MA State Police hazing revealed

[hoosier]

Ex-statie cadets detail academy hazing horrors
By Maggie Mulvihill and Michele McPhee/ Herald Exclusive
Friday, September 16, 2005 - Updated: 04:02 AM EST
Hazing at the state police academy was so vile that one recruit was ordered to wear a classmate's soiled underwear – a demand that prompted him to abandon his dream of becoming a trooper.
_____``If I put on those . . . stained shorts, I would have been selling my soul to the devil,'' said the man, who works in a local district attorney's office and asked that his name be withheld. ``It was all about humiliation. I didn't want to work within that type of organization.''

_____As a chorus of similar tales rang out yesterday, top state police officials again refused to identify an instructor recently transferred as a result of similar allegations. But they did announce the formation of a panel of outside public safety professionals to study training procedures at the New Braintree academy.
_____The abuse problem had been kept secret from the public until the Herald reported yesterday that one instructor had gone so far as to force cadets' heads into dirty toilets and refused to let them bathe afterward.
_____Michelle Bellevue thought she was the perfect candidate for the academy when she arrived for the June class, ecstatic to fulfill her lifelong dream of being a trooper.
_____The Newton police officer had four years of Navy experience and was a marathon runner in top physical condition.
_____But after three weeks she became one of the 82 that have dropped out since June 27. It was not the grueling regimen.
_____It was the alleged physical abuse, said her boyfriend, Newton Police Officer Lt. Mark Gromada.
_____``A woman instructor assaulted her and she said, `that's it.' She reported it, and it never went anywhere,'' Gromada said.
_____``The state police try to be more elite, but what is putting someone's head in the toilet going to do make them a better investigator?'' Gromada said. ``They are losing qualified people because of this juvenile crap.''
_____State police spokeswoman Lt. Sharon Costine confirmed that an instructor was transferred out of the academy within the last two weeks when a formal probe began. She said she could not comment further due to the ongoing investigation
Out of 258 recruits called to the academy for the current class, due to graduate in December, two failed to show up and the 82 have dropped out, Costine said. ``The average attrition rate for each class is about 33 percent and this is in line with that.''
_____Another drop-out, John Roberts, 28, who is currently working as a special Boston Police officer, said he only lasted three days after instructors came into his room and sprayed his closet with shaving gel, staining his only suit.
_____Roberts – an Army National Guardsman who spent a year guarding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – said he also was forced to clean up splattered fruit that instructors smashed in his room with his clean laundry.
_____``It was hell,'' Roberts said. ``If I had done to the prisoners there what was done to me at the State Police Academy, I would have been all over the news for prisoner abuse.''