NEW BRAINTREE — Gov. Charlie Baker and new State Police Col. Christopher Mason are looking to turn the page on MSP’s years of scandals, insisting Thursday that the beleaguered agency’s culture is changing and more reforms are on the way.
“We’re turning a corner,” Mason told the media as he and Baker talked about Mason’s first few months on the job and a reform bill the governor was announcing.
Baker — after walking through the New Braintree State Police Academy door that has a sign stating “It only gets harder from here” — looked to further turn the scandal-plagued staties in the right direction.
“Making the State Police more diverse, increasing accountability and rebuilding public trust; the colonel clearly has his work cut out for him, but his team is making significant progress on this agenda,” Baker said. “The current statutes governing the Mass State Police are out of date and out of step with what is required to govern an effective department today. It limits the department’s ability to embrace change and innovation particularly with respect to building the department’s workforce and pool of future leaders, and they also limit the colonel’s ability to act decisively to enforce accountability within the organization.”
The “Act Advancing Reform within the Massachusetts State Police” includes changes that give the colonel more power over discipline and create a statute that allows state and local departments to get back three times the amount stolen by police overtime abuse.
It also would open the door to external candidates to lead the MSP and create a cadet program and make other promotional changes that all have an eye on continuing to diversify the force.
This all comes after years of high-profile scandals ranging from coverups to racist posts to indecent exposure allegations to overtime abuse so severe that Baker had to dissolve an entire troop. After cover-up allegations caused the hasty retirement of Col. Richard McKeon in 2017, Col. Kerry Gilpin took the reins — and watched as more than 40 troopers were hauled into federal court as the OT-abuse probe widened. Gilpin rode off into the sunset in November, bringing Mason into power.
The new colonel said the current class of 252 recruits is the first to go through the academy with the new curriculum with new focuses on empathy, de-escalation, implicit bias and crisis interactions. Mason said he plans on leveraging the fact that all troopers cycle back through the academy over the course of the year with hammering his points home.
“My command staff and I will continue to prioritize an increased emphasis on teaching recruits the skills necessary for modern-day problem solving and community interaction,” Mason said.
Mason said the department has posted a new position for a civilian diversity officer, and has hired people to better respond to public-records requests.
House Speaker Robert DeLeo said he still had to review the proposal, but was “pleased to see that the proposal builds off of the report of the Legislature’s state police hiring task force.”
State Sen. Michael Moore, the Senate’s Public Safety Committee chairman, said, “I am supportive of Governor Baker’s efforts to further reform policies that negatively impacted the public trust, and I look forward to reviewing his legislation with my colleagues.”
