Dugan Arnett

Mar 13, 2025 | bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett

“This is an auspicious occasion, because I’ve known this individual for a long time, and I’m fully confident that he is up to this job,” Mitchell told the crowd. The two had worked cases together years earlier, when Mitchell was a young prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Boston and Oliveira was climbing the ranks of New Bedford’s Police Department. Oliveira stood beside the mayor that afternoon, stoic.

Mar 13, 2025 | bostonglobe.com | Andrew Ryan |Dugan Arnett

Dozens of Massachusetts agencies — including two of the state’s 10 largest police departments, Brockton and Quincy — have no policy governing the use of informants, a fact that one criminal justice expert calls “insane.” More than three dozen departments in the state allow the use of unregistered informants, who are unvetted and go untracked.

Mar 12, 2025 | bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett |Andrew Ryan

Below deck, a handful of fishermen prepared for their journey. Some lay down to sleep. Shortly before 9:30, they heard pounding on the wheelhouse door. The stranger was dressed in black. His eyes were bloodshot. He had a pistol on his hip. He pushed his way into the cabin, barged into the bunk of a sleeping fisherman, and dug furiously through the man’s pockets. Jolted from sleep, the fisherman pushed and struggled to fight the intruder off.

Jul 4, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett

The Bristol County District Attorney’s Office has dropped criminal charges against a New Bedford man accused of drug trafficking, a month after a judge excoriated a former New Bedford Police detective for “gross misconduct” involving his use of a purported confidential informant. The charges against Miguel Martinez, 46, were quietly dismissed last week during a hearing inside the Bristol County Superior Courthouse in Fall River.

Feb 21, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett

The seventh-grader was naked in the photo “from head to toe.”Berner knew that his son — whose learning disabilities required special education assistance — could be susceptible to bullying, overly trusting and easily coerced. The family had been warned that the differences between the boy and his peers would grow more pronounced as he got older, and that those differences could make him a target. Still, a nude photo?