Records: Northampton Police Spent $61,000 on Outside Investigations

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Last year, when Northampton police officer Heather Longley was heard on dash-cam audio telling her trainee back in the cruiser “we’re going to cheat” during an OUI stop, the fallout was significant. A judge threw out the case and the department hired an independent consulting firm to investigate any wrongdoing on the part of Longley.

The firm Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting took on the case, concluding that Longley had committed misconduct that “contradicts the very fiber of the expectations for a police officer.” The firm recommended firing her and her trainee, Edward Hagelstein. But then-police chief Jody Kasper ignored those recommendations, deciding instead to keep Longley on the force while firing Hagelstein.

It wasn’t the first time that the Northampton Police Department has decided to turn to private firms to conduct its internal investigations. 

Since 2017, the department has paid out at least $60,840 to outside consultants to review allegations of misconduct against officers. This figure comes from department invoices The Shoestring obtained via a public records request, which show six payments since 2017 for these investigations, including three last year. For the investigation of Longley and Hagelstein, the city paid $12,450.

Some are now questioning those payments, given their outcomes last year.

“It was an expensive investigation and a waste of money because the chief ignored at least some of its recommendations,” Jesse Adams, the defense attorney for the driver Longley and Hagelstein arrested, said when informed of the investigation’s cost to the city. 

And that’s not the only outside investigation that has raised eyebrows in Northampton recently.

Last summer, Northampton police officers tackled 60-year-old Holyoke resident Marisol Driouech to the ground, pepper-sprayed and arrested her after a brief traffic stop for a broken headlight. After The Shoestring published dash-cam footage of the arrest, over 70 people protested in front of City Hall against police violence. Protesters were critical of officer John Sellew, who yanked Driouech from her car and in his subsequent police report wrote that because she had grabbed his baton, he knew he had “the ability to utilize strikes or possibly lethal force.”

“Hey hey, ho ho, John Sellew has got to go!” the protesters chanted.

The outside investigators the Northampton police hired to investigate officers’ use of force during the arrest, however, came to a different conclusion. The same firm that investigated the OUI arrest, Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting, determined that Sellew “was forceful, but was not discourteous, rude, or insolent to any member of the public.”

“Officer Sellew under the circumstances 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,” the report said.

That report cost the city $11,978, according to an invoice from Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting. 

“I think that’s a lot of money to pay to have somebody tell you that beating up old ladies is courteous,” said Driouech’s attorney Dana Goldblatt, who has filed a federal lawsuit against the city over the arrest.

The police department is the only city department that outsources its internal investigations in that way, according to City Hall. In an email, interim police Chief John Cartledge said that the department typically hires outside investigators “when the investigations are potentially more significant in nature.” 

“Investigations can take an extensive amount of time and can be taxing on our staff, so hiring an outside investigator can be beneficial to our agency in this way and maintaining our transparency to the department and community,” he said.

Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting is one of a handful of similar outfits across the state. Run by former prosecutors and police officials, the firm consults with police departments and other law enforcement agencies on everything from misconduct investigations to policies, training, and compliance.

One of the partners in the company is Daniel Bennett, a former defense attorney turned prosecutor who served as secretary of the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security from 2015 to 2018 under Gov. Charlie Baker. Reached by email Monday, Bennett said he couldn’t answer specific questions about the firm’s clients.

“We are an independent investigative agency and municipalities retain us knowing that we are going to make our evaluations independently and that anything in our investigation is going to be confidential unless they release it,” he said. 

Bennett did not respond to a request to speak about the company’s business more broadly.

Other firms Northampton has contracted with include APD Management, founded by former Tewksbury police chief Alfred Donovan, and the employment consulting company Discrimination and Harassment Solutions. Police brass hired both of those firms to investigate misconduct allegations against Lt. Alan Borowski. 

The department hired APD Management in 2017 for $3,130 to investigate an anonymous letter that accused Borowski of inappropriately removing drugs from the department’s pill drop box. Kasper suspended Borowski for two days over the report’s findings, but Borowski and his union appealed that discipline and an arbitrator ruled that the department’s investigations into him were “not fair.” The city rescinded all of its discipline and findings of wrongdoing against him.

The Borowski affair led to what Discrimination and Harassment Solutions would soon describe as “unending turmoil” in the department. The Northampton Police Department hired that firm next, in 2019, to investigate supervisors’ behavior while investigating Borowski. The resulting document, which cost the city $26,225, had Kasper’s first name misspelled as Judy several times on the front page. 

Dan Cannity, the former co-chair of the city’s Policing Review Commission, said the outside investigations are further evidence that the city hasn’t changed much about policing after the commission issued its recommendations.

“I’m disappointed that the city continues to seek out and use what are essentially just retired cops to perform investigations of the police that aren’t independent, they aren’t unbiased, and it seems like the city only wants to find a report and listen to a report when it already justifies what they’ve decided,” Cannity said. 

Cannity said that the outside investigations are another example of how Northampton hasn’t moved toward involving the public in oversight of the police department or its budget. He said the city has not done enough to transition responsibilities away from police and toward peer and co-responder models like the city’s Division of Community Care, which the Policing Review Commission initially conceived of as its own department.

“The goal of establishing a Department [of Community Care] was to limit the amount of contact that police had with the public because they aren’t governable,” he said. “Unfortunately, we haven’t seen a huge shift yet in transferring responsibilities, transferring calls, or being integrated deeply into the city.”

“We’re anxiously waiting for that,” he added.

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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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