Many questions remain about what happened on June 18 at the East End basketball court in Provincetown, when three police officers responded to a report of a kid with a gun. Here’s what we do know.
First, there was no gun.
Second, the incident was followed by a series of apologies, from Sgt. Jennifer Nolette, from Town Manager Alex Morse, and finally from Police Chief Jim Golden. What isn’t clear is which of the police activities they are actually acknowledging were wrong.
In her report, written five days after the incident, Nolette, the third officer to arrive on the scene, wrote that she spoke to the basketball players “in a calm voice,” explained that someone had reported seeing a gun, and asked if they had anything that could be mistaken for a gun. They “said no and seemed confused by our presence,” she wrote. “I apologized and advised them we meant no harm.”
In his statement, issued eight days after the incident, Morse wrote, “I want to personally apologize for how this incident unfolded” without specifying what he meant.
Chief Golden apologized in a June 30 Facebook post, not for what happened at the basketball court, but for being “overly defensive” during a community meeting on June 26. As for the police response, Golden insisted it was “professional” and “by the book.”
Anthony Teixeira, 18, was one of the kids. He says he’s been playing at the East End court with his friends every summer for 11 years and that a police cruiser watches them almost every day. The police have not denied that.
Given that fact, why were the Provincetown police so ready to believe a false report about local boys whom they surely recognized? Three of the young men gathered that evening grew up in Provincetown. One is a member of the town’s volunteer fire department.
Why did officers Adam Hanna and Daniel Sheehan arrive at the playground with lights flashing and sirens blaring, shouting orders from behind an open cruiser door, and threatening with obscene language to shoot? That’s according to Teixeira’s account of the incident, which the police have not contradicted.
The police reports state that when Officer Sheehan arrived he placed the youngest member of the group in handcuffs. Hanna wrote that the boy, 16, “was released from handcuffs at the time of Sgt. Nolette’s arrival.” Did Nolette see what was happening and realize that handcuffing someone without probable cause for arrest and without any evidence that the person poses a threat was a serious civil rights violation? Is that why she and Morse apologized?
At the June 26 community meeting, both Golden and Nolette said “it could have been so much worse” — the report of the gun could have been true, they said. This frames the entire encounter in terms of the kids’ potential culpability.
But what if an officer had made the same mistake the caller made and thought he saw a gun where there was none? When I asked the chief if that could have happened, he said no, “That’s not possible.”
