MassLive, January 2026
When former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis saw the widely circulated video footage of federal immigration agents opening fire on a motorist in Minneapolis on Wednesday, one thought leaped immediately to mind. “Unfortunately, it made me think we were going back to the bad old days,” Davis, who helmed Boston’s police department from 2006 until his retirement in 2013, told MassLive on Thursday. “The use of firearms was really prevalent in pursuits of motor vehicles back in the ’70s,“ he continued. ”It wasn’t until 1993 that we started to look at this … and one of the first cities in the country that stopped it was Boston. And it was after an incident where people, tragically, were killed. And we started to think about the dynamics of it.”
The death of Renee Nicole Good, 37, a U.S. citizen who was shot and killed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, sparked a fresh round of protests and nationwide outrage over President Donald Trump’s aggressive mass deportation campaign and the heavy-handed tactics of those charged with carrying it out. It was not clear Thursday, however, whether Good’s death represents the same inflection point as the death of George Floyd, who died at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May 2020, sparking civil rights protests nationwide, they said.
