Fort Edward police chief, sergeant face felony charges

ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) - The police chief and a sergeant from the village of Fort Edward are set to appear in Albany City Court next week, following an investigation into alleged false training records filed by both men.

Fort Edward Police Chief Justin Derway, 42, and Sgt. Dean Watkins, 50, have been named as co-defendants charged with 11 counts of first-degree filing a false instrument with intent to defraud, a felony. The two have been ordered to appear in city court at 10:30 a.m. next Monday.

Derway and Watkins were notified in April 2020 by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) that their certifications as General Topics Instructors and Field Training Officers had been revoked. Both were told that they had failed to comply with field training observation requirements, which detail that all police trainees must be under Field Training Officer supervision during training.

As first reported in the Albany Times-Union, Derway and Watkins were accused of falsifying hundreds of documents over an 11-month span. Those documents claimed that the two officers had supervised the training of 15 police department recruits.

Those records were submitted to the DCJS, which found that the hours reported on some files included more than 24 hours in a given day. State officials allege that Watkins and Derway falsely submitted several hundred hours of combined field training time.

Both men have been on administrative leave since January. Fort Edward Mayor Matthew Traver did not immediately respond to a NEWS10 call seeking comment on Thursday afternoon.

The Fort Edward Police Department is also the subject of a lawsuit by village resident Robert Murat-Hinton, who alleges being a victim of excessive force during an incident last July. Murat-Hinton who was arrested in a bar fight on July 8, was tased by police after kicking a wall inside a police station, and alleges that the tasing continued after he stopped.