The Herald’s Howie Carr often refers to the Massachusetts State Police as not unlike an organized-crime outfit. That’s obviously going a little too far. But there are days when you have to wonder about the culture that can produce so many criminal scandals at the agency, as NBC Boston recently chronicled: the CDL bribery case, overtime fraud, union embezzlement and kickbacks, etc. Five years ago, amid an embarrassing trooper exposure incident at Gillette Stadium, CommonWealth Beacon was asking: “When will State Police scandals end?” … Five years later, we’re still asking the same question as the Karen Read trial winds to a close (see “The State Police are already big losers in the Karen Read trial”).

Personally, I think much, if not most, of the agency’s woes trace back to who they’re hiring at State Police. Specifically, those who survive the brutal cadet training at the State Police Academy. Nearly 20 years ago, the Herald published a shocking series of stories about savage hazing at the academy, as summarized in this non-archived UPI piece from 2005. Skipping over the 2018 academy porn controversy, fast-forward to 2021’s “slip-and-slide” incident or 2022’s “bear crawl” at the academy. With the academy’s heavy emphasis on militarized “stress exposure resiliency training” – which some say too easily crosses the line into hazing – no wonder there’s a high dropout rate at the academy.

The bottom line: the agency has prioritized brawn over brains for years, no matter how much they deny that’s the case. They haven’t just weeded out the physically weak. They’ve systemically weeded out those too intelligent to put up with the  frat-like antics at the agency, where the “rigorous” training is viewed as a sort of rite of passage, a badge of honor, a tradition that needs to be passed down to younger generations of cadets so they’ll think and act just like their future trooper colleagues.

And that’s how institutional cultures are created and maintained.