The uniforms, shiny black boots, and ranger hats on last week’s State Police Academy graduates were the same as they have been for decades. But appearances can be deceiving. Look closer, and there are signs that the agency and its academy are making overdue changes.
After years in which academy dropout rates were sky high — in which dozens of those ex-recruits complained of injuries and ill-treatment and one recruit, Enrique Delgado-Garcia, died weeks before his 2024 graduation — there was a glimmer of that change among the 115 grads in the academy’s 92d Recruit Training Troop.
The class finished with an attrition rate of 22.3 percent — one of the lowest in years and far below the academy’s record high of 46 percent in 2023.
The 91st class also showed strong numbers. That class produced 97 graduates, including 30 who entering through the Cadet Program, and had an attrition rate of 21.7 percent.
“Right now we do have some very compelling data,” State Police Colonel Geoffrey Noble told the editorial board. “Those indications give us, first, a reason to be cautiously optimistic and, second, a basis for continuing in the direction we’ve started going in.”
That presumably boosts the future of the Cadet Program, which brings in 19- to 25-year-olds for entry-level training.
Not only did those cadets enter the academy prepared “mentally and physically” for the training ahead, but, Noble said, many ended up “providing a kind of support network” for their fellow recruits.
Still, the Massachusetts State Police, haunted by a recent past of multiple scandals and the death of Delgado-Garcia, can’t fully put that past in the rearview mirror until an investigation of that death — ordered up by Attorney General Andrea Campbell 16 months ago — is at long last completed and released. And the academy’s future remains a big unknown until a much-anticipated report on its “programs, policies, and practices” by the International Association of Chiefs of Police is finished and implemented.
Noble, who took charge in 2024 as the first outsider to assume leadership of the more than 2,000-member police force, has already made a fair number of changes at the academy, including changing its leadership and opting for smaller entering classes. And he is now taking a serious look at academy trainers and has added outside experts in specific subject areas, rather than relying on the sworn troopers who have traditionally trained their future peers.
But more sweeping change awaits that IACP report.
“They’ve assured us they have what they need,” Noble said of the IACP team of experts. “And I’m confident they’re working hard toward a final product. I just want to get it right.”
As Governor Maura Healey told the most recent group of grads, “The academy is not easy. And I commend each and every one of you for your fortitude and your perseverance.”
Yes, both good qualities. But there is a difference between a program that challenges fortitude and one so abusive that it puts the lives and health of recruits at risk and sets up a model that produces angry troopers with an axe to grind.
A recent Globe analysis of the academy’s paramilitary-style training over four previous classes (not including the two most recent ones) found the training resulted in at least 100 recruits being injured, including at least two dozen who ended up in a hospital or urgent care. It also showed that some 11 percent of the 947 total recruits who resigned said specifically they left because of injuries.
Others cited hazing by instructors, rushed meal times, insufficient injury recovery time, and a stress-based atmosphere.
“At the end of the day, I do not wish to work in an environment such as this for the next 25 years,” one recruit who left the program two years ago said in an exit interview. “While I know there are plenty of good troopers, this is not what I signed up for.”
The now-shuttered boxing facility on the New Braintree campus, closed after Delgado-Garcia suffered head injuries while in the ring (an autopsy report found blunt-force caused hemorrhaging in his skull) now stands as a silent witness to the old way of doing things. The investigation into his death — its cost now approaching $700,000 — remains unfinished.
Today the attrition rate for the recent classes is a promising sign. So too are the demographics. The October graduating class was 13.4 percent Latino, 11.3 percent Black, and 13 percent female. The most recent class was 10.4 percent Black, 7.8 percent Latino, and 11 percent female.
Reforming the academy isn’t just about improving retention and diversity — it’s also about aligning training to the realities of modern policing. A trailblazing 2023 report by the Police Executive Research Forum questioned the boot camp model, noting, “Unlike soldiers, police officers spend most of their time on their own, without immediate direct supervision, and they possess enormous discretion when faced with the myriad circumstances they may encounter in one shift.
“As such, officers need to develop skills beyond understanding the rules and following the orders of their superiors; they need to learn to think and act on their own,” the report added.
If that becomes part of the new model, the people of this state will be better served by the men and women who wear the MSP uniform.
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