If it seems like there is a headline almost every day about police misconduct in Massachusetts, it’s not your imagination.
Over the past few months, there has been an avalanche of bad news involving law enforcement.
Case in point: The Massachusetts State Police troopers arraigned on Thursday in Worcester Superior Court for the death of a recruit at the training academy is not the only scandal currently embroiling the agency.
Massachusetts State Police are also under scrutiny for a deadly crash in Woburn back in 2023 involving off-duty Sgt. Scott Quigley.
Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Scott Quigley is accused of driving drunk in a crash that killed a man more than two years ago, and authorities are coming under fire for their handling of the case.
Revelations that Quigley might have been drunk behind the wheel came to light more than two years after the crash, raising questions about a coverup.
Last week, a Suffolk County grand jury indicted Quigley with motor vehicle homicide for the death of a 37-year-old man with disabilities who was a passenger in the van that the trooper hit.
However, that is far from the only drunk driving incident involving a police officer in recent weeks:
“I think it’s shocking,” said Dennis Galvin, the president of the Massachusetts Association for Professional Law Enforcement. “The public confidence is going to continue to erode. That’s a critical issue for every citizen or resident of Massachusetts … because it undermines the criminal justice system. It undermines your faith in the law.”
Three members of the Massachusetts State Police accused of causing a trooper’s death during a training exercise pleaded not guilty Thursday.
Over the past year, other stories the NBC10 Boston Investigators reported ended up in federal court:
Thomas Hayes of the Hanover Police Department is charged in the hit-and-run crash that killed Alfredo Alves in Brockton. The NBC10 Boston Investigators also uncovered other questionable behavior, like the Medford police sergeant who retired after undercover video showed her using a family member’s disability placard to park in a handicap space at the police station.
Or the Mansfield police sergeant who stepped down after an internal affairs report concluded he sexually harassed high school female interns, even taking one into the woods to walk around a secluded cemetery during an unauthorized ride-along.
Galvin worries about how the litany of examples will affect the future of the profession.
“If you want to get good people into this, they’re not going to get involved with it, because they’re going to say, ‘I don’t want to associate with this kind of environment.’ So we have a serious problem here, in that regard,” Galvin said.
