Investigators Recommended Firing a Northampton Cop. Why Didn’t It Happen?

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NORTHAMPTON — Late last year, Northampton police officer Heather Longley was facing termination. An independent investigation into a drunk-driving stop Longley had supervised almost a year earlier had just concluded that she had committed misconduct that “contradicts the very fiber of the expectations for a police officer.” Longley and her trainee should be fired, the report recommended.

But in the final days of Police Chief Jody Kasper’s tenure, that’s not what happened.

In a decision she made less than a month before she left office, Kasper decided to reject significant parts of those recommendations. She cleared Longley — who had told her training officer during the traffic stop, “We’re going to cheat” — of any wrongdoing, according to new documents The Shoestring has obtained. Kasper did fire the trainee, officer Edward Hagelstein, over the same incident, the records show. 

Those are the latest developments in a saga that began with a January 2023 OUI arrest, first reported by The Shoestring, that Hagelstein conducted under Longley’s supervision. It was nearly 5 a.m. on a chilly January morning and the officers had pulled over a driver who was coming back from the MGM Springfield casino; his car reportedly had a broken taillight. In the arrest report, the officers alleged that the car immediately smelled like alcohol when Hagelstein arrived, that the driver had glassy eyes, slurred his words, and fumbled his belongings before failing field sobriety tests. 

However, when the case made its way to court, dashcam audio from the car revealed that Hagelstein initially told Longley, upon returning to their cruiser, that the driver “didn’t have any smell.” Nevertheless, Longley instructed Hagelstein to return to the car and continue the OUI investigation before the officers eventually arrested the driver when he refused to take a breathalyzer test. 

And those weren’t the only details that raised eyebrows with the driver’s attorney, Jesse Adams, and with Northampton District Court Judge Mary Beth Ogulewicz, who in July agreed to Adams’ request to throw out all of the evidence from the traffic stop. 

“If it’s an OUI, we’re going to cheat,” Longley could be heard telling Hagelstein on the dashcam audio. “I’m going to help you get through this because I need to be out of here by 8:30.”

At the time, Longley’s comments drew a rebuke from Ogulewicz. The judge noted that when Adams asked Longley during cross-examination if cheating is bad because it’s dishonest, Longley answered that “it depends on the context.”

“As a law enforcement officer engaged in the performance of police duties and training another officer, espousing cheating in any regard is anathema to the fair and impartial administration of the law and contributes, particularly in the current socioculturalpolitical climate, to the widely held public perception, particularly among marginalized populations, of rogue law enforcement,” Ogulewicz wrote in her decision to suppress evidence from the traffic stop. 

Following Ogulewicz’s decision, the Northampton  Police Department hired Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting — a Massachusetts consulting firm run by former prosecutors and police officials — to look into the arrest and its fallout. 

The firm’s investigation, which The Shoestring obtained via a public records request, concluded that Longley’s “we’re going to cheat” comment was just an offer to help Hagelstein with post-arrest paperwork, which normally would have been Hagelstein’s sole responsibility as trainee. However, the report concluded that the officers had committed misconduct when they included a “lie” in their police report and “doubled down” when in court. The firm’s investigator Daniel Bennett, who previously worked as a prosecutor in Worcester County, said Hagelstein had even committed felony perjury during his court testimony. He suggested terminating both officers.

But Kasper largely rejected those recommendations. In a separate conclusion written in early December, she said that the available evidence didn’t amount to misconduct on the part of Longley. Kasper wrote that Hagelstein, the trainee, was to blame for the “error” in question but that it did not rise to the level of perjury. Kasper declined an interview for this article, instead directing The Shoestring to her written decisions on the matter. 

The Shoestring’s efforts to reach Hagelstein were unsuccessful. In a statement Longley wrote to her supervisors shortly before Kasper decided not to fire her, she called Bennett’s conclusions a “career ending allegation based on lies and a faulty investigation.” 

“Chief Kasper was given all of the facts and made the right decision,” Longley told The Shoestring during an in-person interview in which she largely read from pre-written statements. “I was rightfully cleared of any wrongdoing.”

That’s not how defense attorney Jesse Adams sees it. As the lawyer who represented the man Longley and Hagelstein arrested, he has characterized Kasper’s decision not to fire Longley as “a show of exceptionally bad judgment.”

“Chief Kasper has sent the message that officers can cheat with impunity if they are on her good side,” Adams said in a statement to The Shoestring. “Chief Kasper, who’d vowed to retire in Northampton, made this decision about a month before she left for her new job and it comes to light now, after she has gone, so there is no accountability. Her parting act was to pardon a discredited officer who is actually responsible for training other officers.”

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The outside investigation that the Northampton Police Department commissioned focused largely on Hagelstein’s initial comment that the driver “didn’t have any smell.” That comment, captured on dashcam audio, contradicted the police report Hagelstein later wrote under Longley’s supervision, which said he noticed a strong odor of alcohol on first contact with the driver. 

That amounted to withholding exculpatory evidence from the driver and replacing it with a “lie,” Bennett, the investigator, concluded. Both officers also said under oath during cross-examination that they didn’t recall Hagelstein initially saying the driver didn’t smell. That was despite the fact that they had recently watched the dashcam video of the arrest several times. 

“Given an opportunity to testify truthfully about the evidence, [Longley] indicated that she did not remember,” Bennett wrote. “This was her sworn testimony despite the fact that she self-admittedly viewed the video three times — including twice within a day of the hearing. This supposed memory loss is not credible. Officer Longley’s misconduct contradicts the very fiber of the expectations for a police officer.”

Regarding Hagelstein, Bennett went even further, suggesting Hagelstein had committed felony perjury by saying on the witness stand that there was a strong odor of alcohol when he first approached the vehicle. Bennett interviewed two other field training officers who said Hagelstein told them after the arrest that he didn’t initially smell alcohol. According to Bennett’s report, Hagelstein told one of those training officers that Longley had accused him of trying to avoid work late in his shift and that she had “forced” him to make an OUI arrest he wasn’t comfortable with. 

“When Officer Hagelstein got back to the station after the arrest, he took the first step towards misconduct by falsifying his police report,” Bennett wrote in his conclusion that the department should fire Hagelstein. “It disturbed him so much that he relayed it to other officers. Officer Longley was experienced and was directing the manner in which Officer Hagelstein wrote his police report; However, it was still Officer Hagelstein’s police report, and he had the responsibility to put the truth and only the truth in it.”

When Kasper went to review those findings, she came to different conclusions.

In a supplemental report on Nov. 7, Kasper accepted Bennett’s findings that Hagelstein had broken department rules about truthfulness, conduct unbecoming an officer, and putting false information on records. However, she rejected Bennett’s conclusion that Hagelstein had committed felony perjury.

That’s because Kasper said there were legitimate questions as to whether Hagelstein and Longley had actually ever heard the cruiser-cabin portion of the dashcam audio before testifying. According to Kasper, both officers said they hadn’t heard the full audio from the department’s new dashcams — a controversial Motorola Solutions system called WatchGuard — and were in “shock” when they first heard it after testifying.

Kasper also said it was plausible, as Longley had suggested, that although Hagelstein had indeed said the driver “didn’t have any smell,” Longley had not heard or registered that comment in the moment. 

In a statement to her supervisors, Longley had explained that she was instead focused on Hagelstein “actively choosing to avoid an OUI investigation because of the man’s proximity to home and because he didn’t want to arrest someone that late into the shift.” Longley said she was so concentrated on telling Hagelstein he needed to do his job that she didn’t hear him make the smell comment — an explanation Kasper accepted in her final decision, which she made on Dec. 6.

“It appears that he was intentionally trying to avoid an arrest late into the shift,” Kasper said. “That single decision started a domino effect of all events that followed related to this case. I find it plausible that Officer Longley was thinking about how to address this issue when Hagelstein made the statement about the odor.”

It’s not clear how much the city of Northampton paid for the investigative report on Hagelstein and Longley’s stop. The Shoestring has submitted a public-records request for invoices of recent independent investigations.

It’s not the first time in recent months that the Northampton Police Department has hired the consulting firm Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting to investigate police misconduct. Last summer, the department hired the firm to investigate an officer who pulled a 60-year-old Hispanic woman from her car, then tackled and pepper-sprayed her, after he had stopped her for a broken headlight. The firm ultimately concluded that Officer John Sellew “was courteous and tactful in his performance of his duties, and controlled his temper, exercising the utmost patience and discretion, even in the face of extreme provocation.”

In 2021, the Northampton Policing Review Commission released a report that suggested several ways to reduce encounters between armed police and civilians during traffic enforcement, during which people of color are disproportionately stopped nationwide. One of the commission’s recommendations was to end stops after dark for equipment violations and/or minor traffic infractions, which they said “may be often pretextual and fraught with increased unnecessary danger for both civilians and officers.” 

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It’s also unclear whether the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office has acted regarding the case. 

Prosecutors are legally required to turn over any exculpatory evidence to defendants in criminal cases, and many DA’s keep what are known as “Brady” lists of police officers who have been found to have credibility issues. In a letter to Longley, the Northampton Police Department said that the DA’s office “will have to train their staff to defend your testimony at trial for the foreseeable future.” 

In an emailed statement, Laurie Loisel, a spokesperson for District Attorney David Sullivan, said that the DA’s office had recently received the investigative report into Hagelstein and Longley’s arrest. However, she said the office doesn’t comment on individual officers and declined to say whether the DA had drafted any Brady disclosures about Longley.

“The DA’s office complies with state and federal case law by disclosing to defense attorneys potentially exculpatory information related to any witness who might testify in a criminal trial,” the statement said. “This is true for law enforcement witnesses as well as civilian witnesses.”

(The independent journalist Andrew Quemere, who writes The Mass Dump newsletter, is currently suing Sullivan for withholding from the public the names of officers on its Brady disclosures.)

Longley told The Shoestring that the DA’s office had not spoken to her about the issue.

The DA’s office also declined to say whether prosecutors had brought a perjury charge against Hagelstein. Loisel said “it is standard policy that we neither confirm nor deny questions around potential criminal investigations.”

A letter the Northampton Police Department sent Hagelstein says that the DA’s office “determined that there was evidence to support an investigation into administrative charge of Criminal Conduct (to wit perjury)” based on their review of audio from the court hearing when Adams made a motion to dismiss evidence from the traffic stop. 

“Additionally, members of the Brady Committee will be revisiting the matter based on the new information gathered via the audio of the motion hearing,” that letter said.

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The power dynamic between Longley and Hagelstein comes up often in the various probes into the arrest. 

Ogulewicz, the Northampton District Court judge who heard the case, said that it was because of “the imbalance of power between the officers” that Hagelstein returned to speak to the driver a second time. Adams, the defense attorney, also highlighted that relationship. Hagelstein himself reportedly told a supervisor that Longley “forced” him to make an OUI arrest and that he didn’t agree with it, according to the outside investigation. 

But Longley painted a different picture. In her statement to supervisors, she said Hagelstein was close with higher-ups, the names of whom the police department has redacted. For that reason, she said she felt “afraid” to give Hagelstein bad performance reviews. She said that Hagelstein “had the power then and he has the power now.”

“This man, while in field training, had a better relationship with supervisors than I ever did and he made sure to brag about it whenever possible,” Longley said. 

Adams, who is a former Northampton city councilor, took issue with Longley’s statement. He described it as failing to take responsibility for her actions and making “excuses,” including “blaming” the officer she was supervising

“Her total absence of resipiscence leads to no reason to believe that she will be deterred from future similar conduct,” Adams said in his statement to The Shoestring — comments Longley called unnecessary and “unprofessional.”

Adams also said that he hopes Nantucket, where Kasper took over as police chief early this year, “takes note of the shocking way in which she snubbed Northampton on her way out the door.” He said the district attorney should take Bennett’s finding of perjury against Hagelstein seriously. He also urged acting Northampton Police Chief John Cartledge to reverse Kasper’s decision to keep Longley on the force.

“He should restore the faith of the city and the good people of the Northampton Police Department that would never engage in this type of behavior and who must be deeply offended by it,” Adams said.

Cartledge declined to comment for this article.

Adams pointed out that Ogulewicz had also drawn attention to Longley’s comments during cross examination, saying that Longley’s “adoption of cheating, and honesty as a malleable factor in the course of police work, casts doubt on her credibility in the determination of facts by this court.” 

Longley, though, said that she never told Adams that cheating was OK and was misquoted to that effect. She said she never had a chance to explain in court her answer that “it depends on the context” when asked if cheating is bad because it’s dishonest.

“Meaning the use of the term cheating does not always mean dishonesty,” she explained. “You can cheat on a diet, you can cheat death etc.”

During her interview with The Shoestring, Longley said that “no one dislikes a bad cop more than a good one, and I can assure you I’m a good one.” 

“I got into this line of work to protect people, to serve my community and to have a job I can be proud of,” she said. “I plan to continue to do that.”

In 2020, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving presented an award to Longley. In a Facebook post announcing the award, the organization said that she goes “above and beyond to take impaired drivers off the road.”

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Dusty Christensen is an independent investigative reporter based in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at dusty.christensen@protonmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @dustyc123 or on Instagram @dustycreports.

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