When Paul Gauvin was an internal affairs investigator with the Fall River Police Department, his efforts to discipline officers for things like steroid abuse and excessive force were sometimes thwarted by station politics and powerful protections in union contracts.
So when Gauvin was promoted to chief in December 2021, he said he tried to overhaul what police accountability looked like in Fall River.
“I think for any community, when you look at your police department, you want to say, does my police department have the ability to police itself?” Gauvin said. “And when I first came in, I don’t think we could say that.”
At the time, Fall River had police officers on the force with long records of excessive force complaints. Two fatal police shootings were being scrutinized in court. And an officer accused of giving drugs to informants was found with drugs in his desk that he never logged as evidence.
Gauvin responded with a series of reforms: he conducted an audit of the station’s drug vault, negotiated with the city’s police unions to get officers wearing body cameras, and encouraged his internal affairs investigators to start documenting even relatively minor forms of misconduct, which he shared with the newly created police oversight agency in Massachusetts, the Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission.
“Those things make police officers paranoid sometimes,” Gauvin said in an interview last week about his decision to step down as chief.
Gauvin said he had also butted heads with union leaders about chain of command protocols and the pay rate for police details. He described himself as a hard negotiator who wasn’t afraid to go up against powerful union leaders.
“I always try to guide myself by asking, what would the public want?” Gauvin said. “I don’t give a lot of deference to likeability factors or popularity factors.”
Gauvin said he was aware his relationship with the police unions was growing tense. But still, Gauvin said he was surprised when the unions announced on Aug. 31 that a majority of police officers had cast a vote declaring they had no confidence in his leadership. He said the union had no pending complaints against him, and there were no ongoing investigations of his conduct.
“The union itself was not transparent in the discussion and the vote that they took,” Gauvin said. “There was no meeting. There was no list of grievances that they had.”
Neither the Fall River Police Association, which represents patrolmen, nor the Fall River Police Superior Officers Association responded to interview requests. But before Gauvin resigned, union leaders did meet with Fall River’s mayor and his staff. To get a better understanding of the dispute, the mayor sent his right hand man down to the police station. City Administrator Seth Aiken said he interviewed more than 40 officers during a stretch of six days.
“There was no finding of any sort of illegality and, frankly, nothing that I found that I thought was the kind of thing that a union would grieve,” Aiken said. “Most of the issues were a little more personal. For me, it just seemed to come down to, you know, two sides that just over time had decided that they just didn’t like each other.”
The mayor’s office soon reached an agreement with Gauvin: he would step down as chief, take a few months of paid leave, and return to his former rank as captain.
To replace him as chief, the mayor chose Kelly Furtado, who he described as a popular pick among the rank and file. Furtado comes from a police family. Her father was a Fall River police officer, and she joined the department at 18 years old. She then married a Fall River police officer, and their son followed them onto the force.
In her first remarks as chief at a press conference last week, Furtado appeared to criticize her predecessor for disagreeing so much with the unions.
“I want to foster collaboration and teamwork,” Furtado said, “something that’s been missing in recent years.”
But like any other chief, Furtado will now have to toe a line between likability and accountability. How a chief strikes that balance can make or break their relationship with their police force. For Paul Gauvin, a lack of popularity cost him the job, even though Mayor Paul Coogan said he appreciated Gauvin’s accountability reforms.
“The key to this,” Coogan said, “is that you cannot have a department that’s not cooperating with the chief.”
As Furtado steps into her new role as chief this week, she’s inheriting several alleged misconduct cases that will test where she stands. One is a domestic violence case against an officer, and another is a lawsuit alleging police tampered with a crime scene to make an unjust fatal shooting look like self defense.
