A MONTH IN THE HILLS

In a case of elections having consequences, a newly sworn-in City Council moved swiftly at its first meeting of the year to pursue two longtime goals of police reform advocates in Saratoga Springs.

The new council scheduled a Feb. 1 public hearing to start the process of creating a new Civilian Review Board that would be empowered to investigate cases of police misconduct. The review board was one of the key recommendations of a city task force on police reform, set up after the racial justice protests of 2020, but the previous City Council had blocked action on the proposal.
The new council, fresh from an election that brought new members to four of its five seats, also voted unanimously to ask for a noncriminal grand jury investigation into the death of Darryl Mount Jr., a young biracial man who was mortally injured in an encounter with city police in 2013.
Questions about the circumstances of Mount’s death helped to spur the formation of a local Black Lives Matter movement, and newly elected Public Safety Commissioner James Montagnino has said concerns about the city’s handling of the case prompted him to run for his seat on the council.

The Times Union of Albany reported that Montagnino expressed support for a Civilian Review Board that mostly would follow the model proposed last year by the city’s Police Reform Task Force.

“The Civilian Review Board they proposed is well thought out,” he said.
Montagnino’s predecessor had instead proposed creating a “community review board” with more limited powers that critics said would amount to a toothless watchdog.

At Montagnino’s urging, the City Council voted to ask Saratoga County District Attorney Karen Heggen to convene a grand jury to investigate the details of Mount’s death. Montagnino explained that the district attorney is the only official empowered to grant immunity to witnesses who might have information about police actions in the handling Mount’s case.

If Heggen declines the request, Montagnino said the city would then appeal to Gov. Kathy Hochul, who could order an investigation by the state attorney general.

Mount was 21 when he was injured while being chased by police in the early morning hours of Aug. 31, 2013. City police said officers approached him on Caroline Street downtown and intended to question him about a domestic violence incident when he fled on foot into an alley where a construction project was under way. He was found unresponsive at the base of a 19-foot-tall scaffold and died nine months later without ever fully regaining consciousness.
The city’s police chief at the time, Gregory Veitch, told reporters that his department was conducting an internal investigation into the incident, and he later claimed that the investigation had found no misconduct by city officers. But five years later, in a sworn deposition he gave in a civil suit brought by Mount’s family, Veitch admitted there had been no investigation. Veitch retired in 2019.

Although city police have said Mount’s injuries were caused by a fall from the scaffold, the Times Union reported in 2018 that a forensic pathologist hired by Mount’s family described the injuries, mainly severe wounds to one side of his head, as “trauma sustained by a direct assault.” The pathologist noted an absence of arm or hand injuries that would be expected in an accidental fall.
Montagnino, a retiree whose legal career included service as a prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer in the Bronx and Westchester County, told the weekly newspaper Saratoga Today in December that he decided to run for his seat in large part because of “the Darryl Mount case and how it was treated – how nobody in authority did anything that you would have hoped.”

In other news from around the region in December and January:

 

Reports detail Williamstown police misconduct
A pair of investigations commissioned last year by town officials in Williamstown, Mass., largely confirmed a former town police sergeant’s claims of racially and sexually “offensive comments and conduct” within the local police department.

But the reports, released Jan. 21 with redactions after the online news site iBerkshires.com submitted a public records request for them, also concluded that the officer who acted as a whistleblower in the case had in fact “initiated, participated in and tolerated” some of the misconduct.

The problems at the Williamstown Police Department broke into public view in August 2020 after Sgt. Thomas McGowan filed a federal lawsuit alleging he and others in the department were subjected for years to a hostile work environment that included racist behavior, demeaning remarks and unwanted sexual touching.

Both Police Chief Kyle Johnson and Town Manager Jason Hoch, who were named as defendants in the suit, resigned in the months that followed.

In court papers, and in an earlier complaint he filed with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, McGowan cited incidents dating back to 2007 in which he claimed Johnson openly harassed a black officer and engaged in unwanted sexual touching with both male and female officers. The sergeant claimed Hoch was made aware of the misconduct but did not investigate.

McGowan withdrew his lawsuit on the day Johnson resigned in December 2020. The sergeant, who had been on paid administrative leave, agreed to retire late last year.

Although the town has denied some of McGowan’s allegations, the Select Board acknowledged early on that some of the incidents he described did occur. The board hired Boston lawyer Judy Levenson in February 2021 to investigate McGowan’s claims in detail.

Levenson recommended a private investigator, Paul L’Italien, whom the town hired to look into certain claims about McGowan’s conduct and background. Those claims were raised in a letter the town received from all of its other full-time police officers, who contended the sergeant’s past personal behavior and legal problems made him unfit to continue serving in the department.
Both Levenson and L’Italien submitted reports to the town in August, though the documents were not publicly released until last month. The two reports together total more than 70 pages and provide details of the evidence and interviews the investigators gathered on specific claims made by both McGowan and the other Williamstown officers.

In a summary section, Levenson concluded that both Johnson and McGowan “initiated, participated in and tolerated” racially and sexually offensive comments and conduct within the department. She said the factual record did not support McGowan’s claims that Johnson or Hoch had retaliated against him.

L’Italien’s report cited failures of management and inadequate policies at the department and concluded that Williamstown police had failed to live up to their responsibilities in handling cases involving McGowan’s off-duty behavior in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For example, after McGowan was charged with driving while intoxicated in Pownal, Vt., in 2009, which resulted in his license being suspended for 30 days in Vermont, McGowan received what L’Italien described as the inappropriately lax discipline of a one-day suspension, after which he was allowed to resume full duty. L’Italien’s report also explored earlier incidents in which McGowan was charged in a domestic assault in North Adams, was taken into custody by state police after an altercation at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, and was found driving on the lawn at Williams College with “in the company of a minor female who possessed alcohol.”

The Berkshire Eagle reported that David Russcol, a lawyer for McGowan, issued a statement that characterized the reports’ focus on the sergeant’s past as a kind of punishment for his effort to expose misconduct in the department.

“It is no secret that many in the department did not appreciate the focus on these issues as a result of Sgt. McGowan’s whistleblowing activity, and that made Sgt. McGowan a target for character assassination,” Russcol wrote, later adding, “The town’s investigations were not fair or impartial.”

-- compiled by Fred Daley