Another CT state police union no-confidence vote as traffic ticket probe continues
Leadership of the state police union voted no confidence Thursday in the agency’s top two commanders in yet another sign of union displeasure with the agency’s response to an investigation of how and why troopers were able to write tens of thousands of phony traffic tickets.
The union leadership said in a blistering statement that it no longer has confidence in public safety Commissioner James Rovella and state police commander Col. Stavros Mellekas. It followed by two weeks a no confidence vote by the state police captains and lieutenants union in Rovella alone. The entire union voted no confidence in Rovella in 2020, long before the ticket scandal was news.
U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate CT state troopers’ issuance of phony traffic tickets
The latest union complaints come amid a flurry of investigative activity following a state audit showing that troopers wrote nearly 26,000 phony traffic tickets or citations over at least the last five years. Investigation so far suggests the fabrication of tickets was haphazard, with troopers fabricating tickets for overtime pay, for on-the- job benefits that come with increased productivity and, in some cases, for no apparent reason at all.
In still other cases, there are suggestions that failures in the agency data processing systems could be at fault.
A concern among state officials is that the issuance of phony tickets, for whatever reasons, has skewed efforts to collect and report data on drivers in traffic stops — data that has been ordered, collected, analyzed and reported to ensure, among other things, that minority drivers are not stopped at disproportionately high rates.
Rovella and Mellekas chose not to respond to the latest union vote, an agency spokesman said. Connecticut State Police Union President Todd Fedigan said in an interview that Rovella and Mellekas have been too slow to defend troopers and too quick to accept criticism – before an investigation is complete and there is a thorough explanation of what happened.
“I can’t answer for what every trooper did,” Fedigan said. “But everybody should have a thorough investigation and reserve judgment until this is over and certainly our commissioner and colonel are not being vocal about it like they should be.”
In a letter to Rovella following the union leadership vote, Fedigan wrote that the agency’s top two commanders “stood by idly, as you allowed others to publicly make false allegations, destroy the morale of our Troopers, and dismantle the reputation of the State Police. How could anyone work for a Commissioner and Colonel who choose their own survival over standing up for due process and the good men and women that risk their lives for the State of Connecticut?”
The state police learned of the phony ticket problem about five years ago, but kept it secret and disciplined four troopers internally. The governor and legislature made it a political issue earlier this summer after the state audit reported the fabricated numbers could hurt efforts to track possible profiling in traffic stops.
Chief State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin assigned a team of state police detectives and prosecutors to the ticket scandal a year ago. Early in July, the U.S. Attorney’s office took over the case.
Among other things, federal authorities are better equipped with investigatory tools needed to make complex investigations of an agency like the state police. For decades, the state legislature has refused to provide state prosecutors with efficient access to investigative grand juries and investigative subpoenas — legal tools essential to compelling testimony from reluctant witnesses in complex investigations.
Although federal prosecutors would not discuss the case, other lawyers said there are crimes which could be subject to investigation. The entry of fraudulent data could be considered a computer crime or, in rare cases, forgery under state law. Since highway safety enforcement is substantially funded by federal grants, the entry by troopers of phony data to increase overtime could be construed as theft from a federal program.
There also could be a civil rights component of a federal investigation. Should it be determined that falsification of tickets was sufficiently widespread to skew demographic data collection on highway stops, the federal government could attempt to enter into some sort of consent decree with the state to resolve the problem and prevent its recurrence, lawyers following events said.