LUCAS WILLARD: WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes has been reporting on the story and joins us now. Hi, Josh.
JOSH LANDES: Hello, Lucas.
Josh, catch me up to speed. What happened at last night's meeting?
All right, so basically, this police killing back in January, the only cops on the scene wearing body cameras were from Dalton, not the officers from the Hinsdale Police Department, the town in which this incident occurred. So, some of the questions were, why doesn't Hinsdale have these body cameras? And when poking around and looking through some documents, I found that, in fact, Hinsdale had received $85,000 for police and cruiser cams years ago, and actually promised them publicly, but it never actually took place and was implemented. So, last night I went to this town meeting just to sort of test the water on where the community is standing amidst a lot of controversy, and sort of inadvertently stumbled into the realization that the Select Board Chair, Maggie Gregory, was very willing to talk about the body cams. And she told me, confirming rumors that I'd heard already, that in fact Hinsdale had received the body cameras and they had sat beneath a desk in the police department for some time before being shipped back to the manufacturer and then returning the state grant money back to Massachusetts.
So, Josh, what was her explanation as to why the cameras were never even taken out of the box?
So, Gregory basically put it all on the former Hinsdale chief, Susan Rathbun, who retired back in May 2024. She was the one who promised publicly in a town report that they were going to have this police body cam system up and running by the summer of 2024, and basically what Gregory said was that by the time the new chief came in — Shawn Boyne, who continues to be the chief though he's on administrative leave over the incident in January. Basically, Rathbun, according to Gregory, did not do the work required to set up the whole system, and again, kind of left the ball in her court:
GREGORY: They sat under a desk and never came out of the box. It was her responsibility to take those cameras, put a policy and procedure together, and deploy them. Not only that, she needed to report on those on the she had to provide data, she had to provide information, and she had to do quarterly reports to the federal government. She didn't do that, so they sat, and they sat.
Gregory told me the town is now working on again trying to get those state grants for the body cameras, so I guess we'll see what happens there.
Yeah, and what else did you learn from the Select Board Chair?
Well, from this FOIA situation and the information I'm getting back from Hinsdale and Dalton and other police departments involved in this January police killing, there was this subplot about the current chief of Hinsdale, Shawn Boyne, who again, is on administrative leave, going to this vendor's event for Massachusetts chiefs representing Hinsdale just last month. This came up in one of the records I found from my request to Dalton, where the Dalton police chief was essentially saying, is it a good reflection on Hinsdale's professional standards, is it up to grade to have this guy on administrative leave represent the town at this vendor's event? Gregory told me two things about it. One is that town administrator Robert Graves had actually specifically approved a request for Boyne to go and represent the town while still being on administrative leave amidst the controversy around this killing back in January. Bruce Cullett is Hinsdale's acting police chief during Boyne's administrative leave:
Chief Cullett had spoken to our town administrator and expressed to him how he would like to be able to have Chief Boyne go to this event, and it was approved.
The other point was that Gregory actively defended the decision in the face of that criticism from the Dalton police chief about the questions of professionalism about Boyne going while on leave:
That only comes once a year, it doesn't come six times a year. So, that it happened while he was on administrative leave doesn't mean that he can't attend. He can attend because it's important for the town to be able to have the chief who's on administrative leave be able to get that information.
We spoke about a lot more, Lucas, but those are two of the biggest takeaways from this conversation with the Select Board Chair in Hinsdale last night.
And that's WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes reporting. Josh, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Lucas.
