Last Friday, state police suspended a trooper without pay for allegedly committing a lewd act at a concert at Foxboro Stadium. WGBH Morning Edition Host Joe Mathieu spoke with Northeastern University law professor and WGBH News legal analyst Daniel Medwed about some of the more recent corruption scandals that have affected the state police, and how the department is addressing them. The transcript has been edited for clarity.
Joe Mathieu: Let's start with last week's news, before we talk about anything else. What happened in Foxboro?
Daniel Medwed: An off duty trooper allegedly exposed himself and punched someone in the face during a Luke Bryan concert in June. The state police responded by suspending him with pay. That is until last week, when he was charged formally with the crime of lewd and lascivious conduct. That prompted the state police to convert his suspension to one without pay. As you mentioned at the top, this is just the latest in a string of ugly incidents embroiling the state police.
Mathieu: Well, let's run through some of the other incidents and how you categorize them in terms of severity.
Medwed: I think we could break them down into two different categories. First, we have ones that relate to organizational or systemic misconduct, and second, those that concerned individual rogue troopers. So first, organizational misconduct. There is that massive billing scheme coming out of Troop E, where 46 troopers were implicated in a plan to overcharge overtime and bilk the state out of money. That resulted in 10 criminal indictments: eight of the troopers have pled guilty to embezzlement [and] two other charges are pending. Then, of course, there was a scandal related to discriminatory practices in hiring and promotion in the state police. So those are the two most prominent organizational systemic scandals.
Mathieu: How about individual incidents of misconduct?
Medwed: In addition to the lewd and lascivious conduct charge that we talked about, there was an indictment in September when a trooper allegedly fired a rifle at some folks who were driving ATVs on I-93. Now, maybe it's not wise to drive ATVs on I-93, but I don't think it's wise to necessarily respond with riflery. In addition, some supervisors allegedly put pressure on a lower level trooper to scrub embarrassing details from an arrest report of the daughter of a prominent local state court judge. I think all of these individual incidents are symptoms of a larger cultural malady within the organization — a tolerance for corruption in our state police.
Mathieu: Daniel, the state has reacted to these scandals. We've done a lot of reporting, for instance, on the overtime billing scandal. Will that prevent them from happening again?
Medwed: I don't think so, and here's why. On the one hand, there has been a reaction. Yes, we've disbanded Troop E. Yes, Colonel Kerry Gilpin has come up at the top of the chain of command. And yes, Governor Baker and Colonel Gilpin have implemented a number of internal reforms [and] self-regulation, such as more robust internal auditing processes. But on the other hand, I don't think that's enough without robust, strong external regulation. Where is our legislature? Why haven't we had open public hearings about improprieties in the state police? We do this when there's a natural gas explosion in the Merrimack Valley [and] when there's a concern about real estate sales involving Mount Ida College. Why hasn't the legislature acted here with alacrity and really tried to expose and figure out what's going on? In the absence of that type of external regulation, I fear that these incidents will continue.
Mathieu: Are our federal authorities doing enough here?
Medwed: Well, to their credit, the local federal U.S. attorney's office has taken the initiative here. They have submitted a host of criminal charges against troopers in the billing scandal. But that said, I haven't seen conspiracy charges related to the state police. It seems like that was a very integrated scheme. I'm not sure, but maybe that would lead to some conspiracy charges. And this is an office that is quite comfortable filing conspiracy charges in other contexts. They've done so in the college admissions "varsity blues" case and in the case involving Shelley Joseph, the Newton judge who is accused of allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant evade ICE. So at bottom, I think the feds — and even more the state — has failed to hold our state police accountable, and we need to do more.
