From [HERE] and [HERE] Four months after he was sworn in as Boston’s first black police commissioner, William Gross blasted the American Civil Liberties Union over its lawsuit, saying the city’s cops racially profile people of color in their efforts to fight gangs.

The ACLU suit accuses the police department of using a gang-monitoring system that targets and investigates a disproportionate number of black and brown people who may not even belong to a gang, WFXT-TV reported.

With that, Gross fired back at the ACLU on Facebook and called the civil rights organization “paper warriors,” the station said.

“How would they know,” the commissioner noted in his post, “they are never in the streets but always hiding and waiting for a slow news day to justify their existence.”

The local chapter of the ACLU and 14 other groups filed a lawsuit on Nov. 15, accusing the department of being secretive about its process of monitoring gang members. The organization claimed that by using a point system, the city’s police department targets, labels and investigates a disproportionate amount of black and brown students as it relates to gang affiliations.

Gross, in his Facebook post, said the organization isn’t around when officers are shot, or when his department is helping citizens, but are “always hiding and waiting for a slow news day to justify their existence.”

“No ACLU present when we have to explain to a mother that her son or daughter was horribly murdered by gang violence,” Gross wrote

The ACLU fired back at police Commissioner William G. Gross yesterday, calling his Facebook post slamming the organization “an attempt to divert attention” from a lawsuit seeking gang database records.

In a statement sent to the Herald, Massachusetts ACLU Executive Director Carol Rose said “the Commissioner’s post does not explain why the Boston Police Department has failed to comply with the public records law, and does not answer basic questions about the BPD’s use of its gang database.”

“Commissioner Gross’ accusations appear to be nothing more than an attempt to divert attention from the serious issues raised by an ACLU lawsuit that seeks to uncover whether the Boston Police Department is unfairly and arbitrarily targeting people of color,” Rose said in the statement. “In order to make Boston a safe city for all its residents, we must meaningfully address discriminatory policing, and confront the role the gang database plays in the lives of young Black and Latino people in our city.”