An officer off the streets, but not the controversy

A Jamaica Plain police officer who's been the target of complaints from members of the Hispanic community is off the beat.

Sergeant Paul A. Joyce, a veteran of nearly 24 years on the force, has not been working out of the E-13 station in JP since April due to a recurring injury suffered in a work-related motor vehicle accident in 2002, according to Sergeant Tom Sexton, a Boston Police Department spokesman.

Sexton said Joyce, who records show made $1,225.93 a week in base salary last year, is receiving full pay.

In June, Joyce, 54, put in for a job-related disability retirement, according to officials at the city's Retirement Board, who said the application is still pending.

Reached by phone, Joyce declined to discuss his retirement decision or any of the conflicts he has had with minority residents. ''I would have no comment," he said.

As word of Joyce's departure has flashed through the neighborhod, there has been rejoicing among his critics, who say he has been hostile to Hispanics and other racial minorities.

''It's the best thing that could happen to the community," said Carlos Diaz, a JP resident in charge of public safety at Urban Edge, a nonprofit housing corporation.

Diaz, who had a run-in with Joyce in the late '90s that led to his filing a physical-abuse complaint against the officer with the police department's Internal Affairs Division, added: ''He's finally met his match."

That match, Diaz believes, is Ivelisa Zayas, a 27-year-old hairstylist living in JP who was involved in an incident with Joyce during a traffic stop there in 2003, during which Zayas said Joyce manhandled her and cursed her race, and he brought charges against her including disturbing the peace and resisting arrest.

Diaz and others note that Joyce filed for retirement less than two weeks after Zayas was found not guilty of those charges.

On the heels of her acquittal, Zayas in August officially informed the city that she is preparing to file suit against Joyce for a lineup of alleged transgressions: excessive force, assault and battery, infliction of emotional distress, false arrest and false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and abuse of process.

City and police officials declined comment on allegations that Joyce mistreated minorities, with a city spokesman citing potentially pending litigation.

In the August letter, Zayas's lawyer tells the city she is willing to settle her claims for $150,000 now -- or sue after a six-month grace period.

Zayas lawyer Anthony Neal says the notice is required under a law that partly states: ''A civil action shall not be instituted against a public employer on a claim for damages under this chapter unless the claimant shall have first presented his claim in writing to the executive officer of such public employer . . ."

In the presentment letter to the city, Neal said that while Zayas was visiting relatives in JP during the summer of '03, Joyce yanked the Hispanic woman from her car, twisted her left arm, elbowed her in the back, kneed her from behind, grabbed her by the hair, pushed her face against the hood of his car, and whispered a racial slur in her ear.

According to a police report filed in court, Joyce says it was Zayas who went off on him; he says she lost her cool when he tried to get her to stop blocking traffic with her car. She hurled a racial slur against him and struggled so violently as he tried to handcuff her that he suffered a ''minor abrasion" to his left hand, Joyce said.

Zayas, in a recent interview, said she feels vindicated that a jury aquitted her of all charges in the 2003 incident. Since the episode with Joyce, she said she has required medical care and suffered from emotional strain on top of physical pain: flashbacks that kept her up at night; jitters that made it hard to hold down food; paranoia that caused her to recoil at the sight of a cop. Her young son was in the car at the time and he was traumatized, too, Zayas said.

''I don't feel he should be a police officer," she said of Joyce. ''My goal is to have him off the force completely. Last time I checked, they're supposed to protect us, not abuse us."

In court papers filed in the criminal trial she won, Zayas lawyer A. Anthony Guadalupe said that Joyce had a ''history of physical and verbal abuse toward racial minorities," and that he had a pattern of creating ''false charges to justify his use of unreasonable force against and harassment of individuals like Zayas."

In 1999, City Weekly reported that the city, while saying it was not admitting guilt, paid a Haitian couple to drop a lawsuit that alleged their civil rights were violated by a group of Boston police officers -- including Joyce.

In their suit, Georges and Marie Cazil said that in response to neighbors' complaints that a Cazil family party in Roslindale had spun out of control, officers under Joyce's supervision beat Georges and dragged him away; struck the Cazils' baby with a flashlight; asked people to produce their green cards and suggested they go back to Haiti -- and arrested the Cazils for disorderly conduct.

The Cazils were acquitted. Though the officers denied any wrongdoing, the city ended up paying the Cazils $25,000 not to press their civil rights claims that included inducing fear of police in the Cazil children who watched their parents being arrested.

Now, Guadalupe said of Zayas's lawsuit-in-waiting, ''We're trying to send a message to the city that these types of police officers are costing the citizens of the Commonwealth money."

JP activist Jaime Rodriguez said that the alleged actions of Joyce take another kind of toll, crippling community policing strategies that rely on cooperation between cops and residents.

''By behaving like a bully, you undermine that kind of relation," said Rodriguez, 62, chairman of the Boston chapter of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights.

Community leaders say that Joyce caused a breach in the cop-community bond during a combustible encounter with two Latinos in the late '90s.

In an interview with City Weekly at the time, a Jamaica Plain businessman, Ray Castellanos, said he was in the E-13 station parking lot waiting to meet with a Latino cop when Joyce arrested him for trespassing. Then in his cell, Castellanos said, Joyce derided his Dominican roots by speaking to him in broken English.

Meanwhile, Diaz told City Weekly at the time that he'd heard about the Castellanos incident, so he went to the station to investigate. Once there, he said, he ran into Joyce. In his report, Joyce said Diaz was making a scene. Diaz said Joyce grabbed him by the back of his pants, twisted his arm, and put him in a cell.

Both Castellanos and Diaz filed complaints against Joyce with police Internal Affairs, but neither claim was substantiated.

Latino leader Tony Molina, 63, president of Boston's Puerto Rican Festival and a JP resident, said Joyce's presence had turned policing on its head: Some young people, he said, were afraid of running into the officer.

Now, with Joyce off the block, Molina and others say there is a huge change in the neighborhood's climate. ''A sense of relief," Molina said.