Leonard Campanello isn’t the only Gloucester police officer to have been charged with misconduct.

Stephen Voltz

In recent years Gloucester police have been found to have committed charged with several serious offenses, including multiple felonies. None have been prosecuted. Some are still on the force.

• One Gloucester Police Department officer was found to have committed sexual misconduct against a person he was arresting, then offering to “make charges go away” in exchange for sex. [NEEDS CONFIRMATION!]
• Another Gloucester police officer was found to have, while off duty and out of uniform, attacking man filling his tank at a gas station and thrown him to the ground and put him in a chokehold, because the officer believed the man had cut him off in traffic (2017). That officer was eventually fired, but only months later, after – and possibly because – he had filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that a superior officer had directed him to fabricate allegations of sexual assault in a police report. [NEEDS CONFIRMATION]
• One of Gloucester’s currently serving superior officers was alleged to have ordered the release of a suspect, not because the suspect was innocent, but because officer had a relationship with the woman. (2016) [NEEDS CONFIRMATION]

• One of Gloucester’s currently serving superior officers was found to have ordered a patrolman to falsify an arrest report so to include a fabricated witness “statement” – never made by any witness – that a burglary suspect had also committed a sexual assault. (2017)[NEEDS CONFIRMATION]

• Another Gloucester officer was so reckless with his sidearm that he shot another officer in the stomach. Two weeks later, he did it again. And that was during firearms training. (2016) [NEEDS CONFIRMATION]
• One of Gloucester’s superior officers was found to have been running a side business illegally selling guns, including, in at least one instance, to a fellow Gloucester police officer. The city’s outside investigator found that the officer had engaged “in six non-complaint firearms transactions . . . in felony violation of Massachusetts laws." (2016) [NEEDS CONFIRMATION]

Over the past few months, we've been working to get the files documenting this misconduct by pursuing formal requests under the Massachusetts Public Records Act and have obtained roughly five hundred pages of documents which we are in the process of reviewing now.  We will post the key documents here after we've finished reviewing them.