Shady Massachusetts State Police need to be quarantined

If the Massachusetts State Police were a college fraternity, they would be on double secret probation.

So I have a proposal that could possibly curtail, if not totally end, the endless Animal House antics of what was once considered to be one of America’s premier law-enforcement agencies.

Ban all out-of-state travel by all troopers at all times.

Enough with the MSP’s tourist thuggery.

Perhaps that sounds extreme. But consider where most of these tawdry arrests, embarrassments, gun thefts, charges of lewd and lascivious behavior etc. have occurred:

Trooper Joel S. Devine, suspended without pay, charged with pointing a gun at his ex-girlfriend in Attleboro, after what the law terms a prior bad act in 2019 … in the Bahamas.

Sgt. Bryan Erickson, still suspended without pay while incarcerated at the Rockingham County House of Correction after allegedly using his longtime paramour as a punching bag in Exeter, N.H.

Trooper “C,” still officially unidentified, suspended without pay after apparently, uh, losing track of his service weapon while visiting a, uh, friend in Rhode Island last fall, after which he — well, we’ve an FOIA in on Trooper C and will let you know when the brass coughs up the incident reports.

Andrew Patterson, better known as “the Foxboro Flasher,” now collecting a tax-free $65,647 pension after a string of drunken incidents in 2019 that began with him getting handcuffed after he punched a security guard at a hotel in Las Vegas.

Dana Pullman, indicted tubby former troopers’ union boss, charged by the feds with shacking up with “Individual No. 1” in a love nest in Miami Beach, when he wasn’t hosting romantic lunches in Manhattan and spending $150 on caviar alone.

Do you begin to see a pattern here, other than the fact that all of these dodgy cops are making way too much money, if they can afford to keep getting into these kinds of jams, often in sunny places for shady people?

Most of the time, a trooper can get away with this kind of bad behavior if he just stays close to home. Obviously, the closer to his base that a shady statie operates, the more likely it is that he can get the case broomed. Because as we all know, in Massachusetts, in the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Look at the felonious embezzlers at the now-disbanded Troop E out on the Turnpike. Literally dozens of sticky-fingered crooked cops, and only two or three have even lost their pensions, let alone gone to prison (and most for a lot shorter stretch than Sgt. Erickson’s continuing incarceration).

But out of state just does not rate — at least if you’re trying to beat the rap.

There are other recurring patterns in these scandals. Consider Trooper Devine, who made a mere $75,230 last year in his rookie season. He’d “moved on from” his ex-girlfriend, his lawyer told me, but she accused Devine of, among other things, pointing a gun at her last year.

She made these charges against Devine on a Saturday night in January.

Exactly three Saturday nights later, the married Sgt. Erickson allegedly throttled his gal pal. She too was very worried about his firearms.

Elton John once wrote a song, “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fightin.’” Troopers, it’s just an old tune, not the MSP’s official anthem.

A lot of the women involved in these sordid tales seem to have come out of, shall we say, the hospitality industry. Just ask Trooper C, or Erickson, or Pullman.

You know, the Staties used to spend most of their time living in barracks. Back then, troopers seldom got jammed up like this. Which brings me to another modest proposal:

Put the staties back in barracks, and then spike their water with saltpeter. Does it really do what they always told us it would do – probably not, but given the State Police’s recent behavior, it couldn’t hurt. Possibly they should also think about adding Antabuse to the MSP water supply – think of how many careers might have been saved by that miracle drug.

I’m telling you, booze is an overarching theme in most of these dismal MSP hijinks. Does Pullman’s old union, SPAM, still have that open bar at its hack headquarters on Beacon Street?

Come to think of it, if the MSP had a liquor license, its headquarters on Route 9 in Framingham would have been long since padlocked by the vice squad.

The Mass State Police – from Protect and Serve to Protect and Overserve.