Ayanna Pressley’s Husband’s Consulting Firm Paid By Taxpayers To Make Boston Police Less White, Boston Globe Fails To Mention Connection In Story

 

The Boston Globe published a story today with a predictable headline:

It’s a day of the week that ends in Y, so it’s not exactly surprising that they’d publish a story involving two of their favorite things – race baiting, and police bashing. Apparently it’s racist and sexist for a police department to only be 21% black, in a country that is 13% black, if 23% of the city is black.

White police officers are inherently bad and can’t be trusted. That’s the message that’s being sent here. This is how you know we live in a society that lacks actual real problems when it comes to racism.

Evidently the issue is that there isn’t enough recruitment of women and minorities.

Here’s a thought – when elected officials, city leaders, and cultural icons tell young black and brown people that the police are a racist institution that can’t be trusted, maybe that would explain why a lot of black and brown kids don’t wanna be cops.

Here’s another thought – maybe it’s OK that a small percentage of cops are women. Ya know, because on average men tend to be bigger, stronger, and faster than women, and police do a job that often requires them to be bigger, stronger, and faster than the criminals they’re trying to apprehend.

But they have to pretend that Boston is such a racist city that it necessitated the creation of a job called Executive Director of Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, and hired a black woman named Stephanie Everett to run it in 2021.

Numbers have to change. There are simply too many white police officers in Boston.

The fact that taxpayers are fitting the bill to pay this completely useless woman’s salary so she can pay for consulting firms to tell the City how to hire more people based on the color of their skin, is both racist and a huge waste of taxpayer resources.

But it’s who the City hired to reach the conclusion that BPD isn’t diverse enough that should raise some red flags.

Conan Harris & Associates is a consulting firm started in 2019 by Conan Harris, the ex-con husband of Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. The same man who was charged three years ago for driving on a suspended license, only to have the charges dropped because his wife’s friend and former District Attorney Rachael Rollins decided that would be one of the many laws that would no longer enforced in Suffolk County.


Keep in mind, Harris spent 10 years in prison for drug trafficking. Why is the City of Boston getting its direction on who to hire for police officers from a former drug dealer?

Oh right, because he’s sleeping with one of the most powerful people in Boston. When you do that the city will pay you to make personnel decisions. If only the city’s police department had been more diverse when he was selling drugs, then he wouldn’t have ended up behind bars for 10 years.

Today I put in an official request with the City of Boston for all checks and/or other moneys paid by the City to Conan Harris & Associates since Pressley became a member of Congress.

The City legally has two weeks to get back to me, but they are notorious for flaunting the law. It took 11 months for them to respond to a records request about how much they’d paid Monica Cannon-Grant.

Keep in mind, Conan Harris got his previous job at City Hall working for Mayor Marty Walsh because his wife had influence as a powerful City Councillor. She denies she had anything to do with his hiring, but of course no rational person actually believes that.

When Pressley left the City Council to become the Ringo Starr of The Squad, many were concerned that Harris immediately left his job working for Walsh and launched his own for profit consulting firm.

The move, Harris said, is designed to provide him more “flexibility professionally.” But an ethics expert warns he and Pressley will have to be mindful to avoid any potential ethical and political pitfalls as she builds her profile in Washington and he grows his client list. The timing of his business launch, however, could look as if he’s “launching on the heels of her success,” said Meredith McGehee, the executive director of Issue One, a Washington-based advocacy group focused on government ethics.

And as a consultant seeking new clients, ethical minefields are everywhere. For example, as Harris’s days dwindled in the city’s Office of Public Safety, he used his city-issued e-mail account to pitch Walsh’s chief of staff on staying on as a consultant.

He offered to work eight hours a week as an “interim senior advisor” to the public safety office and the city’s My Brother’s Keeper program, which Harris ran, according to e-mails obtained through a public records request. The proposed cost: $50,000 a year, paid in pro-rated, renewable contracts — or about half of what he made as a full-time employee.

State ethics laws bar municipal employees from knowingly using official resources for personal gain, above a certain threshold. Generally, ethics regulators would only pursue action in cases involving an improper use of a public position if it involved resources of “substantial value,” deemed by the state to be $50 or more.

Harris — who responded to questions through Pressley’s political advisers — said he never willfully used his public position for his own benefit or “in any way that violated my understanding of my obligations under state ethics laws.”

“I, at one point, used my municipal e-mail account to convey my eagerness to continue to support the My Brother’s Keeper team,” Harris, 41, said, referring to the program modeled after then-President Obama’s efforts to close the gap between men of color and their potential achievements. He said the pitch sprung from a “conversation” — though he didn’t say with whom — about whether he could continue to help after he left City Hall.

He knew that he was on shaky ethical grounds already because he got caught trying to use his influence to get a $50K job working 8 hours a week. He knew that people would be keeping an eye on his consulting firm in case they got contracts from the City and had to be careful. So he waited for about 4 years until he gave up pretending to be ethical and started accepting taxpayer money from a place where he used to work, and probably still has connections to.

My question is, how did the City of Boston decide to hire his firm of all the consulting firms out there? His consulting firm appears to be rather bootleg, and mostly uses stock photographs. His “booking” section allows you to click a button to book his company for a variety of things, including public speaking, executive coaching (which he knows little to nothing about), and management consulting. The problem is that when you go to book him you get this:

The website isn’t even functional. The links to his company’s social media at the bottom all bring you to Wix Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. It’s a Mickey Mouse consulting company that somehow got hired by the City to do the most important thing currently on the City’s agenda – making sure we have less white cops.

Anyway, Globe reporter Ivy Scott apparently didn’t think any of this was relevant information that should’ve been mentioned in her story, which isn’t surprising since the Globe exists to protect the most powerful people in and around Boston. But I do think it’s important, and I look forward to finding out exactly how much Conan Harris’ company is making off the taxpayers to conduct this completely useless study.

 

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