SPRINGFIELD – In a Feb. 11 article in The Chronicle, in an interview with the president for the local chapter of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a comment was published that was not verified about the Springfield Police Department.
Ibrahim Coulibaly said that in Springfield, there have been incidents where Black people call the police for help and end up getting arrested themselves, and that this has occured on buses, in stores, and at recent protests.
“I reviewed every complaint that came in last year, and there are no complaints like that,” Leutentient George Crolly with Springfield Police said. “Even if somebody complained, and we had trouble locating a call or figuring it out right away, we’d have a documented complaint that would show that somebody called us about this type of thing.”
Coulibaly said he “cannot share specifics about our cases because they are protected under attorney/client laws under our legal redress lawyers license.”
“If there’s an incident like that on a bus or at a store, I would like to know about that,” Crolly said. “I would be appalled to learn that just because somebody called the police we would be targeting them … if any of my officers did anything like that, I would want to know about it and act on it.”
