In Gero’s official account, after an initial struggle, Goffigan broke loose and tried to flee. Gero then grabbed him by the shirt and discharged his pepper spray, hitting Goffigan in the face and neck.
This did not stop Goffigan, according to Gero’s incident report. Despite taking a direct pepper-spray blast in the face from less than three feet away, Goffigan broke free of Gero’s grasp, ran out of the courtyard to the end of Sonoma Street, “did a U-Turn,” and ran back, all the while eluding the officer. Somewhere during this dash, Gero claims to have seen Goffigan pull a plastic bag of green vegetable-like matter from his pocket and throw it to some undetermined location, from which it was never recovered. Goffigan — who walks with a heavy limp, the result of being shot in the leg last December — then returned to the courtyard and began a second violent struggle with Gero, according to the report. This, Gero reports, is when people from the party began hitting and kicking him.
Witnesses, both those at the party and uninvolved neighbors who say they watched from windows, insist that nobody other than Goffigan ever hit or kicked Gero. Nobody aside from Goffigan was arrested. In fact, nobody was even interviewed about this alleged mass assault on a uniformed officer. Driscoll claims Gero was unable to identify the individuals involved.
Within minutes of the start of the incident, a dozen police cruisers had arrived. Eighteen officers swarmed the courtyard — still filled with children — with their guns drawn and began shouting orders, some of which were laced with obscenities. Several officers carried away an incapacitated Goffigan, who had to be treated for his pepper-spray burns. He was held overnight and is now out on $1000 bail.
That evening, some upset partygoers expressed their outrage over the use of pepper spray and guns near children during a brief report that aired on WB56’s 10 o’clock news.
But according to Driscoll, “the facts weren’t presented accurately” in the news segment, prompting her department to post the blog entry the following afternoon.
Instead of being quickly forgotten, then, the incident was relayed in a Herald article on Tuesday, July 18, which parroted the blog’s version of events. That led to several local bloggers excoriating the Sonoma Street residents, which was followed on Wednesday by a Herald column by Joe Fitzgerald blasting the entire minority population over the incident. Fitzgerald’s report contained extensive quotes from BPD spokesperson Michael McCarthy, who characterized the Sonoma Street residents as ungrateful, vicious people who were teaching their children to beat up heroic police officers in order to help the bad guy escape.
None of this media coverage mentioned that bystanders were hurt by the pepper spray, nor did they acknowledge that Officer Gero was the only person to claim he was beaten by others, a claim that contradicts many witnesses’ statements to the Phoenix. In every single news report, Goffigan was treated as a potentially dangerous man who had been chased into a party, rather than an invited guest in attendance. For the BPD PR team, this is a mission accomplished.
Unless, of course, the mission is to foster a good relationship between police and the city’s residents — that’s been shot to hell.
