Firm to investigate Boise: “We need to know whether racist ideology has tainted policing”

A prominent Washington, D.C. lawyer will investigate the tenure of retired Boise Police Capt. Matt Bryngelson, who made racist posts online while serving as an officer in the department before his retirement in August.

The team of lawyers will investigate whether Matt Bryngelson’s racist views impacted his policing, the public, and other officers, and whether any city resources were involved in “racist materials,” Mayor Lauren McLean said at a Wednesday news conference.

News of Bryngelson’s conduct surfaced online earlier this month, after observers located racist blog posts written under a pseudonym in a website linked to white supremacist views, as well as a video interview with Bryngelson using the same pseudonym, in which he expresses some of those same views.

The Idaho Statesman previously confirmed Bryngelson’s connection to the conference from a public official who knows him, and confirmed the pseudonym is him by watching the video he appears in. Bryngelson did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment.

Michael Bromwich, an attorney with the international firm Steptoe and Johnston, will lead the investigation, McLean said.

Bromwich is known for a recent investigation into a years-long corruption scandal at the Baltimore Police Department, which one local outlet dubbed “the largest scandal to ever hit” Baltimore police. Eight members of a local task force are now in federal prison, and investigators discovered years of coordinated efforts to plant drugs on suspected drug dealers, steal their money and drugs, and resell them, according to Baltimore TV station WMAR.

Bromwich has long experience in oversight and independent investigations and has represented Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor who accused U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct; and Andrew McCabe, a former acting director of the FBI who was fired by former President Trump days before he was scheduled to retire. He is a former inspector general at the U.S. Department of Justice.

“We need to know whether racist ideology has tainted policing, hiring and promotions, internal investigations, and community interactions in any way,” McLean said. “It is one thing to hold a set of beliefs, but it is an altogether different thing to allow those beliefs to impact the behaviors, to impact your fellow officers, to impact the community. And that is what we have to be able to determine.”

City staff members are drafting a contract with the firm, which will be presented to the City Council next Tuesday, the mayor said. The mayor declined to say what the cost of the investigation would be, as the contract is not yet finalized.

She said the timeline of the investigation is still to be determined, but said she hopes it will be done “as quickly and transparently as possible.”

Mayor, union leader say they believe Bryngelson’s views not pervasive

At Wednesday’s news conference, McLean said she does not believe that Bryngelson’s views are “pervasive,” but added that “we must know what does exist and what’s happened” in the department.

Interim Police Chief Ron Winegar and Cpl. Brian Holland, a spokesperson for the Boise police union, attended the news conference and said they support the investigation.

“These have not been easy days,” Winegar said. “We stand ready to support the investigation by fully providing the investigator and his team with access to the documents, data and interviews necessary to be thorough.”

He added, “There is no room in the Boise Police Department for those who allow racist or white supremacist views to negatively impact policing in our community.”

Holland said Bryngelson’s views were “an isolated incident,” and the union would have preferred an internal investigation.

“We believe there’s offices designed for that,” he said. The city has an Office of Police Accountability that audits the department and investigates citizen complaints.

McLean said she selected an outside firm because there have been three versions of semi-independent police oversight offices during the more than two decades Bryngelson was with the police department. She also said she wanted an investigation by someone “that wouldn’t be a party to part of a system that we’re going to be looking at.”

Council member wants review of police systems

Members of the City Council, including President Elaine Clegg and Holli Woodings, Patrick Bageant and Jimmy Hallyburton, attended the news conference, along with members of the department’s command staff.

In the online posts, Bryngelson, writing under a pseudonym, linked Black people to higher levels of crime, writing that “every major crime here involves a Black person.”

In an interview with the Statesman, Hallyburton called such statements “clearly racist” and false.

“It doesn’t take much to go look at the news, to look at some of the major crimes ... and see that that’s an absolutely false statement,” Hallyburton said. “There’s all sorts of heinous crimes that are committed by white people as well as people of color.”

He also said he wants the city to review the Police Department’s structure, while noting that he’s had largely “very positive” experience with officers.

“It’s also alarming to see somebody who’s been in the Police Department that long and has managed to share those views while on BPD, and to imagine that there isn’t a system that allows those beliefs to exist,” he said.

He added, “There are systems in place that allowed this person to be here for a really long time, and that’s not OK. And we have to figure out what those systems are.”