New Hampshire has allowed several documented instances of officers maintaining their certifications after misconduct and finding work with other law enforcement agencies. (Getty Images)
This story is being co-published by Invisible Institute, a public accountability journalism nonprofit based in Chicago, and the New Hampshire Bulletin.
After the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, a task force appointed by New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu called for state police training regulators to update their antiquated database so that they could track “wandering officers”: those police officers who commit misconduct at one department, only to find a job at another because they maintained their state certification.
“We don’t pull enough certifications from police officers,” former Bartlett police chief Janet Hadley Champlin testified before the New Hampshire Law Enforcement Accountability, Community and Transparency Commission in July 2020. “I know of some police officers whose conduct that I think, ‘Wow, I can’t believe they’re still a police officer.’”
Included in her recommendations to the commission, also called the LEACT commission, was a call to improve the state database “that will specifically track problem officers who move, or attempt to move, to and from law enforcement agencies within the state.”
There has historically been little transparency on this issue in New Hampshire, which has allowed several documented instances of officers maintaining their certifications after misconduct and finding work with other law enforcement agencies. Most of these cases have been unearthed by media investigations or civil lawsuits, rather than authorities.
The LEACT commission heeded her call, and included its own recommendation in its final report that the New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Council (PSTC) should maintain “a full record over the course of an officer’s career of his or her training completion, any incidents of sustained misconduct, movement from one agency to another and/or decertification.” The commission’s report was fully endorsed by Sununu soon after its August 2020 release.
Four years later, after inquiries from Invisible Institute and the New Hampshire Bulletin, officials with the PSTC, New Hampshire’s police regulatory body, say that they decided to exclude one important piece of information from the PSTC’s expensive new database that would help it achieve that recommendation: the employment histories for all police officers who have worked in the state since before 2021, when the database was created.
Without this information in the state’s custom new database software — worth at least $468,750, according to the state’s purchase order — experts said it will be virtually impossible for training and standards regulators, the press, or the public to monitor at a systemic level whether officers with past histories of committing misconduct and getting rehired elsewhere are continuing their patterns. Hundreds of officers working in New Hampshire today were certified by the PSTC before March 2021, when the current database’s information begins.
Reporting by Invisible Institute and the Bulletin shows that officials with the PSTC decided that importing the old system’s employment history data would be too expensive — without even ordering a full cost estimate from its IT department. PSTC officials told reporters that, while an overall purchase order with the vendor exists, no formal breakdown of moving data over from the old system exists.
The employment history information that the PSTC decided not to create a database for is basic data that 27 other states across the country, including Vermont, have released to a national reporting project, which includes Invisible Institute.
Now, that national reporting project is launching a police employment lookup data tool in 17 other states across the country, driving home the lack of access in New Hampshire.
In June 2024, after inquiries and interviews with Invisible Institute and the Bulletin on this issue, PSTC officials issued a new RFP for a Learning and Record Management System. One of the required questions for vendors to answer is to “discuss what historical data they have and have not converted/migrated into the new system,” and how many historical years is “the right number of years to convert.”
Wandering officers in New Hampshire
Though the PSTC accepts complaints from the public, most of the disciplinary actions it takes against police officers come after the officer’s employing agency has taken action, or the officer has been charged with a crime.
However, even when the original agency has disciplined an officer, the PSTC has had historic issues of overlooking significant police misconduct and allowing officers to maintain their certifications after many have argued they shouldn’t.
The case of state Rep. Jon Stone provides an extreme example. As records recently made public after a request by InDepthNH show, the PSTC received copies of an internal affairs investigation by the Claremont Police Department, which found that Stone had made threats of a mass shooting and sexual assault against the wife and children of his police chief at the time.
Despite receiving those records, the PSTC took no action, allowing Stone to appeal his termination and enter into a settlement with Claremont, part of which involved the city changing the paperwork that it had already filed with the PSTC.
Stone was allowed to give up his New Hampshire police certification without a hearing, and was shortly thereafter hired as a correctional officer in Vermont. He was fired from that position several years later for harassing and intimidating coworkers with racist, sexist, and homophobic insults, though he is currently appealing to get his job back.
PSTC Director John Scippa said that the agency would act differently now if it received the same information about Stone due to changes last year that require all allegations of misconduct to go before the PSTC’s newly created Conduct Review Committee.
That committee reviews local departments’ internal investigations when an officer has committed misconduct or has resigned under investigation, and determines whether further action or investigation is needed.
However, under the law, the committee will not open a larger review of cases in which officers are cleared by their local departments, unless it finds that an internal investigation was not “valid.” This still, as before, ultimately leaves the question of officer discipline largely in the hands of their employers.
The legislation creating the Conduct Review Committee was debated over the course of 2022 as more and more reports came to light of PSTC’s recent failure to prevent officers from department-hopping.
These included the cases of Haden Wilber, a state trooper fired for making false statements and for credibility issues in drug arrests who was still hired by the Kingston Police and allowed to make additional arrests, and Killian Kondrup, a Dover officer who was similarly fired for lying about his participation in a fatal police pursuit and then hired in Lee.
The Wilber case wasn’t surfaced first by PSTC officials, but rather investigative reporters. The PSTC eventually decertified both officers, but not before a lengthy delay allowed them to continue working on the streets of New Hampshire.
While some changes were made to how PSTC handles alleged wrongdoing, some have questioned whether the approach achieves true transparency and oversight.
The Conduct Review Committee was created in lieu of an independent state agency that would receive and investigate complaints of police misconduct from citizens and others.
In an op-ed written as the standards were being considered, then state Rep. Paul Berch, a Westmoreland Democrat, said that “independent from the police hierarchy,” “public accountability,” and “transparency” were all “missing” from the process, and questioned whether the Conduct Review Committee could do its job when reliant on the work and findings of local police departments to investigate their own.
Of LEACT, the longtime former public defender wrote, “This commission appears to be going off the rails.”
Laurie List didn’t solve this
The Attorney General’s statewide “Laurie List” of cops who have had credibility issues, created in 1995 after an overturned murder conviction and made partially public in 2021, was supposed to address the bulk of one aspect of the “wandering officer” issue – at least on paper.
Under the previous system, “Chiefs would just report up their officers that were on the list to the county attorneys’ offices,” said Jeffrey Odland, a Manchester lawyer and president of the New Hampshire Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys.
In theory, those reports would make their way up the line to prosecutors and into the hands of defense attorneys representing clients arrested by Laurie List cops.
In practice, “there was no formal system in place and nobody was really in charge of making sure the system was robust and complete,” Odland said in an interview. “As long as [officers] moved counties, they might be able to fall through the cracks.”
“So that was one of the things that the list being at the Attorney General’s Office statewide level was seeking to address: Once you are on the list, you can’t just transfer to a new department and have the classic wayward officer issue where it’s just a completely new clean slate and nobody knows what happened at the old agency.”
But the new system — like the old one — is almost entirely reliant on local police departments fully investigating misconduct, taking appropriate action against their own, and reporting that up to the Attorney General’s Office.
“I certainly think that it’s possible that there could be issues where people are able to avoid any sort of finding and just transfer agencies,” Odland said. “There likely is a category of concerning officers that could exist that you could identify if we had a database and we could look up the universe of officers that have worked at three or more agencies in the last ten years.”
The expectation that each individual local police department is fully investigating and reporting each potential Laurie credibility issue is simply unlikely, given his and other defense attorneys’ experience, he said.
“There’s a large general sense amongst the criminal defense bar that many attorneys know of officers that have had significant misconduct allegations levied against them that don’t appear on the” list, Odland said. “Broadly, the defense bar is skeptical of how uniform and robust the inclusion of officers on the [Laurie List] really is — and it’s not surprising because it starts from internal investigations within the individual departments.”
“It’s just natural that certain departments might be more vigilant in properly investigating misconduct claims and reporting them up the chain, and others may not,” he said. “That’s just sort of the nature of the beast.”
Even for officers who do make it onto the list, that has not been a bar to their employment in New Hampshire. At least eight officers on the statewide list were still employed as of 2022, according to reporting by New Hampshire Public Radio.
NHPR was able to utilize the limited data the PSTC does release — showing current officers and where they work at the time of the request — to compare with the Laurie List, but had no way to systematically go through the potentially lengthy histories of misconduct of officers who were no longer active in the state.
LEACT goals, LEACT reality
The lofty aspirations of Sununu’s Law Enforcement Accountability, Community and Transparency Commission, or LEACT, were only partially met. After saying he endorsed all of LEACT’s recommendations, Sununu’s administration failed to follow through on several key accountability measures, experts said.
In an October 2021 meeting, LEACT commissioners debated one of its key recommendations from its report released the previous year: the independent state agency to investigate and adjudicate all allegations of police misconduct.
PSTC director Scippa was opposed, saying that he didn’t see why a new agency should take over what his own “has been doing for 50 years,” InDepthNH reported.
“I just don’t understand why you agreed to that last year,” commission member Joseph Lascaze of ACLU of New Hampshire said during that meeting, the only voice of dissent in the room. (Julian Jefferson, a longtime public defender, also opposed the change, but was not at that meeting.) Without the votes otherwise, the commission ended up moving forward with Scippa’s proposal for the Conduct Review Committee.
The employment history database, too, fell victim to the shifting priorities of the officials responsible for implementing the recommendations.
In 2020, Scippa himself described the need for PSTC to “leverage technology” for the purpose of “maintaining a full record over the course of an officer’s career of their training completion, any incidents of sustained misconduct, movement from one agency to another and/or decertification.”
In 2023, in an interview with Invisible Institute and the Bulletin, the priorities had changed.
“We did not go back and enter historical data” into the new database the PSTC paid to have created, he said, “because it would have been just way, way too expensive.”
Exactly how expensive, he couldn’t say.
Oversight challenges
The PSTC has long had technical problems hampering its ability to fully exercise its oversight authority over New Hampshire police.
A legislative performance audit, conducted in 2019, found that PSTC’s operations were “hindered” by “a less than fully functional database.”
The database had been “internally developed,” and “relied heavily on manual processes performed by both PSTC staff and law enforcement hiring authorities,” the audit found. PSTC wrote elsewhere that the system “was created by a former PSTC employee and uses two open source (free) technologies” that had serious security risks.
Auditors suggested that PSTC’s technical operations had been hampered by its previous existence as an administrative attachment to the Community College System of New Hampshire. “While attached to the CCSNH, the PSTC had few information technology resources available to improve its customer service,” auditors wrote. “The PSTC reported it was unable to budget for a replacement database in the past because the police training fund, which determined PSTC revenue prior to the audit period, did not provide sufficient funds.”
PSTC wrote that it agreed with the auditors’ assessment of its funding limitations — and that it planned to upgrade its database, now that it was an independent state agency, a process that occurred during the course of the audit nearly five years ago.
“Our current database is outdated, unsupported by [the state Department of Information Technology] and not sufficient to meet our needs,” PSTC wrote. The agency added that it had requested funding for a “new, up to date database system” that has “built-in controls to assure accuracy and completeness.”
It’s unclear exactly how the project progressed from there. An annual report for fiscal year 2019-2020 stated that the capital funding for the “Database Replacement Project,” which stemmed from the audit, had been approved, but was “on hold” due to the pandemic. The next annual report stated that $150,000 had been allocated for the project, but was still on hold.
But a purchase order released under the New Hampshire right-to-know law shows that PSTC had already spent $156,250 on a contract with a database vendor called Benchmark Analytics in November 2020 — just the first of three such payments in the contract.
Scippa’s December 2020 report to the council also shows that Benchmark, a company started by former Chicago police and education officials, had already been selected for the project.
The November 2020 purchase order was accompanied by a one-page “justification” for the purchase, which included the argument that it will “greatly enhance the integrity and security of this information and Computer system by migrating to a supported application software and database architecture.”
In New Hampshire, most state government purchasing is required to go through a competitive bidding process, resulting in a contract approved by the governor and the Executive Council. Here, no bidding process occurred, and the contract was untouched by the council, according to Scippa.
“We worked with our New Hampshire [Department of Information Technology] and did a single source purchase to get Benchmark,” he said. “It was a very, very quick purchase just so that we could move things along as quickly as possible and get something in place sooner rather than later.”
When contacted in a follow-up for a document outlining PSTC’s requirements for the project, “It is just limited to the purchase order that you have,” Stacie Moeser, an attorney for PSTC, responded in an email. “So no proposals and it did not go through [the] Governor and Council, just the agency and review by the Department of Information Technology and the Department of Administrative Services.”
After the Benchmark purchase was made, Moeser said PSTC made the call that bringing over the employment history data from its old system would be too cost-prohibitive — without a formal cost estimate.
“Regarding your request for proposals of cost, we did not receive written estimates for other models/options so there are no responsive records,” she wrote.
However, PSTC officials discussed the data transfer being too expensive in webinars shared with Invisible Institute and the Bulletin after inquiries. In a webinar filmed in June 2021, Cpt. Adam Hawkins, who’s listed as the head of PSTC’s Bureau of Professional Development and Technology, tells attendees that they had already determined that historical employment and training data would not be captured.
“For us to put historical employment and training records — the amount of time and the amount of money it would take to do that is incredible,” Hawkins said.
Robert “Chris” Collman, PSTC’s records and technology specialist, told attendees, “I was responsible for getting data out of our old decrepit database and I was very relieved when the director said no [historical data], draw a line in the sand, get it out.”
Despite all this, in its marketing material, Benchmark makes the following claim: “Developed in response to the Governor’s Executive Order on Law Enforcement, Accountability, Community and Transparency, Benchmark was selected to implement a statewide capture of employment, training and disciplinary history — across 200+ law enforcement agencies.” The original text is in italics.
“I can understand why they might say that, even if they didn’t do a detailed analysis of exactly what the costs would be,” said James McKim, president of the Manchester NAACP. “In building systems, you get to a point where you understand enough that it’s going to be more than what you have. You may not have an exact number, [but] it’s going to cost more than you have.”
At the same time, McKim, who is a technology and software consultant and has previously served as a chief information officer in the private sector, said he would have put a project of this importance, and need for customization, to a bidding process where all needs could be addressed before the contract is signed. “If it was a brand new system, yeah, I would bid it out,” he said.
He added that if the Benchmark contract was potentially part of an existing relationship with a company, that may impact whether he would put the creation of the database out for a new bid, but information published by the company shows that PSTC was the first state contract it was awarded. The Department of Corrections followed.
“I would hope that there is a thought about enhancing the system going forward,” McKim, who served on the LEACT commission, said.
After follow-up inquiries were sent to PSTC officials, Moeser provided the RFP for a new database management system that went out in June 2024, which contains a question for vendors about importing historical data. “In order to maintain the integrity of the procurement process, we are unable to comment further while this remains pending,” she wrote in her email.
What’s at stake
A national reporting project, including Invisible Institute, has been working for over two years to obtain police employment history data in each state — resulting in data from 27 states.
A small number of other states — eight — were able to only provide current snapshots in time of the officers employed at the time of the request. New Hampshire is included in this smaller group. (Some 14 other states have refused to release any information whatsoever about its certified police officers, and two have no centralized system to speak of.)
“We know that many wrongful convictions are not being detected and that is partly due to failing to collect and retain pertinent data,” said Cynthia Mousseau, a staff attorney with the New England Innocence Project, in a statement.
“Data collection regarding police misconduct and employment in New Hampshire has traditionally been disorganized and out of the public eye. Only recently has a limited amount of information become public. NEIP testified before the LEACT commission on behalf of the recommendation to maintain and keep records of police employment and discipline. NEIP advocated for an even longer ‘lookback’ period than had been proposed. Without these protections, we can never truly assess the role state misconduct has played in wrongful convictions.”
New Hampshire, despite its nearly half-a-million-dollar contract with a bespoke technology firm that advertises its ability to build complex yet easy-to-use databases for law enforcement agencies, has only been able to produce a simple PDF showing the names and employing agencies of officers at the time of a request — not even any history dating back to when the new database began.
“With regards to responding to [public records] requests, that was not a priority as we were rolling this stuff out,” Scippa said in the interview. “As it stands now, Benchmark would have to build us something or develop something in order for us to provide that information.”
“Our staff has been trying to get this information from you, but we do not have the ability to pull the data through any Benchmark reports,” Moeser wrote in an email in November 2023, after several follow-up questions from Invisible Institute. “There is unfortunately no ‘button’ in our system to produce this type of compiled data.”
“I apologize that we do not have a more satisfying response while we are limited by present system capabilities beyond our control,” she said.
McKim said that he hopes these current shortcomings in the database and other unfulfilled-as-of-yet recommendations will be reviewed by new meetings of the LEACT commission — if it meets again.
“This is one of those where we’re behind the curve. And this is where we, the LEACT commission, expressed to the governor that we wanted to be able to meet again to review progress on those requests,” he said. “So I would have hoped that we would have been called back to hear the status of things and be able to provide our input. We have not.”
At the same time, agencies across the state and country have been reporting what they’ve termed a hiring “crisis” — which has prompted some New Hampshire departments to offer five-figure hiring bonuses for lateral transfer officers from other agencies.
Experts have warned against these tactics. “Agencies … have only a limited ability to learn about any misconduct an officer may have committed at a prior agency,” researchers with the Police Executive Research Forum wrote in a 2023 report on the police “staffing crisis.” It cautioned agencies to “be wary of lateral recruitment.”
“Every agency is screaming for more police officer applicants, and so that makes hiring and the acceptance of officers who may have questionable backgrounds a problem for us,” said Patrick Solar, a former police chief in Genoa, Illinois, and a criminal justice professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.
“To hire people to fill the ranks, we may intentionally or inadvertently lower our standards. It brings in the opportunity for officers who may run into trouble moving from one agency to the next.”
This week, millions of Americans will newly be able to search, filter, and download basic employment and certification data about the armed law enforcement officers that patrol their streets. Just not in New Hampshire.
The Bulletin’s Annmarie Timmins contributed to this report.