(Image via dartmouth.theweektoday.com)

Staff Writer: Gwen Pichette

Email: gpichette@umassd.edu

Trigger Warning: Mention of Sexual Assault

“Accountable, competent, and trustworthy” is the mission statement on UMass Dartmouth police’s official website, beneath a photo of smiling officers. 

Yet this mission statement, intended to outline the most basic values of the organization, has proven to be questionable.

25 Investigates, a segment from Boston 25 news, has received an anonymous thumb drive that has raised some concerns about the competence within the UMass Dartmouth police force. The blank thumb drive had no name attached nor a return address indicating who could have sent it. 

Inside? Copies of internal affair reports, emails, and transcripts of interviews that an outside investigator had conducted with UMass Dartmouth officers that had been withheld from the state. 

It mainly contained information regarding two separate incidents that were a cause for concern. 

The first incident, whose contents took up multiple files found on the anonymous USB stick, involved an overnight supervisor, Lieutenant Damon Gomes, neglecting basic duties. 

An anonymous email sent to the department claimed that Gomes’ patrol car was parked outside the house of a female co-worker “for the majority of the night” while he was scheduled to be working.

This was not an isolated incident. 

According to the investigative report, Gomes was found to have left campus at least “8-10 separate shifts without notifying the dispatch center or his subordinates that he would be out of service and out of the area.”  

The female’s house was located in New Bedford, six miles away—a 16-minute drive from campus. 

This is worrying, considering overnight officers are responsible for patrolling the campus to ensure student safety. 

Gomes reportedly received a four-day suspension and a six-month demotion for this incident. 

As of now, he still remains employed as the Lieutenant of the University Police force, according to the UMass staff directory site. 

The second and more alarming incident that was revealed in the thumb drive was the accidental discharge of a firearm by another UMass Police Officer, Officer Keith DePaco. 

On August 31st, 2021, DePaco’s firearm fired off multiple shots in a police station bathroom, according to a report by Al Donovan, who was tasked with probing the incident.

UMass Lieutenant John Souza, who has since been promoted to police chief, was initially assigned to investigate the incident. But Donovan found Souza’s investigation utterly “incomplete, ineffective, and incompetent.” 

Donovan’s report found that DePaco removed the loaded gun from its place in his holster, hanging it on the coat hook located inside the bathroom stall. 

The report then states that “when he reached for his firearm when he was leaving, the firearm discharged several times toward the ceiling, striking an overhead water pipe and causing flooding of the bathroom area.”

While nobody was injured, this incident has still caused much unease. 

Although this was an accident, the shots were still fired erratically and could have seriously harmed DePaco or even another innocent bystander in the bathroom. 

When asked how the gun went off, DePaco merely replied, “I just, I can’t explain it. I don’t know,” according to an interview transcript.

DePaco was initially terminated following this incident. 

Yet this supposed “termination” did not last very long. Following a police union arbitration process, he was soon reinstated and remains working as an officer here at UMass. 

Generally, the handling of this has raised some safety concerns.

Despite the complete negligence DePaco exhibited with his firearm, along with a lack of a proper explanation for this carelessness, he was still reinstated—and will be trusted to handle a firearm every day. 

Additionally, police departments are required to follow Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) if officers are ever investigated or disciplined for serious matters—a requirement that the UMass Police Department failed to comply with. 

POST is the system that certifies police officers and provides a public database of disciplinary decisions against officers. This database is intended to be searchable by department and officer name. 

The official Massachusetts POST page states that its mission is to “enhance public confidence in law enforcement.”

The UMass Dartmouth Police Department instead neglected to report both DePaco and Gomes’ discipline, which is why their names did not appear in the POST database. 

Some strides are being taken to fix this, according to a UMass Dartmouth spokesperson, who claims that representatives met with POST in late October about the missing disciplinary records. They say that the police department “is making good faith efforts to provide the necessary documentation.”

Additionally, the thumb drive also contained an email sent by Former Police Chief Haydee Martinez to the Vice Chancellors in July 2022, specifically regarding the POST reporting that was never completed.

Martinez stated in the email that she could not attest to “the good moral character” of either Gomes or DePaco.

Martinez was placed on leave the following day and never returned. A university spokesperson claimed this was unrelated to the POST reporting. The spokesperson claimed it was instead the result of personnel issues—a phrase which appears to be an understatement.

There was an overwhelming amount of complaints against Martinez, with more than 20 grievances that condemned her as “a police chief rife with incompetence, lack of organization and accountability, total disregard for the collective bargaining agreement, and absent the ethics integral to effective police leadership.” 

A March press release pointed to her presence on the force as hazardous, stating that “in a critical incident situation, Chief Martinez’s lack of experience and sub-par leadership would be a detriment to the University and the UMass community.” 

What is even more troubling is how Martinez got hired in the first place and then was promoted despite concerns expressed by her fellow officers. 

The union claims that officers expressed worry over whether Martinez was qualified for the position, claiming that the university failed to conduct “a transparent and fair hiring process” when Martinez was promoted to chief. 

This, along with Gomes and Depaco’s discipline and UMass’s handling, is a cause for concern. 

However, this is certainly not the first time there have been questionable staff members on the UMass police force.

A far more severe incident with a UMass police officer dates back to over 14 years ago. 

In October of 2010, a 20-year-old student accused UMass officer David Laudon of sexually assaulting her. Laudon is pictured below. 

The student alleged that Laudon had harassed her through text messages and phone calls. He engaged in multiple offenses that were deemed to be sexual assault, “including one incident the investigator classified as rape.” 

Even more alarming is that after Laudon was forced to resign, UMass did not disclose Laudon’s past of sexual assault to new employers. 

Laudon would then go on to apply to police departments in Baltimore and Blackstone Police Department, where he ultimately received a job.

A report on the matter states that in both instances, school officials confirmed Laudon’s date of employment at UMass—yet they failed to mention any of the allegations of sexual assault or harassment that he had against him.

Because school officials failed to disclose the allegations to employers at Blackstone, Laudon was assigned to investigate sexual assaults within the school system and even worked with children. 

This caused the town of Blackstone to commission a report into Laudon’s past conduct at UMass, which accused the university of sweeping the allegations under the rug.

The staggering 81-page report alleged that UMass police supervisors “were aware of Officer Laudon’s misconduct and failed to conduct a minimally competent investigation.” 

The Blackstone report also said there was no evidence that UMass ever launched a criminal investigation into the matter, claiming that “UMD officials have continued to this day to stonewall and cover up Officer Laudon’s misconduct and UMD’s own failures in 2010 to properly investigate and take appropriate action regarding Officer Laudon’s misconduct.”

Lead investigator Chief Arthur Parker said the findings made him “really question the decisions of UMass Dartmouth and the competency of UMass Dartmouth leadership.”

UMass then, in 2023, hired former Boston police commissioner Ed Davis “to conduct an independent review of all the facts known to UMass Dartmouth at the time of these incidents in 2010.” 

Chancellor Mark Fuller released a statement back in 2023, assuring that the university does not stand for Laudon’s behavior today: “While these incidents occurred over thirteen years ago, I state unequivocally that today’s UMass Dartmouth does not condone any behavior such as is described in the Blackstone report,” Fuller noted. “My administration does not tolerate sex discrimination, sexual harassment, or sexual violence of any kind.”

A more extensive report on this specific Blackstone investigation can be found in a 2023 Torch article here.

While there appears to be some movement towards fixing the missing files in the POST system, along with a reinvestigation into the mishandling of Laudon’s sexual assault allegations from 2010, is there also a pattern of potential negligence within the UMass Dartmouth Police Department?