A judge gave a lawyer for the state a hard time Thursday as she tried to argue that the disciplinary records of a state trooper fired for misconduct should remain confidential.
If you “look at the trend in the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s cases, your reading seems to be a departure from that more expansive view of public access to public records,” Merrimack County Superior Judge John C. Kissinger Jr. told Assistant Attorney General Jessica King partway through the hearing.
On the night of Aug. 19, 2021, Torres, 40, was among a group of people police describe as in a near-riot state. On the pavement, covered by a tarp, was 67-year-old Beverly Avery, a Hispanic woman who was struck and killed by a motorist. (The identity of that driver still has not been released by police who only will say he is 22-years-old and from Bedford. Chief Allen D. Aldenberg said the results of the investigation are with the Hillsborough County Attorney’s Office who will decide how to proceed.)
Four days after Sandwich Police Department Chief Shawn Varney received a New Hampshire Right to Know request for twenty years of police records on April 15, the town emailed back a 63-page attachment containing information on budgets, hiring and officer demographics dating back to 2000.
Ossipee, a town 19 miles to the southeast, was sent an identical request at the exact same time and nearly a year later, Police Chief Tony Castaldo continues to ignore the law and hasn’t responded.
The case involved a February 2017 traffic stop by Trooper Haden Wilber on Interstate 95 in Portsmouth. After finding what looked like a small amount of heroin during a search of the car, Wilber also accused the driver — Robyn White of Avon, Maine — of carrying additional drugs in her body. She spent 13 days in jail, underwent an invasive body cavity search and was eventually released when no drugs were found.
The state’s Police Standards and Training Council is one of the organizations that came under scrutiny and increased public interest following last year’s police killing of George Floyd, which sparked a nationwide movement to review policing structures and policies.
In New Hampshire, that movement chiefly came in the form of the governor’s police accountability commission, which released 48 recommendations to improve policing, nearly half of which directly reference the standards and training council.
As calls for police reform have intensified, one popular response has been to equip more officers with body cameras.
The idea is that increased monitoring of officers will deter misconduct and make it easier to discover and punish when it does happen. Body cameras have support from a broad range of stakeholders — if not always for the same reasons — including many police officials and activists.
Both Sununu’s administration and reform advocates said the new laws represent a significant step forward in police misconduct transparency, like publishing the state’s “Laurie List” of officers with credibility issues and opening police disciplinary hearings to the public. But critics said the legislature effectively “gutted” one of the bills, removing key provisions such as demographic data collection and mandatory implicit bias training for judges.
During the two-hour discussion, Police Chief Michael Carignan fielded dozens of questions, ranging from inquiries about the department's cultural competency training to its outreach with local youth. Though this was the first virtual iteration, these discussions have been taking place for more than five years through a collaborative initiative called Nashua Community Conversations on Race and Justice — and organizers say the program has significantly improved community-police relations within the city during that time.
