Mass Police Officer Found to Have Repeatedly Lied In Court Loses Integrity, Job
A recent Civil Service Commission decision affirms why Massachusetts police officers commit a "cardinal sin" when being deliberately untruthful about critical facts related to law enforcement. In the attached case, a 17-year police officer for the Town of West Bridgewater was fired for a pattern of perjury, lying, harassment, and conduct unbecoming a police officer.
The officer befriended a married woman and then facilitated her efforts to seek a restraining order against her husband. In the course of these proceedings, the Commission found the officer to have lied about: a) his claim never to have seen this woman's affidavit in advance of a court hearing; b) his claim that he never entered the courthouse on a particular day; c) his claim that he never visited this woman's house; d) his claim that he was not present in the woman's neighborhood on a particular night; and e) his official police report omitted discussions of his whereabouts with a police officer. He also was found to have improperly used department equipment to conduct an interstate inquiry about his girlfriend. (The Commission dismissed certain allegations related to abuse of authority and harassment, though it found his repeated unsolicited texting of the woman to be troubling).
Once the officer's untruthfulness was substantiated, the Commission was left to decide whether to affirm or reduce the penalty of termination. The Commission agreed that a police officer's untruthfulness can be grounds, by itself for termination, citing a stream of decisions that span decades. The officer's 17-year career could not mitigate this penalty. Given the severity of the misconduct and the limited authority to reduce discipline issued for conduct it independently verified, the Commission's decision to affirm the termination was a foregone conclusion. (This case, yet again, affirms why arbitration is a better avenue for discipline appeals than the Commission. The case simultaneously shows why a police union could legitimately decline to arbitrate a termination based upon untruthfulness).
Not every false statement or omission does, or at least should, result in termination, even for police officers held to higher standards. Some misstatements are unintentional, relate to minor facts, and/or are wholly unconnected to official police business. But those arguments were unavailing to an officer found to have lied repeatedly about multiple facts under oath in a court hearing determining whether to restrict an innocent citizen's freedom of movement.
The Commission's handling of West Bridgewater's other cases of untruthfulness could provide some guidance for future cases. The Commission, hypothetically, can reduce discipline, even for an officer who lied, when an officer is treated differently than other officers who engaged in the same misconduct. Here, the Commission dismissed two other instances of police officer untruthfulness as not comparable. While the police chief was not disciplined in response to testimony found by the MCAD to be not credible, the Commission disregarded this episode without sufficient explanation. A second instance involved a federal judge finding that a fellow police officer was the worst law enforcement witness in the judge's memory. The Commission found the Town's inaction to this finding - it did not discipline the officer in question - to be "perplexing." Nonetheless, the Commission found this one case to be insufficient to overturn the termination in the instant case.
Perhaps the officer's appeal would have been improved if he showed that the Town knew of these adverse credibility findings against the other officers, that the Town agreed with (or didn't challenge) the findings, and did not terminate the officers. Here, the evidence suggested only that the Town did nothing. It also might have been helpful to determine how many other findings of untruthfulness existed in the Department.
Again, an independent arbitrator could have considered these prior cases differently. By allowing the Chief to give non-credible testimony and permitting another officer to serve as a veritable poster boy for untruthfulness, the Town effectively communicated that untruthfulness is not a terminable offense. While a Town is free to change its mind about appropriate penalties for discipline, an arbitration might agree that the Town cannot impose a new standard retroactively.
