Boston Globe Makes Violent New Bedford Gangbanger a Victim

By now, the people of New Bedford are used to the Boston-centric media and other out-of-town elites looking down their long noses at them, judging them as unsophisticated rubes and barbaric ignoramuses. It's par for the course.

We've been called "Pit City" by the Boston Herald and "the end of the universe" by the Dukakis Administration. We know how to take a hit.

The Boston Globe's latest attack on New Bedford and its police force is just more of the same.

The Globe's Spotlight series "Snitch City" takes particular umbrage with the NBPD's use of confidential informants to break open "savage" drug and gun-running gangs. I suspect neither of the Globe's hit piece authors has ever had to encounter an armed and dangerous gang member.

And the Boston Globe has never used an unnamed or anonymous source before, right?

"Snitches" don't post tips on the NBPD's Facebook page. Undercover officers have to scour the "crowded triple-deckers or waterfront hotels" looking for clues that might take a fentanyl dealer or gun runner off the streets before their poison or weapons kill another New Bedford kid.

But to the Boston Globe, we are just a "population well-versed in racial profiling."

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The Globe has made a victim out of a young informant, Daniel, who "had no choice, of course," but to cooperate with police, "becoming the latest local foot soldier in the nation's endless drug war."

Poor Daniel "has pimples on his cheeks" still and while always armed, never carried his gun into his grandmother's house "because some places, he believes, are sacred."

The paper says Daniel had multiple arrests for drug, gun and assault charges, including domestic assault, and was a "low-level member of a feared New Bedford street gang" who "took part in two shootings."

The Globe says Daniel, who admits to trafficking guns and drugs, was "far from a kingpin" who, like other informants, was sent "with no training and no protection into the city's darkest corners to serve as the eyes and ears of police."

I wonder if the Globe even considered how many kids died from the drugs and guns the now-incarcerated Daniel was "trusted with storing" in New Bedford?

The Globe series raises legitimate concerns about policing that should be discussed. Mayor Jon Mitchell has promised to ask the FBI and the consultant firm Jensen Hughes to review all of the Globe's allegations and report back to the people.

It is important to note that the Boston Globe concedes that the "FBI's probe into (Police Chief Paul) Oliveira and the New Bedford narcotics unit fizzled," apparently without finding.

If corruption exists in the New Bedford Police Department, the Boston Globe should present the proof, not innuendo and hearsay.

READ MORE: The New Bedford Police Department Responds to Boston Globe's "Snitch City"

Instead, the paper tries to gin up sympathy for a jailed low-life gangbanger who sold guns and drugs to our kids as proof that New Bedford cops are no good because they use confidential informants.

I'll wait for the evidence.