Joseph Benjamin Green – 50th Reunion Essay

Joseph Benjamin Green

jgreen@kcslegal.com

617 943-278814

Craigie Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

Spouse(s): Carol Shasha Green (1976 -)

Child(ren): Jeffrey (1978), Ariana (1982), Nicholas (1989)

Grandchild(ren): Zachary (2014), Angelica ( 2015), Ethan ( 2018), Jacob (2017)

Education: Harvard Law School (1976)

Career: Assistant District Attorney, 1979-1989; now at Kotin, Crabtree and Strong LLP, specializing in representing students with disabilities.

Avocations: Tennis and Golf

College: Saybrook

When I was a senior at Yale, I applied to law school, but I really did not want to keep going to school, so I also applied to the New York City Police Department. While this was viewed as a rather unusual choice for a Yale senior, I was persuaded by an article in the Atlantic written by an Amherst College graduate, who was a New York City policeman. David Durk asserted that being a police officer in New York City was not that different from being in Vista or the Peace Corps and could have a greater impact. He claimed that there was no better way to learn what was really happening in the inner city and have an impact on people’s lives. This was the time of the Knapp Commission on police corruption and Serpico, whom I met through Durk.

Well, I did not get in to the NYPD.  No, I had not been arrested for antiwar protests and was not on any list of subversives. It was simply that New York City was having a budget crisis and there was a hiring freeze for all municipal agencies. My police exam results placed me high on the waiting list after applicants who had gotten extra points for veteran preference. I think I was number 130, which was pretty high considering there were 33,000 police officers on the NYPD at that time.

New York City, of course, provided  no prediction as to  when it would recover from the budget crisis and start hiring again, so as a fallback while waiting for the NYPD, I enrolled at Harvard Law School (apparently it was easier to get into Harvard Law School than into the New York City Police Department). I paid the tuition month-to-month with the expectation that I might get the call from New York at any time. I shared a house on a 100-acre horse farm in Bedford with Scott Armstrong.

In the Spring of 1970, I saw a notice in the Boston newspaper that the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. was doing nationwide recruiting and was conducting interviews in Boston. Being in a federal city whose employees were at that time paid entirely by the U.S, Treasury, Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police was not hampered by budget freezes and, with the highest crime rate in the country at that time, had just been authorized to double the size of the police department (from 2500 to 5,000) after a Congressman had been robbed and his secretary assaulted on the streets of D.C. near the Capitol. So even though I had not been to D.C. since the 7^th grade field trip, I figured I would apply, since both the interview and the physical were being offered locally in the Boston area. I was accepted (they were desperate to meet their quota for recruits), and since New York City had not come through, I accepted. By then it was late spring, and I was allowed to finish the year at law school before reporting to the Police Academy in D.C.

Joining the police department was not an attempt to avoid being drafted for Vietnam, since there was now a lottery system with no deferments. (I was number 301 and they got up to 295 the following year). The aggressive recruitment created interesting changes in the Metropolitan Police Department in the early 1970’s. They were so desperate to get bodies on the street that not only did they accept Ivy League graduates, they also offered a 180-day early discharge to soldiers on active duty in Vietnam if they joined the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. In addition, and even more game-changing, the recruiters were instructed to ensure that the new class of recruits was 50% African-American, whereas the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department had always had an unofficial quota of 10% African-American (even though Washington, D.C. was about 70% African-American).

Because of this new racial mix, many of the experienced white officers, many of whom were from the South, either resigned or asked for reassignment from the precincts to the detectives. This left the precincts with all new, young officers, a situation which, on the one hand meant there was no pressure to conform to bad or corrupt practices; on the other hand, there were no good models to emulate, because virtually everyone was new. Most new police officers, like me, had no idea how to get from place to place in D.C., so giving directions to tourists was quite problematical in this time before GPS.

Even with the integration of the police department, officers lined up for roll call with black officers on one side and white officers on the other side. I frequently lined up on the non-white side just to see what would happen. Interestingly, nobody ever said anything about it. There was no overt racism, since 50% of the recruits were African-American and most career officers had left the precincts.

I learned a lot as a police officer about police and inner-city life. My patrol area still had boarded up storefronts from the 1968 riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King. As a police officer, you see people at their worst—lots of domestic abuse and alcohol and drug problems. We often could not even attend to all the calls for armed robberies and assaults. There were some humorous times too. One of my Yale roommates, John Mazer, came down to march in the anti-war Moratorium. He stayed with me and we rode downtown together. John got out on one side of the street to march and I got out on the other side to guard the government office buildings. I was not involved in the 10,000 arrests (many of those arrested were later compensated in civil suits).

As police officers move up in seniority, they take exams to get promotions and higher pay, which usually means desk jobs, which is what they want. I learned that most police do not want confrontations and almost from the start, they talk about pensions and retirement. However, I figured if I was going to have desk job, I didn’t need to be in the police department. So, after three years on street patrol, I decided it was time to move on.  A friend, who was an academic, said I should apply for a grant, and she told me to apply to the National Endowment for the Humanities because they had a Younger Humanist Fellowship which was not for academic credit and for which no academic paper was required to be written. I thought the idea was ridiculous but I put in for a grant to study the French police. Hey, why not? I had worked for an American company in Paris after my freshman year at Yale, so I had been looking for an excuse to go back to Paris. To my amazement I got the grant.

So I took a “leave” from the police department and set off. First I joined my senior year off-campus Yale roommate, Jim Mann, a Harvard graduate who was working for the  New Haven Register (Jim later went on to have a distinguished journalism career at the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun) and then  set off with Jim and his wife on a trip through  Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. I was in Afghanistan during the coup that deposed the King, and I saw the mountain carved with the Buddha that was later destroyed by the Taliban.

After three months of travelling I went to Paris for my fellowship. I had an introduction to an F.B.I. agent who was assigned to the U.S. Embassy, and he arranged for me to meet some French police officials. They were a bit skeptical when I said I was most interested in the lowest level of policing because that is where there is direct contact with the population, so they arranged for me to ride with some Paris patrol officers, who mostly just harassed prostitutes. Mostly I sent to have long lunches at the police academy in Lyons rather than being “on the street,” which was my real interest. Although I did not get a lot of access to street officers, I did meet my future wife, Carol Shasha, a Connecticut College graduate who worked as a textile designer in Paris for three years. It was much easier to get access to the police in London. I asked for a high crime area, and I rode with officers in the theater district. Their main focus seemed to be busting theater ticket scalpers, which was a very far cry from what we were doing on the streets of Washington, D.C.

After the Younger Humanist Fellowship I applied from Paris to re-enter to Harvard Law School as a 2L and was accepted.  However, instead of going west to the U.S., Carol and I decided to take a circuitous route back to the U.S by going East through Southeast Asia and Hawaii. We travelled with backpacks for 3 ½ months s through Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Hawaii, ending up with classmate Nick Putnam in L.A. and then to Boston for Harvard Law.

Harvard Law School was different in 1974 than it was in 1969. This time there were a number of students who had not come straight from college. There were students who had worked in political campaigns and students who had written books before going to law school. One student had been a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down. After finishing the last two years at Harvard Law, living in an apartment in Watertown, Carol and I got married and honeymooned in Scandinavia.

I turned down a job at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and accepted a lawyer job at a medium-sized corporate law firm in Boston.  It didn’t take me long to realize that this type of law firm was not for me. After two years an opportunity arose to join the office of a newly-elected district attorney in Essex County, north of Boston. I came in as Chief District Court Prosecutor and supervised 20 assistant district attorneys. My police experience was helpful in many ways; for one thing, I could sense when police were not being truthful or were exaggerating.  I got to choose the cases I wanted for myself. In order to assure consistency in prosecutorial decisions, I assigned myself to review all motor vehicle homicide cases, civil rights cases, and parental child kidnapping cases. In addition I tried murders, rapes and armed robberies. I wrote an article on parental kidnapping in the Massachusetts Law Review and I co-authored a book with a chemist on Apprehending and Prosecuting Drunk Drivers.

Being in the top echelon of the district attorney’s office was a great job, and I stayed for 10 years.  By then I felt that I had done pretty much everything that a D.A. could do, and I had also reached the highest pay level, which was not all that much, especially since we now had two kids. So I decided to try private practice again, but this time I joined a different type of firm. I joined Kotin, Crabtree and Strong as of counsel and became the eighth partner after a year. The firm had a general practice, but also had a specialty area in representing parents and children with special needs fighting school districts to provide funding of special education private schools. I started out doing personal injury cases and criminal cases, but eventually gravitated to the special education area, as well as Title IX (sexual harassment in colleges) and school discipline cases in high schools and colleges. I have been at the firm for 30 years.

Carol and I have three children—Jeffrey, Ariana, and Nicholas–and four grandchildren. We have lived in the same house in Cambridge since 1979.