×
×
homepage logo
LOGIN
SUBSCRIBE

Police flap puts city in bad state

By Staff | Nov 3, 2013

There are two critical lessons to be drawn from the political thunder that rocked Nashua last week after Mayor Donnalee Lozeau accused the city’s police department of launching a politically motivated smear campaign against she and her husband, David.

The mayor stopped short Thursday of saying she would welcome a third-party review of her charge that police “brought back to life” a dormant investigation after she criticized the department’s budget during a speech in February and opposed union contracts for police employees.

Before embracing the idea of bringing in a third party, the mayor said, she needs to finish a closer inspection of the police records that have been turned over to the Lozeaus and their attorney.

“It looks like there’s somebody who’s said things who I don’t think is credible. I’m concerned about that. I really have to finish my homework,” she said in an interview with The Telegraph. “We just have to finish that. It’s a lot of information. I hope I’ll have more answers when I finish looking through everything.”

OK, that makes sense, but wouldn’t the time to publicly accuse the police department of corruption have been after she did her homework, rather than before?

Nashua Police Chief John Seusing, for his part, has flatly denied that politics played any role in the investigation of David Lozeau, who released his own statement on Thursday. The mayor’s husband said, among other things, that police have dogged him as far back as 2004, when they sought to have him removed as bail commissioner when he was a member of the Board of Aldermen and took a hard line against the police department.

It’s disappointing that the police chief hasn’t said more about the charges, and Seusing’s failure to defend the department beyond a flat denial seems wholly inadequate. The public, we think, is entitled to more of an explanation.

This crisis should also serve as a case study for exactly why police should not handle an investigation involving a top city official, or a close relative of one. Police put themselves in an untenable position the moment they started to investigate the mayor’s husband. The ethical – and smart – thing to do would have been to let an outside agency conduct the probe from start to finish.

The Lozeaus said they only found out in the past week that they were targeted by police in 2010, after a man David Lozeau had sued went to police. According to David Lozeau’s statement, Tom Brennan told police the Lozeaus were involved in bid-rigging while Donnalee Lozeau worked at Southern New Hampshire Services, a charge both Lozeaus deny. The mayor said police also looked into allegations that her husband used drugs and engaged in misconduct as a bail commissioner.

David Lozeau said police wiretapped his phone 11 times and never had to get a judge’s permission to do so – they only needed the approval of a prosecutor to go forward.

If that’s true, that’s something that should make every citizen in the state nervous, because it seems to run counter to the constitutional principles and protections we take for granted.

We give credit to Executive Councilor Debora Pignatelli, of Nashua, for suggesting that the attorney general’s office step in to help sort out the dispute. But punting the issue to the AG’s office at this point would likely only cloud the matter further, since they were kept in the loop by Nashua police during the initial 2010 investigation, according to Attorney General Joe Foster.

He suggested the matter could be referred to a county attorney’s office, but that should be initiated only after the public has a chance to read the police files.

“Until the records are reviewed and released, it might be premature,” Foster said.

He’s right. There is an urgency to getting the police files in the public’s hands. The longer the issue is delayed, the longer questions linger about the propriety of the investigation and the mayor’s characterization of it.

Newsletter

Join thousands already receiving our daily newsletter.

Interests
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *