Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins said it was “not helpful” that Boston police didn’t wear body cameras during the so-called Straight Pride parade in the city last August.
“It is not helpful, I will say, when we don’t have body cam footage,” she told Greater Boston host Jim Braude on Tuesday.
Police logged over 9,000 hours of overtime during the parade without capturing any of it on body-worn cameras, WBUR reported. Boston police rolled out their body camera program in June.
A Boston Police spokesman said that department policy requires that officers wear the cameras only during regular shifts, not during overtime shifts.
Rollins called on the City Council to revisit the incident.
“I would hope the Boston City Council is going to be talking about that,” she said.
Rollins also discussed a new initiative in her office around the city's unsolved crimes. The Project for Unsolved Suffolk Homicides, or "PUSH," will address the backlog of more than 1,300 unsolved homicide cases in the county dating back to the 1960s, she said.
“As a candidate campaigning that was the most heart wrenching thing, when I would shake people's hands and they’d say, 'You never called me, the police never called me [after] 6, 7, 13, 15 years,'" she said.
"We have to do something,” Rollins continued.
Rollins said the goal of the project is to give each of those unsolved cases an administrative review and to assign an assistant district attorney to look into each one.
"We are going to get a complete accounting of all of those 1367 [cases],” she said.
The initiative may address the racial disparity in the city's unsolved crimes as well. A Washington Post investigation last year found that, in Boston, police solved an average of twice as many murder cases with white victims as cases where the victims were black.
“Reading that article was very concerning of course," Rollins said.
