Surmounting a blue wall

Cox was working an undercover assignment in Mattapan when, at the end of a police search, he was chased and beaten by a group of officers on Woodruff Way. The officers in question were never definitively identified, thanks to a blue wall of silence that immediately enveloped the case.

The case has been vividly resurrected in a new book by Dick Lehr, a former Globe investigative reporter who’s now a journalism professor at Boston University, titled "The Fence: A Police Coverup Along Boston's Racial Divide." A longtime interest in police misconduct - often brilliantly pursued in the pages of this newspaper - led him to his deconstruction of the Cox case.

“The Cox case was always under the media’s radar,’’ Lehr said this week. “It just became this quintessential case that captures the power of the blue wall and the gravitational pull to lie, even when the victim is one of your own.’’

That plenty of people lied there can be no doubt. The original news reports of Cox’s injuries said he had somehow been hurt on duty, but gave no sense of how or why. Subsequent reports said there has been no official complaint of wrongdoing to investigate, which was ludicrous. The US Attorney’s Office ultimately handled the case, and botched it.

The fatal mistake of the feds was to focus like a laser on one of the officers who had been on the scene that night, a young cop from South Boston named Kenny Conley.

Conley, a white officer, was supposed to reveal the identity of those who beat Cox, a black officer, but there is strong evidence that he did not actually see the beating. He was convicted of perjury, then cleared years later.

Lehr convincingly argues that most, if not all, of the other officers on the scene plainly fabricated their versions of events. But while some of them were fired, only Conley ever faced prosecution for the savage assault.

Conley did become a minor cause celebré. Cox did not. He successfully sued the department and won a multimillion-dollar settlement in a civil rights case. To his profound credit - and the surprise of many - he stayed on the force, refusing to be pushed out of the career he had always wanted.

The failings in the Cox case belonged to many people. But among those who failed, arguably, were Mayor Thomas M. Menino and former police commissioner Paul F. Evans. In the critical period after the beating when they might have taken charge of the situation, they basically failed to do so, instead spouting bromides.

“They allowed all these lies to take hold and take root, and was perceived by many people I talked to as permission,’’ Lehr said.

“They chose to see if they could ride it out,’’ he continued. “I think that was a mistake because of all the damage that has flowed to this day.’’

In truth, the media and the community were all slow to recognize the Cox beating as the scandal it was. It’s been suggested that everything would have been different had there been video of the beating as in the Rodney King case. But Cox’s story dribbled out, without a moment that galvanized outrage.

Both Cox and Conley cooperated in the writing of the book - Conley enthusiastically, Cox much less so. Both are on the force now. But the sad coda to the book is that Cox’s promising career was permanently affected. He is a deputy superintendent now, but sadly concedes that he could never feel the same way about police work since the beating and the coverup.

The other sad fact is the legacy of the case within the department. It hasn’t had one. This could be a case study in the perils of profiling. It isn’t so much forgotten history, as buried.

Perhaps this outstanding book can fix that.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.