Cesar Villalobos, founder and director of the Peruvian musicians known as Inca Son, was arrested last August on allegations that he had set up a camcorder in the bathroom of his sister’s house (incorrectly reported in the Chronicle as his own home) and videotaped a sixteen-year-old girl in the nude.

Not reflected in the headline, or even "slugged"—a subheadline in news jargon—were the established, complicating facts that Villalobos had filed a successful police misconduct complaint against the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) in 1997, which charged that an officer who had been dating Villalobos' estranged wife had pulled him from his shower, called him an "Indian piece of shit," and arrested him on a charge of violating a restraining order.

Villalobos is alleging a frame-up in retaliation for the complaint. He says—not mentioned in the Chronicle article—that the officer also held a gun to his head. An independent city review board, the Police Review and Advisory Board (PRAB), found "merit" in Villalobos' complaint and recommended to the city manager and the police commissioner that Officer Ronald Mason be fired.

In an interview Villalobos categorically denied the charges. "I don't know who this girl is, I don't know her name, I don't even know what she looks like" he said. "They haven't shown us anything."

By law the identity of a minor who makes certain kinds of criminal allegations can be sealed by the county prosecutor, Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley. "Where is the evidence? Just show us the evidence. It is all lies. I never did these things," Villalobos said.

Within our system which balances the right to privacy of accuser and accused, the presumption of innocence-until-found-guilty, and the public's right to know, is an elusive quantity that can be called the "paparazzi factor," which ties newsworthiness, to some extent, to a person's simply being who he or she is. José Seis-Cervezas found guilty of murder may never push beyond the back page. But Bill Clinton simply arrested for anything is big news.

Ironically, the independent review board charged with investigating citizens' complaints of police misconduct, the very kind if place a case like Villalobo’s would be a candidate for, is now under attack by the city's political machinery, and being targeted for elimination.

Vacancies have only recently been filled because a of lawsuit filed by a group of citizens led by city council candidate Lawrence Adkins.

The city manager now wants to essentially fold the Board's functions into the police department's Internal Affairs division.

City Manager Robert Healy has taken the police department’s allegations at face value. And the Chronicle lets him say, "There's no retaliation for an eight-year-old complaint . We don't do police work based on retaliation."

The PRAB is a local equivalent of the investigative commissions on a national level which are appointed to insure that a department or branch of government is not investigating itself. Several major cities in the United States, including New York, San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon have some form of review board which is independent of a police department's Internal Affairs division. In the wake of the Victoria Snelgrove shooting last year, in which a young woman was killed by a pepper spray bullet shot by police after a Red Sox game, Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen O'Toole has considered re-establishing Bostn’s citizens' review board.

The Cambridge Police Department is no stranger to controversy.

Since PRAB’s inception there have been no fewer than 160 complaints filed, most of which went unresolved due the vacancies unfilled by the city manager.

A formal request for access to the public files, made in 2002, produced a letter from the city attorney requesting over $200 for the time it would take to censor the records of names contained in them. In 2002 a Cambridge Police tactical team stormed the house of a man, believed to be mentally ill, who was wielding a hachet inside his house and acting bizarrely, although he had no hostages. The team fired tear-gas into the house, then stormed it and shot the man dead as, according to the police, he “charged” them.

59-year-old retired security guard Daniel Furtado had been an issue in the neighborhood before, but some neighbors expressed shock that the situation had gotten out of hand after three-and-a-half hours of pleading with him to surrender. One neighbor said “I’ve gotten him out of there a bunch of times. This shouldn’t have happened.”

In 1997 a Cambridge officer, Kevin Dottin, was the subject of numerous complaints of eye-witnesses who saw him arrest a woman bicyclist who ran a red light at 8:40 in the morning. A witness said she saw Dottin "whip her around so her back was facing him and grab her two wrists and put handcuffs on her.” At that time the city was undergoing a string of aggressive bicycle arrests.

Last year, the Cambridge Police were the subject of a 50-person protest in front of City Hall to denounce the arrests of the “Layette eight,” a group of housing activists who were taken by police as they cleaned and fixed an abandoned building in a public and symbolic advocacy statement.

Police had watched the protesters unconcerned a week before the arrests as they entered the building during the statewide March To Abolish Poverty. The eight “suspects” were charged with “intent to commit a felony,” although in the words of Indymedia.com and Bridge reporter Steve Iskovitz “Prosecutors [did] not…[reveal] what felony they claim the eight intended to commit…”

The members of Homes Not Jails had been planting flowers and a tree and cleaning up the abandoned gas station near Central Square for over a week. They were sweeping up glass from the floor when plainclothes police arrived with guns drawn. According to the Indymedia report “Cambridge police told the local Fox TV news affiliate that the group was storing materials for illegal use during the convention,” referring to the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston.

Cesar Villalobos, the arrested leader of Inca Son, says he plans to fight the charges against him vigorously, proclaiming his innocence. “You can ask a thousand people who know me and they will tell you the same thing,” he said in the interview, “they say, Cesar, we know you would never do anything like this. I would not.”

Source links http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/23200/index.php http://list.massbike.org/archive/199706/0167.html http://www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=217953