respond to you. So in Massachusetts, the law says they have to respond to you within 10 days, but they can get a good cause extension. I think it's, they can get 20 days for agencies,

30 days for municipalities. And in Massachusetts, they can only ask for an extension once. They can't just keep saying, ooh, actually 30 more days, actually 30 more days for the rest of your life. But because you're looking for police records, I think in almost every state, there are huge carve outs for the rest of your life. But because you're looking for police records, I think in almost every state, there are huge carve outs for the cops

because they are not an institution that favors transparency. They like to operate in the dark. They don't like to engage with the public and they're hiding. I mean, in this case, they're just hiding something funny, but a lot of times they're hiding something bad. So there are massive carve outs for the police.

And so I think in Massachusetts specifically, I think the, so again, I guess back to the idea that every state has different sort of specifics to their public records law. And so one of the things that varies from state to state are the exemptions. So a public records law should cover every document that the government creates, right? Because those are our documents, the government works for us. But there are carve outs for things that they don't think you should have. Like, I mean, some of it's pretty obvious, like most states won't let you say, I'm making a public records request for the home address of every judge. Like, it's obvious that you can't do that.

That's a good idea. You can't say, I would like to FOIA the credit card number that the city clerk uses to buy pizza for meetings. You can't have that. That makes sense. You know, most- Do you know that because you've tried? No. No, I was actually reading the Virginia state code and it specifically lists like you can't FOIA credit card numbers.

Like, I mean, I'm glad you put that in there. But I think what the exemption you're going to run up against here is personnel. And that varies from state to state. I know here in Virginia, just last year, city attorneys had to conduct new trainings with everyone because they were abusing the personnel exemption. They were saying that, well, anything that has an employee's name on it is personnel. And that's not the case. It's about like private employee information, some certain disciplinary

records. But they were just like not turning over anything that had an employee's name on it, which is not how that's supposed to work. But then like in states like Pennsylvania, which actually this happened to me earlier this year, I was trying to get some police reports from Pennsylvania under their Right to Know Act. And their exemptions around law enforcement records are so complete that you can't get anything a cop ever wrote down basically. Like you just can't get police. This was a 20 yearyear-old closed case, and they were like, well, those are investigative records. And I was like, wow.

You're not investigating it anymore. He's in jail. We'll pick up with Molly in a bit. So with the fear that the FOIA gods struck into my heart, I made my request. And while I waited for the mandated 10 business days, I kept investigating. And to be clear, I was for the mandated 10 business days, I kept investigating. And to be clear, I was not the first person to file a FOIA to try and crack Slidecop's

identity. Someone had already filed one trying to find out who he was, almost immediately after the video surfaced. 404 Media co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Motherboard Jason Kobler hit the BPD with a FOIA more or less immediately and published the reply on August 22nd, 2023. His request had been for any and all records, body cam footage, or images of the incident, and he'd gotten the classic police department swerve. The BPD does not have any body camera footage, images,

audio recordings, or any other recordings or media of this incident. Therefore, there are no responsive records. Attached is a redacted incident report you requested. Lies. They're lying. I think they're lying. And Kubler points out in his piece

that this is probably not true, because if you look in the far right of the Slidecop clip, there is a second person filming who, and I can't confirm it but others have speculated, who appears to be wearing a police uniform and a fluorescent mesh vest, identical to the one that Slidecop is seen wearing in the video. Still a lot of questions, but we do get this one document released from Cobler's FOIA, the incident report. And we learn a few things from this. We learn that the name of the reporting officer

was Steven Cantow. We learn the name of the doctor who treated Slidecop. And critically, we learn the date of the incident. Because remember, the person who uploaded the video to Twitter was reposting and couldn't answer when the clip was taken in the first place. And most media did not look into when it was, but I care when it was.

And so here is what the incident report from that FOIA says. On July 29th, 2023, at about 1835. And then the name of slide cop, which is redacted. I mean, of course it is redacted. They're not going to make it this easy because my life has to be difficult, even if I'm having a hard time. So back to the report. On July 29th, 2023, at about 1835, officer redacted to work a special event at City Hall Plaza when he struck his head in right arm.

The officer was brought back to District A1 and EMS was requested. The on-duty supervisor, Sergeant Downey, was notified. Boston EMS Ambulance 3A-08 responded to District A-1 and transported the officer to Tufts Medical Center for treatment. The officer was treated by Dr. Pham and returned to duty. You can say it, that's not a lot of information. Except that Slidecop Busted is asked so badly that he had to be taken in an ambulance to the nearest hospital. And while Slidecop's age is also blacked out, he is confirmed to be the white male we saw in the video. And we also have the name of that reporting officer, Steven Cantow,

who it only takes a few clicks to learn made about $184,000 a year in 2021 and has been the subject of a sustained finding in both an internal investigation and a citizen complaint. Not to mention he doesn't even live in Boston, which is still a requirement for this department. Cops, man. But let's take it back to the date, July 29th, 2023. This was a Saturday, around 6.30 in the evening, and the event going on at City Hall Plaza at that time would have been the Puerto Rican Festival of Massachusetts. Very cool annual event in the city that was set to go on all weekend. Earlier in the day, there was a parade in the downtown Boston area that went from noon to 10 at night both days. So perfect event to send a pair of middle-aged white Boston cops to. The Puerto Rican festival covered City Hall Plaza with food stands,

music, carnival attractions, you name it. So I looked into the moment to moment schedule of this event, and at the time that the slide cop allegedly took this tumble, musician Aishani was scheduled to be performing at City Hall, right near the playground. But in spite of the fact that this is a family event, the playground doesn't seem to be very busy at all, and you can't really hear indications that there's a festival going on nearby. Granted based on the videos I watched at the festival it's not super close to the playground but from anecdotal evidence I do think you would be able to hear something. But at this point I had more information than

anyone else I'd seen. So I did what Molly said I foy-ed the foya. Something I did not previously know was a thing you could do. But, as she said, I cast a little bit of a wider net, in hopes that the Boston Police Department would not realize exactly what I was looking for. So, trying to be slick, I FOIA'd for all records in the weeks before and after the incident. And here's what I received in return. The wrong papers. They straight up did not send me what I asked for, which was where cops were stationed with regards to events.

What I instead got back was promotions or office transfers. Basically, I got the runaround. And that's tremendously frustrating because by the time I got this run around, the Boston police and cops all over the country and the world were brutalizing peacefully protesting college students holding it down for Palestine. The police and citizen mob violence people were subjected to for conducting teach-ins, denouncing genocide, and demanding divestment from

Israel were horrific. And in my tiny brain, I couldn't help but think, slide cop could very well be in that stormtrooper line, brutalizing young people. And I got the fucking run around. And so with my tail between my little legs, I went back to Molly Conger to find out what to do next. Besides file another FOIA request, which I did. God, I don't know how people do it. I was reading through the first round of, you know, there was a writer from 404 who immediately made a FOIA request and conveniently,

this specific cop's name was redacted. And the reason for that, I feel like is pretty clear. But what is the excuse to redact someone like Slidecop's name when the guy he was with and the guy who reported it, that cop's name is available and the doctor who treated him's name is available? What about Slidecop makes him redactable? So I found this particular exemption in the Massachusetts

law about public records. This is subclause C, personnel and medical files or information and any other materials or data relating to a specifically named individual, the disclosure of which may constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. Provided, however, this subclause shall not apply to records related to law enforcement misconduct investigation.

So had he been investigated for misconduct, for inappropriately sliding, then you could get the records, right? Like if this were a misconduct investigation because he was behaving badly at the Puerto Rican Pride Festival, then you could get it. But in this case, it's just that it's this is a personnel incident report, right? That this was I wonder if they're claiming a medical exemption, right? Because he was injured on the job and sent to the hospital so there's a variety of Ways they can pretend that it's legal for them not to give this to you, right? That's and that's kind of why

When we talked about making this request I was like don't make it clear what you're looking for, right? If you say like, I want records about side cop, they'll just say no, or they'll find a reason to say no. But if you don't let them know what you're looking for, maybe they won't think to abuse their discretion around exemptions. Interesting, because I started working on this episode before the student protests for Palestine began. Now we're talking several weeks in, and I know that you've been covering them as well. And the American cops are once again

in a bit of a PR crisis because they're arresting and brutalizing students. So I guess my question around Slidecop, and I think we talked about this, was why not take advantage of what seems like kind of a PR slam dunk? A cop did something funny that everyone thought was like, I felt like there was a missed opportunity for a spin here, and the cops usually seem to take every opportunity for spin. Do you have any thoughts on why they may not have taken advantage

of it? Yeah, I think it would have been funny and cute, right? If he went on the news, was like, I was just enjoying our public... I'm not going to do a Boston accent, right? But I was just enjoying this public park. I just said I wasn't going to... But you know what I mean? He could have gone on the news and been cute about it, but I'm thinking what Margaret Atwood said about men and women, right? Like, men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them. And I think in this scenario, it's, you know, cops in the public, like, being laughed at is the worst thing that can happen to them after getting a little bit of a boo boo. They also hate getting a little bit of

a boo boo. And so he was getting laughed at, he got a boo boo. And that makes them lash out like they're not capable of, of normal human experience. They can't just laugh about it because it is funny. He should have gone on whatever garbage, vaguely right-wing local news network you have in Boston and just laughed. And the Boston cops, I will say, in my experience with cops in a variety of locations, I have a special hatred for the Boston police department. And I don't care if they hear this. I do hate you. I do hate you, Captain John Danielecki in particular. Thank you so much to Molly Conger, and you can support her work over at patreon.com slash socialist dog mom. But in the meantime, most Boston journalists I spoke with did not seem

to think that the main character was the Slide Cop. They felt it was the Slide. This was challenging for me. Why the fuck did everyone care about the Slide? I mean, I'd seen the Slide myself. Too slippery, too steep. But after the incident, capital T, capital I, the Slide became the celebrity, not the Slide Cop. The week after the incident, there was a 45-minute line around the new playground consisting of all adults, according to Jezebel on August 4th. By August 11th, Slide Cop mania had reached such a frenzy in downtown Boston and so many people were ready to kill themselves for a bit that there was a tiny

little fence put around the slide by the city. Said Twitter user Unpoppable, they arrested the fucking slide. And this didn't last long, but they arrested the slide. And I can tell you with complete certainty that the lore surrounding the slide endured for months and months afterward. That Halloween, several locals went soft viral for dressing up like the slide or even more cursed a couple's costume of the slide and the slide cop. So while the slide cop's identity remains a mystery for now, I'm adding this to the open case files of 16th Minute, were left with the cop hating slide itself.

How does a steep slide end up in front of a major city hall and has it tried to kill anyone else? When the new City Hall Plaza was opened after the renovation in 2022, the local news was all over it. CBS Boston's Katrina Kincaid reported live from the top of the slide. You can see her from behind its freaky cage on the day that it opened and went down the slide itself at the end of her broadcast. And she, you guessed it, completely ate shit.

Here's the clip. And this whole thing is going to open, also, you know, including this playground, which if you can see this big slide, I get to try out the big slide. Give me a moment. Here we go. Five to eight more celebrations continue. If you can't make it today, you can join from tomorrow. There's gonna be even more stuff here, guys. Oh my gosh, are you okay?

That's definitely a workers' comp claim right there. That does not look good. I'm doing great. Again, the clunking noise. A middle-class professional cannot go down this slide without the clunking noise, but it wasn't until an especially incompetent public servant made use of it

that things really went haywire. Now as for why the slide is here, it is to attract people back to City Hall Plaza, which has always been challenging. Because it's ugly. Or as one of my best friends and WGBH reporter in Boston, Tori Bedford says, City Hall has a certain brutalism about it. Sure. And then they constructed the City Hall in this beautiful, brutalist architecture that- Are you a fan?

I don't know. It's really like on the inside of the building too. It's so echoey. And I don't know about a building that looms over its residents to assert power. Personally, I think it's ugly. And I know ugly. I'm from Brockton.

So does this story boil down to cops eating shit is funny? Maybe because sure. But I wanted to understand what was going on in Boston at the moment this story took off that made this specific cop uniquely hateable. Mother's Day is right around the corner and in true She Pivots fashion, we're highlighting moms who've dedicated their lives and their pivots to supporting mothers. The iconic Christy Turlington will join us to talk about launching Every Mother Counts after pivoting from her 90s supermodel days. And later, the co-CEOs of Baby to Baby will share how they're addressing the needs for

millions of babies and moms. So tune in and subscribe to She Pivots. New episodes out every Wednesday. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt, and we're the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.

It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting. Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more. Here's a clip from an upcoming episode featuring the weekly home checks, Keyshawn Lane, that you won't want to miss. What common mistake that a lot of people do, they use fabric softener when it's not so great for your clothes. Should we never be using fabric softener? No, you should not ever be using fabric softener. It leaves a deposit on our clothes, which is also left in the machine. And it also makes the clothes highly flammable.

Wait, what? Yes. What you want to do instead is just use a quarter cup of vinegar. And that'll make them softer? That'll make them softer. And if you wanted some kind of scent, you can use essential oils. Wow, wow, wow. Catch new episodes of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult every other Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Danielle Moody here, host of the Woke F Daily podcast. We've been with iHeart's outspoken network for a year and what a year it has been. Every weekday, I navigate our rapidly changing world alongside our series of fabulous expert guests. As we head deeper into 2024 and yet another life-changing election cycle, Woke AF Daily is here to keep you sane and woke. Woke not just to the latest headlines, but also to the collective power we all have. Woke to the need to build community with those around us. Woke to how to avoid burnout,

and woke to the ways we can all find joy in the madness. Make Woke AF Daily with Danielle Moody your podcast destination for 2024 election news and analysis. And tune in to hear the ways I am working to stay grounded amidst it all. Listen to Woke app daily season five on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As it turns out, the month that Slidecop took his little tumble should have been a huge

moment for forward motion and transparency between the police and the public. In late August 2023, a database full of complaints made against Massachusetts police officers was released over a year after it was promised to the public. Consisting of around 3,400 disciplinary reports ranging across 2,100 officers yes, feel free to do that math, it's not great the records were compiled and released by a police oversight committee that came together in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. The oversight board is called POST the Peace Offic Officer Standards and Training

Commission, and a WBUR report from Deborah Becker and Ali Jermanning broke down the results, or rather what was released of the promised results. Because a lot of complaints were excluded from this report. Among the top offenders included were the Massachusetts State Police, the Springfield Police, and the Boston Police. And these are just disciplinary reports that were filed. Enrique Zuniga, Post's executive director, said this when the report was released. There are approximately 20,000 police officers in the Commonwealth and the database contains records for about 2100. The majority of officers are doing their work in the database contains records for about 2100. The majority of officers are doing their work in the professional way that is expected of

them. But that's still more than 1 in 10 police officers with a disciplinary record, in a field where many people would not feel safe retaliating against officers in the first place. 1 in 10 is not a bad Apple situation. So it's no surprise that the people of Boston want to see their cops eat shit. They're an act of danger, and many people feel that the year-late post report didn't tell the half of it.

Independent reporters like Jeff Raymond, who runs the blog Mask Transparency, say that the committee is missing a lot of the truth and is working to fill in the blanks himself. I caught up with him to learn more. My name is Jeff Raymond. I moonlight as an investigative journalist. And Mass Transparency is a public records project that I launched last spring to do some public records journalism throughout the state of Massachusetts. Wait, do you remember where you were when you saw the Slidecop video?

I mean, I think we were all on the Bird app at the same time at that point. And it's funny because I'm pretty sure I saw the memes of Slidecop before I saw Slidecop himself. Wow. It was, in fact, you know, I'm thinking about it now. I hadn't even thought of when I first saw it. I believe it was a video where it was essentially

the cop coming out of the thing and then a bunch of other cops spelling out underneath him into a big pile of slide cops. Yeah. Boston needed a win. And perhaps more importantly, Boston didn't have its own entry in the in the air tonight drum break. I feel like my cop provided that to us. Exactly. And we're richer for it. This is community policing distilled into its personal essence. Our cop tries to get along with the common man. He's like, I'm going to go down this slide. And the next thing you know, he's concussed and there's records of things and incident reports and physicists are being consulted. Like, it's like barriers up around the slide at night to make sure that nobody else goes down it because you know, all the kids who went down that slide for the last x number of years were fine, but the minute a police officer hits the side the wrong way, we have to, you know.

Yeah. I was really excited to get to talk to you because I wanted to contextualize just the general attitude towards policing in Massachusetts right now, but also just in this specific moment, because I feel like it was an eventful and interesting summer in police oversight or the lack thereof. What motivated you to start the mass transparency project? What are its goals at present? This started as an offshoot of a local news thing that I was doing because local news is being decimated across the country. Massachusetts is no different in that regard. Some IT company bought the paper along with like six others in the region about a year and a half, two years ago. Me and a friend tried and failed to kick something off

on the ground here, but I wanted to focus a little broader because I enjoy doing public records requests because I'm a huge nerd. And this was a perfect incident on it, which is the Post Commission, the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission. That's a nice big word jumble. They had launched shortly after the George Floyd

murder in Massachusetts as part of a wholesale reform bill. So to give some very high level background, after the murder, a very contentious reform package went through the Massachusetts legislature and was signed by Governor Baker, a Republican at the time. And part of it was to create a state level oversight committee for the police officer in the state. The Post Commission has a lot of different avenues they have to go through, but one of

them is to keep a public database of disciplinary records. So if an officer has a complaint lodged against him or her, the complaint is already lodged at the local police department or police vehicle, depending on what it is, because they can, they handle the colleges and stuff too. But those complaints were being compiled by the individual departments and sent off to post. Okay. And post was supposed to put them online.

That database was supposed to happen. This is how long this has been going on now. This database was supposed to launch in November of 2022. Wow, okay. I started my project in March of 2023 because A, the database still hadn't happened and B, Post was putting out feelers that said they weren't going to publish it at all. Was there reasoning given for that? The official reason they gave was that it was data fidelity issues, which essentially is a BS term for we don't like what we're getting and we're just going to push it aside. Again, I am a nerd with a lot of free time on his hands

and I know how to craft a good public record request. So I decided to do the insane thing and write all 351 local police departments in Massachusetts to get the records they sent the post. Wow. Oh my god. FOIA nerds are our bravest soldiers, our bravest soldiers. 350 requests. Yeah. What was the response rate? Oh, they hate me. There were times that I felt like I could not drive in for a while. There were some very contentious conversations

with chiefs of police and town clerks and stuff. I got the ire of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, which is sort of like the lobbying body for the different chiefs in the state. They tried to coordinate over email a way to give a blanket denial of my request, which was a lot of fun, but their lawyer put a typo in. So I was able to find out really quickly who was using this thing, and I was able to, you know, I was putting appeals into the state.

The state public records division knows me by name now. Like, you know, one of the women there is, you know, she and I are tight. It's, it became a whole thing. I think at the end of the day with this project for policing in particular, like you said, 100, 350 individual towns got requests from me. I've had to issue an additional, I believe on up to 385 appeals because these departments are trying not to release this information. And there are still some departments out there,

about 30 of them now that are still resisting and we're a year out now. They will have to soon. We're waiting on a Supreme Court decision that I'm not related to but is being used to deny the records. But it has been what I thought was going to be a fun, quote unquote fun project over like Easter break while I didn't have a lot going on, became this like year long crusade where I've become like the poster boy for police transparency in central Massachusetts.

Wow. I learned of your coverage doing a general look at what was going on from a WBOR piece about initial launch, which is the same week as Slidecop did. Walk me through this. The database is kind of released. What happened? What happened was that all these departments, now that I have all the documents, I can see the transition and trajectory of where this went. All the departments were tasked by the Post Commission to compile this evidence on their own. Essentially, instead of the Post Commission going directly to the chiefs, they were saying, chiefs, use this form, fill out the information, send it back to us. These chiefs don't know how to use technology.

They don't know how to craft a coherent Excel spreadsheet. None of them were exporting them the same way. Some of them would PDF it. And if you try to PDF an Excel spreadsheet, it doesn't work. Disaster. Yeah. Faster. So it's like, I understand now what they meant by data fidelity, because the post commission

doesn't have the resources to actually go through these things line by line and do the copy paste. And, you know, I'm sure they don't have a coder who can use ours or something like that to create a script. I mean, they're under-resourced for what they need to do. And they're coming up against fierce resistance from the chiefs of police who don't want to put their guys in the way, the labor unions for the police who are problems for any sort of accountability,

and a public that thinks that the police who are problems for any sort of accountability. And, you know, a public that thinks that the police, you know, one of Massachusetts is considered a very progressive state in the grand scheme of things. We are pro-police to a fault here in a lot of ways. You know, it's very interesting the blind spot we have for policing compared to other places that you would think would have our sort of blind spot. Right. So when you have the public not behind you and the unions not behind you and the chiefs not behind you, you're up against a lot of a lot of stuff. And the post commission, you know, I feel like they're operating in good faith. They're doing the best they can. But they watered down the database they put out there.

They didn't put all of the stuff that's been recorded in there. They only wanted to publicize the things that were sustained. And the definition of a sustained complaint differs from department to department. Okay, and they promised me, I actually had an interview with the director of the post commission, that they would have aggregate data for us. And that was six months ago and I've seen nothing.

So it's very frustrating. In your view, what needs to happen in order for post to work effectively? Post needs more money. We don't have it in the state. We've already had to do a bunch of cuts for services because our tax revenues are not where they need to be. And we do not have a population that is willing

to put any cuts into the police departments of this area. It's just not happening. Because the police departments feel this area. It's just not happening. Because the police departments feel like they're underfunded, they're not going to then take, allow for money to go to the thing that's overseeing them without a fight. And a lot of people in the state house and the legislature staked a lot of their political capital on getting this first reform through. And they've had their bite of the apple and they've moved on. They're looking at different things now. And, you know, the nature of legislation in 2024 is we flip from one shiny object to the next and history ends a month before you're talking

about it. Right. That's my optimism. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that that's beautiful. But how do we bring this back to slide cop is is the real question. I'll say it's like I was thinking about this. And slide cop incident also distills the lack of transparency in this whole charade. One of the arguments that the district attorneys are making in terms of disclosure for these post reports is that they don't want their officers mocked on social media. They specifically call out video on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram reels as they don't want this information

that could include interviews that are taped or audio that goes out there to be put online, to be remixed, to be put upon, mocked, all this stuff. They hate disclosure. And you just see them, if you read the articles from the slide cop era, all these departments circled the wagons about keeping this guy's name a secret. And it's like, you know, I'm going to be honest with you, that was the most humanizing police encounter I've seen online in years. And you think that this guy, let him have his 15 minutes, let him have his whole

thing. Yeah, I'm the guy who went down the slide. Oops, you know, Boston police had a million ways to go about this. They could have leaned into a little bit had a little fun with it, taken to five minutes and then the internet would have moved on. Instead, we still don't know this guy is two years later. It's impossible to find any information on it. You're doing a podcast about it years after the fact, because it's still there because they won't tell us anything about it. Yeah, I sort of felt the same way where it's like there, I think there's a very cynical way that this story goes where, you know, slide cop becomes a pro policing mascot, but it feels like there is this like, really, you know, jingoistic masculine pride in the police force where it's like,

we refuse to look silly. Even if it would behoove us, we refuse to look silly. Like you can't tell me they couldn't get McGruff, the crime dog, to like stand up with the cop and talk about playground safety. Like you could have leaned this into a community benefit. You know, if they were trying to be transparent, it stops being a story.

Nobody cares because everybody's there. Every moment that you keep something a secret. And you know, there's a part of me that it's like, they're keeping this guy's name a secret because he has a rap sheet and they don't want it to come out there. And that's the first thing I think of now because I've seen the post reports that they didn't want public. And I've seen how some officers get away with, let's be honest here, they get away with literal murder sometimes.

Yeah. And, you know, I am not saying that Sly Cop is a murderer. I'm not even saying that he might be a bad cop. But you know what, I'm thinking it now because they don't want to tell us who he is. Thank you so much to Jeff, and you can follow his ongoing efforts at masstransparency.org. I have to be honest, I'm pissed off that I was not able to figure out who Slidecop was. I'd made every effort from interviewing reporters to enlisting hackers to contacting the police myself.

And I failed. And then, a few days after Jeff Raymond and I spoke, he sent me a convoluted government document that offered an answer as to why this search has been so challenging. The document is from an appellate court on August 11, 2023, just a week after the Boston slide caught delighted people all over the world. The question at the center of the case was this, and I quote, Whether the legislature's grant of authority to the Post Commission implies that the Commission has the exclusive authority to release the names of police officers whose conduct has

been investigated Or should officers with complaints filed against them in the post report be named pretty deep into this document It's explicitly suggested why most props exert their right to refuse to be recorded Here's what it says Once deemed to be public records recordings can be used in whatever way the public wishes. The public, however, can be cruel and harassing, increasing opportunities to harass and instill fear through social media. It is easy to foresee the refusal of any public employee to submit to being recorded ever again if the public release of the recorded interview can be expected to be uploaded to the internet, modified for TikTok, submitted to Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, or any

individual podcast for the purpose of ridiculing or vilifying the interviewees. The public disclosure of such interviews likewise could lead to retaliation against public employees, creating a danger to them and their families. Now I'm not saying that the slide cop has an on record disciplinary report filed against him, but lowball estimates from the poorly resourced post commission do indicate that this is very possible. And what this appellate court document tells me is that in the summer of 2023, the company line for the Boston police was, do not, under any circumstances, become the internet's main

character. Because if you do, some little bitch is going to vilify you on a podcast. A few days before this episode was scheduled to drop, Jeff Raymond called me back with some new information that a decision had been made that public records would be made more accessible, in theory at least, but that that probably wouldn't apply to slide cops still because no one was really wronged in the incident except the cop himself when it was classified as a medical thing. But Jeff had a lead for me.

Okay. Hi, Jeff. It is what? than it was classified as a medical thing. But Jeff had a lead for me. Okay, hi Jeff. It is what? It's like almost two months after we first spoke. I feel like it's been a whirlwind. When we last spoke, we were waiting on the Supreme Judicial Court of the state of Massachusetts to bring down a transparency ruling regarding an officer involved shooting in Fall River.

That came down roughly a month ago, I want to say April 26th, don't quote me on that, Mack versus a district attorney of Bristol County. And of that, of note for what I've been working on and to a certain extent, the Slidecop saga, they came down with two ideas. One is that the exemption that the police have been using to hide all this information about disciplinary records, quote, unambiguously states that the privacy exemption does not apply to investigation of law enforcement and misconduct to require the investigation to end with a finding of police misconduct, places the cart before the

horse and runs counter to the goals of police accountability and transparency. So here is the bad news, because I was really, really, really hoping that this would open up the slide gates, I guess, for lack of a better term. But what I found interesting as I was digging in a little more, the incident report for a slide cop makes it a medical situation with the officer,

which is still not subject to disclosure, which means that I don't know if they did it this way on purpose or it just happened to be a happy coincidence on their part, but they don't need to disclose that person's name or really the fact that anything leaked out of it at all is kind of surprising, giving them it's a health situation. Now, with that said, you know, if there are any police officers who are possibly listening to this who might have access to Clearview AI and might want to, you know, drop in a drop in a video or two and see if it matches anybody in your databases, I wouldn't complain. in your databases, I wouldn't complain. You know, that's gonna be a dead end until we can get a better picture of who is in there.

The good news, I'll call it good news, is that we can narrow down the exact precinct that this officer works out of. Wow. We know exactly where he works out of, what he does. They do not make immediately public, like, you know, when they worked, their hours, things like that.

But with a lot more digging and a lot more research, and possibly somebody who can do it who has a who doesn't have a full time job and a mortgage, you know, you can narrow down who's in the who's in the district that area and, you know, at least get down to it. But there are 10s of 1000s of cops in Boston. And only, you know, you're down to hundreds in But there are tens of thousands of cops in Boston, and only, you know, you're down to hundreds in his precinct. If I have the precinct number, I have the name of this this guy he was with. If you can get down to these are the 150 people who are in this precinct, it's possible it's

doable with the information that we have. It's a question of the time and effort and ability of somebody who's able to take that work and do it. And we're closer than we think. I like those odds. It's 730 in the morning. I just had my first cup of coffee. I'll have 200 more. I don't give a shit. Well, amazing. Thank you so much. So this was last Thursday morning, and I did in fact drop everything to see if I could find this motherfucker. Jeff's careful record collection allowed me to narrow down the list of working cops to the A1 precinct, about 160 names. Then I narrowed it down by gender.

And then for two days, I looked into who these men were and what they did. And I have to say, looking at pictures of cops for two days, bad for my mental health. But I was able to narrow down the list by a lot, although you may not be surprised to hear after this whole saga that finding pictures of certain cops can be extremely difficult. And when you're digging like this to find someone through public records, through news archives, through social media, the character of these cops comes into sharp focus. And to no one's surprise, the BPD is comprised of some of the most tremendous pieces of shit to ever take breath, but the specifics are brutal. On my journey to find Mr. Slide, I came across a bunch of wrong answers with terrible records.

There was Zachary Crossan, the cop who signed off on the incident report after Stephen Canto reported it. He went viral back in 2018 for stopping a black man on the street for no reason, and the harassment story ended up on Desus and Mero. I found out about James Carnell, who frequently published editorials in the Boston Herald and other periodicals and called black teenagers scumbags and intellectually bereft adults. I saw so many cops kissing their adult daughters on the mouth in their Facebook profile pictures.

I found out about Kirk Merrickx, a former cop hiding military-grade explosives in his estranged wife's house. I learned about Carl Dugal, who's been ruled against for false imprisonment and is currently a side character in an ongoing local televised court case revolving around a woman named Karen Reed. I learned about Thomas Nee, who was charged in an overtime fraud scheme. I learned about Brian Lundy, a cop who thought he was buying his son a PS4 for Christmas, but when his son opened the box, it instead contained a wooden block with writing that said, From cock and balls with love. I hate Boston cops.

I hate those bitches so much. Of the 164 names I looked into, I couldn't find reliable images for 34 cops. Seven of them looked like they could potentially be slide cop, and two looked like they could likely be Slidecop. But try to remember, finding a white cop in his 40s with a gray crew cut who's bad at his job is the ultimate needle in the ultimate haystack. But two likely options? That's not bad. I've got some foyers to file. Reach out if you're good with this stuff. Let's talk. Boston Slidecop, your 16th minute ends when I say it ends.

Show yourself. Okay, so here's your moment of fun. I was home recently and as a reporter, I did my due diligence and I got on the fucking slide. And not to be a cop, but it was very scary. it was very scary. Okay, this is Jamie. I am headed to the slide. It is very steep. It does seem like it could potentially kill you. There's like a blue block, an orange block, a scary little tube, and then the aluminum slide.

Very steep. A lot of children. It's still pretty cold. I'm gonna look like a sicko, but I've made it this far. Okay, so I did get too scared and turned off my recorder right as I was about to go down the first time. So now I can tell you with knowledge, with lived experience, that this slide, well folks, it's pretty fast.

It's not slow. And because Bostonians cannot help but be foolish in public, I did end up inspiring my fellow adults. So unfortunately, I appear to have inspired other adults to do the same. But you know, I'll tell you what, there's a kid going up there right now and it is in fact built for them and not us. Looking at these adults getting onto the slide, it really makes you think how much we were making this about us. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.

It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans, and our supervising producer and editor is Ian Johnson. Our theme song is by Sadie Tukwi. And I would like to thank my cats, Lee and Casper, podcasting Bleeding Clean Dog Anderson, and my pet rock bird, who will outlive us all. Goodbye. Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt, and we're the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult,

a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts. It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting. Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more. Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff. Grown Up Stuff.

Mother's Day is right around the corner and in true she pivots fashion, we're highlighting moms who've dedicated their lives and their pivots to supporting mothers. The iconic Christy Turlington will join us to talk about launching Every Mother Counts after pivoting from her 90s supermodel days. And later, the co-CEOs of Baby to Baby will share how they're addressing the needs for millions of babies and moms. So tune in and subscribe to She Pivots. New episodes out every Wednesday. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey fam, I'm Simone Voice. I'm Danielle Robay. And we're the hosts of The Bright Side, the podcast from Hell of Sunshine that's guaranteed to light up your day. Like our recent episode with sisters Regina and Reina King about the why behind their production company Royal Ties. We have such a huge love for storytelling without walls, without barriers. Listen to the bright side from Hello Sunshine on

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