logo
After recruit's death, Mass. State Police implement training reforms ahead of incoming academy class

After recruit's death, Mass. State Police implement training reforms ahead of incoming academy class

Yahoo02-05-2025
The Massachusetts State Police on Thursday announced a series of training reforms 'to enhance recruit training and ensure the highest standards of safety and effectiveness' following the death of a recruit in September.
Massachusetts State Police recruit Enrique Delgado-Garcia, of the 90th Recruit Training Troop at the Academy in New Braintree, died in September after suffering a 'medical crisis' during a defensive training exercise.
The new measures, released Thursday ahead of the next Recruit Training Troop, include dividing the upcoming class into two smaller cohorts, appointing new Academy leadership and completing an hour-by-hour review of the training curriculum, state police said in a statement.
The measures also include commissioning the International Association of Chiefs of Police to conduct an independent assessment of the State Police Academy.
'These initiatives reflect the Department's commitment to ensuring the Academy's training programs and practices meet the highest standards of safety and effectiveness while addressing the evolving needs of modern policing,' state police said.
In response to Gov. Maura Healey's directive, 'the Department has taken steps to align the Academy's programs, policies and practices with modern public safety needs, evolving societal expectations and best practices,' state police said.
'The State Police will bifurcate the next academy class into two smaller groups of recruits. One group will begin in May and the other will begin later this summer,' state police said. 'This new structure will allow Academy instructors to better address the individual needs of each recruit, strengthen mentorship, and promote overall readiness. This year's bifurcated class will serve as a pilot program to assess its impacts on recruits.'
The measures come months after Delgado-Garcia's death.
'We continue to mourn the loss of Trooper Delgado Garcia and extend our deepest condolences to his loved ones,' Massachusetts State Police Geoffrey Noble said in a statement.
'We remain dedicated to ensuring our Academy's programs and training practices uphold the highest standards of safety while preparing our recruits to serve with excellence and distinction,' Noble said. 'These new measures, including the IACP's assessment, will enhance our training model, reduce attrition, and prepare troopers to meet the demands of modern policing.'
The department continues to cooperate with an independent investigation led by David Meier, who was appointed by Attorney General Andrea Campbell, into the death of Delgado-Garcia, Noble said.
'The Massachusetts State Police Academy plays a vital role in preparing the next generation of troopers to protect and serve our communities statewide,' Noble said. 'We are committed to ensuring our training environment fosters professionalism and excellence while prioritizing the health and well-being of our recruits.'
Noble elevated the role of Academy Commandant from the rank of Detective Lieutenant to Captain.
He has appointed Captain David Pinkham, a 20-year veteran with a broad range of management experience in field, investigative, and standards and training functions, to serve as the new Commandant of the Academy.
In this role, Pinkham will oversee the selection of teaching staff for the upcoming Recruit Training Troop.
In addition, Academy staff have completed an hour-by-hour review of recruits' experiences at the Academy 'to ensure all training fosters a supportive environment with the appropriate balance of high-intensity activities with periods of rest and recovery,' state police said.
The boxing program remains suspended.
The department will evaluate the impact and outcomes of these adjustments to determine whether they should be adopted as a model for future Recruit Training Troops.
In January, the Department released a Request for Proposals seeking to identify independent experts to conduct a comprehensive review.
A strategic sourcing team of leaders from across the department evaluated submissions and recommended IACP for its clear plan to assess the Academy and provide recommendations based on their extensive experience in all areas of training and law enforcement.
With support from the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, the Department approved the selection of the IACP.
State police said the review will focus on critical areas, including, but not limited to:
· Training Programs and Methods: A thorough analysis of all current training modules will be conducted, including physical fitness requirements, classroom instruction, and scenario-based training. The evaluation will focus on the relevance, efficacy, and safety of the paramilitary training model currently in use as it relates to the roles and responsibilities of State Troopers. Additionally, it will consider the curriculum's alignment with modern policing needs, such as community engagement, de-escalation, and occupationally relevant physical assessments.
· Attrition and Injury Rates: The review will analyze trends in attrition rates for the last ten academy classes, with particular attention to candidate preparation and suitability, causes of dropout, such as injury, academic failure, and voluntary withdrawal. Disparities in attrition rates across gender, race, and other demographic factors will be examined, along with the financial and operational impacts of high attrition rates.
· Injury Prevention and Fitness Standards: The evaluation will assess fitness standards in selection and training to ensure they align with national best practices for injury prevention. They will also review the relevance of physical fitness assessments in selection and training (e.g., running time trials) in relation to the occupational demands of policing and identify gaps in selection processes for recruits' physical and psychological readiness. Recommendations will be provided to strike the appropriate balance between physical stress and injury prevention.
· Organizational Culture and Leadership: The assessment will evaluate the role of academy leadership and instructors in creating a safe and professional training environment. 1gvf45It will also review processes for instructor oversight, accountability, and remediation in cases of misconduct or unsafe practices. The costs and benefits of communal living arrangements on recruits' mental health, physical health, and overall performance in the Academy and as Troopers will be assessed.
· Alignment with National Standards: The Academy's practices will be benchmarked against national and international models in police training, including models from POST-certified academies and peer agencies recognized for innovation. An analysis will be conducted to compare the Academy's training standards and methods to job-based performance metrics from other jurisdictions, as well as evaluate the Academy's preparedness to address societal changes and evolving public expectations of policing.
'The comprehensive evaluation of the Academy's programming, training methodologies, and organizational culture will provide actionable recommendations aimed at enhancing safety, improving recruit retention, and ensuring sustained excellence,' state police said.
'As part of its commitment to transparency and community engagement, the Department will share the findings publicly when they become available,' state police said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts.
Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Providence police oversight board slams department for ‘internal failures'
Providence police oversight board slams department for ‘internal failures'

Boston Globe

time3 hours ago

  • Boston Globe

Providence police oversight board slams department for ‘internal failures'

The three-page statement from the oversight board criticizing the city police on Friday afternoon came in light of the Get Rhode Map A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State. Enter Email Sign Up Hanley's reinstatement 'should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the structural deficiencies in Rhode Island's police accountability framework,' the oversight board wrote. 'His return to duty, despite his admission to serious allegations of misconduct and a dissenting opinion from a high-ranking police official, reflects the deep-rooted ineffectiveness of current oversight mechanisms.' Advertisement The PERA board is a civilian panel created in 2002 that investigates alleged misconduct by Providence police officers and reviews policies, making recommendations for discipline, policy changes and training. While the group is ultimately advisory, the police department is required to cooperate with its work, and its findings and recommendations are made public. Advertisement The board members are unpaid, but currently has three staff members including an executive director, an administrative assistant and one investigator. Karoly, the executive director, is a lawyer and former deputy chief of the Middletown Police Department. In its letter, the panel claims the police department has ignored the majority of its policy recommendations, and also has not responded to a request to come up with a 'disciplinary matrix,' essentially a guideline for officer misconduct that lays out the recommended punishment for each offense, from harassment to excessive use of force. The ordinance that created the oversight board says the matrix should be developed by the board and the chief of police. 'We submitted one several years ago, and they've just never approved it,' Karoly said. 'It's just kind of stayed in limbo.' Multiple recommendations also went unanswered or were denied, Karoly said. Josh Estrella, a spokesperson for the city, said the police department has responded to policy recommendations, as recently as March of this year. 'The Department has been actively working on a matrix and will continue to respond to PERA's recommendations formally as it relates to discipline or policy,' Estrella said. 'The Providence Police Department remains committed to transparency, accountability and strengthening public trust.' He said the review authority's budget, along with other department budgets, was cut based on 'actual expenditures,' which were lower than the board's budget. Advertisement The budget cuts will limit the group's 'ability to conduct hearings and fulfill our oversight responsibilities,' members wrote. 'These actions do not reflect a commitment to accountability — they are deliberate obstructions.' The oversight board members also said the police department has repeatedly obstructed their investigations, sometimes taking more than a year to provide evidence so the board can review alleged misconduct. In one case, the board said it investigated a complaint from a person who was videotaping and 'verbally criticizing' a sergeant who was arresting someone on Broad Street in 2023. The findings, released May 6, said it took until December 2024 – more than a year – for police to share the case file for the PERA investigator to review. According to the board's findings, the person who was filming the arrest was 20 feet away and did not get in the way of the police, but the sergeant — whose name is redacted — kept engaging with him and 'bumping him with his chest' before having him arrested for disorderly conduct. The charge was later dropped. The police department's internal investigation found the accusations of wrongdoing against the officer were sustained, and gave him a verbal reprimand, according to the oversight board's findings. The board recommended that the punishment be modified to a five-day suspension and eight hours of retraining, but has so far been ignored, Friday's letter claims. 'Instead of cooperation, we have encountered resistance,' the civilian panel wrote. 'The Providence police department must acknowledge and correct its internal failures.' One of the board-recommended changes to the ordinance that created the Providence External Review Authority is that staff be given 'full user access' to police records, including internal investigations and the body-worn camera system, 'so that PERA may efficiently review and or audit all police internal investigations as well as complete its own investigations.' Advertisement The review authority staff members would be 'subject to the same confidentiality requirements as police users and will not disclose personally identifiable information except as allowed by law,' the proposed ordinance says. The oversight board has fought to get evidence in the past. When the city refused for months to release the Then-executive director Jose Batista, who is also a state representative, publicly released the video and was ultimately fired for doing so. (Batista sued for wrongful termination, and later settled with the city for $45,000.) The oversight board was not conducting investigations for a period of time after Batista's firing, but has ramped up its activities under Karoly. Last week, PERA said it would investigate Providence police officers' Related : The letter also criticizes the state law formerly known as the Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights, or LEOBOR, which allowed Hanley to return to the force by leaving the decision to a panel of law enforcement officers, not the chief of police. The vote was 2 to 1 to reinstate Hanley. Advertisement While the law was recently But the state law alone cannot be blamed, the panel said. 'Accountability starts at the departmental level, and the issues raised in Sgt. Hanley's case reflect a broader failure within the Providence Police Department,' the board's letter said, citing Deputy Chief Timothy O'Hara's dissent in the LEOBOR case, which stated Hanley was 'a man prone to volatility, a man prone to violence, a man prone to vulgarity, a man prone to untruthfulness, and a man accustomed to lying.' 'The fact that Hanley achieved the rank of Sergeant, served in the Detective Bureau, and held supervisory responsibilities despite internal concerns about his behavior raises troubling questions,' the board wrote. 'We are ready to do our part,' board members said. 'But we cannot improve policing in Providence without the tools, cooperation, and political will necessary to challenge the status quo. The community deserves better — and we will continue to fight for it." Steph Machado can be reached at

Bypassing Habba, Judges in New Jersey Name New Top Federal Prosecutor
Bypassing Habba, Judges in New Jersey Name New Top Federal Prosecutor

New York Times

time3 hours ago

  • New York Times

Bypassing Habba, Judges in New Jersey Name New Top Federal Prosecutor

A panel of federal judges in New Jersey on Tuesday blocked Alina Habba from staying in the job as the state's interim U.S. attorney and instead invoked a rarely used power to select a candidate of their own to take over as the state's top federal prosecutor. The judges announced that they had appointed Desiree Leigh Grace, a seasoned prosecutor whom Ms. Habba named as her first assistant soon after she took over in March. The appointment is effective as of Tuesday, according to an order signed by the district's chief judge, Renée Marie Bumb. The unusual decision by the district court judges came hours before Ms. Habba's 120-day temporary term was set to expire and could be undone by President Trump, who selected Ms. Habba for the job and has assumed closer control of the Justice Department than any other president in the past half century. A similar showdown took place last week in a federal prosecutors' office in Albany, N.Y. There, after judges refused to extend the temporary term of John A. Sarcone III, another embattled top prosecutor appointed by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department named him 'special attorney' to Pam Bondi, the attorney general. The appointment gave Mr. Sarcone the powers of a U.S. attorney and is 'indefinite,' according to a letter from the Justice Department's human resources division that was obtained by The New York Times. Ms. Habba, Mr. Trump's former personal lawyer, had no experience as a prosecutor or in criminal law before the president appointed her to the temporary post. She had been nominated by Mr. Trump to remain in the job permanently, but her confirmation faced headwinds in the U.S. Senate after New Jersey's two Democratic senators said she had pursued 'frivolous and politically motivated' prosecutions and 'did not meet the standard' to become a U.S. attorney. Ms. Habba is one of several of Mr. Trump's former defense lawyers to serve in top Justice Department positions. And she has used the traditionally nonpartisan position to pursue several investigations into prominent Democrats. Less than two months into her tenure, Ms. Habba, 41, charged Mayor Ras J. Baraka of Newark and Representative LaMonica McIver, both Democrats, after a clash with federal immigration agents outside a detention center they were seeking to tour in Newark. Ten days later, Ms. Habba moved to drop the trespassing charge Mr. Baraka faced — a sequence of events that led a federal court judge to publicly criticize decision makers in the office. Mr. Baraka is now suing Ms. Habba for malicious prosecution. Todd Blanche, a deputy U.S. attorney general who was previously Mr. Trump's criminal defense lawyer, praised Ms. Habba on Sunday night in advance of a meeting by the New Jersey district court judges on Monday. Ms. Habba has the 'full confidence' of the president, Mr. Blanche wrote in a social media post. 'District judges should use their authority to keep her in place,' he added. It is not unheard-of for district court judges to appoint interim U.S. attorneys to the job permanently. That's what happened in 2018, during Mr. Trump's first term as president, when New Jersey judges named Craig Carpenito, then the interim U.S. attorney, as the state's top federal prosecutor. Across the river, in the Southern District of New York, judges voted unanimously in 2018 to install Geoffrey S. Berman as U.S. attorney. (Mr. Berman was later fired by Mr. Trump after he said he would stay in his job despite efforts by a former U.S. attorney general, William P. Barr, to remove him.) But it is far less common for federal judges to identify a candidate on their own, as is authorized by a federal statute, according to Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. Ms. Habba had met with the judges who held the power to extend her term to try to persuade them of her competence. But her efforts had largely fallen flat, according to several prominent lawyers in the state with knowledge of the discussions.

Justice Dept. Reaches Out to Ghislaine Maxwell, a Longtime Epstein Associate
Justice Dept. Reaches Out to Ghislaine Maxwell, a Longtime Epstein Associate

New York Times

time5 hours ago

  • New York Times

Justice Dept. Reaches Out to Ghislaine Maxwell, a Longtime Epstein Associate

Top Justice Department officials have contacted lawyers representing Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a prison term for sex trafficking, to address lingering questions about the case that have fueled a furious right-wing backlash. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, announced on social media early Tuesday that he had requested a meeting with the disgraced former socialite, Mr. Epstein's loyal co-conspirator and enabler who also interacted with the rich and powerful men he courted — included President Trump. 'I have communicated with counsel for Ms. Maxwell to determine whether she would be willing to speak with prosecutors from the Department,' Mr. Blanche wrote on social media. 'If Ghislane Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say,' he wrote, misspelling Ms. Maxwell's first name and adding that he was acting on Mr. Trump's instruction to release all 'credible' evidence. The announcement came hours before a major committee in the Republican-controlled House voted to subpoena Ms. Maxwell, and days after The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Trump sent Mr. Epstein a salacious birthday greeting in 2003 in which he expressed close friendship. The overture is the latest in a flurry of frantic efforts by Trump subordinates intended to quell a political crisis precipitated by Attorney General Pam Bondi's announcement earlier this month that she was shutting down the Epstein investigation. The unexpected furor over the case forced the Republican-controlled Congress to confront a divisive political crisis in the middle of a victory lap after the passage of Mr. Trump's signature domestic policy bill. House Republicans have been stymied from advancing an immigration bill and a rollback of Biden-era regulations after Democrats on a critical panel threatened to force a vote on an Epstein-related measure It is not clear how, or when, the department would release any information about an interview with Ms. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison after a jury in Manhattan convicted her of sex trafficking and other crimes in 2022. Reporting was contributed by Abbie VanSickle, Michael Gold and Adam Goldman from Washington and Matthew Goldstein from New York.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store