BOSTON — At 10 o'clock yesterday morning, the Boston City Council's Public Safety committee gaveled in a hearing on the two issues hammering Boston's rank-and-file cops: the staffing crisis, and the police-detail reimbursement system the City won't explain.
One chair was empty. The Boston Police Commissioner's.
Michael Cox — Mayor Michelle Wu's hand-picked top cop — did not appear.
Second council oversight no-show in six weeks.
Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox. Mayor Wu appointed him in 2022. (Source: City of Boston)
What he skipped
Two hearing orders were on the agenda. The staffing order — filed in April by Councilors Ed Flynn and Erin Murphy — calls Boston's situation "a public safety and public health emergency." It points to the 2,500-officer floor codified in city law since 1980, and documents resignations jumping from one in 2018 to thirty-six in 2022, voluntary retirements from seventeen to one hundred twenty-seven. The reimbursement order, filed by Murphy in March, asks why the police-detail reimbursement system doesn't fully recover the City's cost from private contractors for cops at construction sites, sporting events, and concert lots.
These are the questions every BPD union rep has been asking. They're the questions Cox would have had to answer.
He didn't show up.
The councilors who called the hearing
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Murphy responded in a statement Tuesday.
"Commissioner Cox was called before the Council to answer specific questions about overtime, staffing, and details," Murphy said. "He should have been there, or he should have sent command staff who could answer directly. The idea that appearing at a budget hearing last week excuses him from showing up for an oversight hearing today is ridiculous."
Boston City Councilors Ed Flynn (left) and Erin Murphy (right). Both filed the staffing-hearing order Cox skipped.
Flynn issued his own statement.
"As someone that has always supported the men and women of the Boston Police, it's disappointing that the police commissioner refused to appear before an important hearing we called to discuss strategies to hire hundreds of police officers every year and to support police officers and their families as well," Flynn said. "Unlike city colleagues, I have never been part of the defund the police movement or ignoring crime in Boston."
The pattern
It's not Cox's first vanishing act. On April 7, the same committee held a hearing on body-cam policy after Officer Nicholas O'Malley's fatal Roxbury shooting. Cox didn't appear. A BPD legal advisor went in his place. The committee chair publicly called the absence "disappointing" and a motion to formally summon Cox was filed — and withdrawn after his office said he was "ready, willing, and able" to testify at a future date, GBH reported.
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Then Tuesday came.
Why the chair is empty
Wu's $4.9 billion FY27 budget puts the Boston Police Department at $484.5 million — an increase of 0.09 percent over FY26. Essentially flat. The Boston Policy Institute has tracked Boston's police-overtime overrun for years; the City writes the same number, and the cops blow past it because mandatory overtime is what keeps shifts staffed.
If Cox had testified honestly Tuesday, every honest answer he gave would have been a vote of no confidence in Wu's budget.
So he didn't give one.
The Council vote on FY27 arrives no later than Wednesday, June 10 — three weeks out.
Mass Daily News reached out to the Boston Police Department for comment. The department did not immediately respond.
The empty chair stays empty until then.
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