An internal investigation in September found that the Maine State Police sergeant who earned the second-highest amount of overtime pay in 2023 violated the agency’s rules against working too many hours on 20 occasions that year.
State police leaders uncovered the violations by former Sgt. Jonathan Leach during an internal audit of the agency’s top overtime earners earlier this year, Col. William Ross said in a recent interview. Leach’s supervisor was also written up for improperly approving the overtime in the state’s payroll system.
Ross, the chief of Maine’s largest police force, called for the audit because he believed the agency’s record-breaking overtime spending last year required additional oversight. He said he did not consider the violations by Leach to be a serious transgression by the agency’s standards, but they are an example of the type of concerns that prompted the closer scrutiny of how much his officers have been working.
What’s more, the case also demonstrates the state police’s relatively new approach to ensuring that officers who resign during an internal investigation, as Leach did, do not dodge findings of misconduct. Previously, resignations put an end to internal inquiries, which allowed officers to avoid discipline that becomes a public record under Maine law.
“We’re really serious about the hours that our folks work, and we’re serious about transparency,” said Lt. Col. Brian Scott, who oversees the agency’s office of professional standards.
In January, Ross called for an audit of the 10 officers who earned the most overtime wages in the second half of 2023, a year where troopers racked up record overtime. Indeed, a recent Bangor Daily News analysis of payroll data found that officers collected an average of $27,636 in overtime last year — up from $20,446 in 2019 — and four troopers earned more than $100,000 on top of their base salaries. (Previously, only one had ever earned more than six figures in overtime wages, in 2022.)
Staffing shortages and increased workloads for specialty assignments have been driving up overtime spending for years, but those factors intensified after the pandemic when the state police found it harder to recruit and retain officers, agency leaders have said. Ross believed those record hours warranted a review to make sure troopers were following the agency’s rules for overtime, he said.
For instance, state troopers are not allowed to work more than 18 hours in a row or more than 80 hours in a week to prevent fatigue on the job. They are only approved to surpass those limits under rare circumstances, such as responding to an ongoing emergency.
The audit found that Leach, a veteran officer who joined the state police in 1997 and most recently oversaw firearms training, worked over those limits 20 times, Ross and Scott said. In 2023, Leach earned $117,486 in overtime on top of his base salary, bringing his total wages to $212,685, payroll data show.
Upon discovering the excessive shifts, the state police opened an internal investigation and scheduled an interview with Leach, said Scott, the agency’s chief disciplinarian. However, investigators were unable to question the sergeant because Leach resigned the day of the interview.
The BDN was unable to reach Leach for comment.
Historically, when troopers have resigned while being investigated, it puts an end to the investigation, regardless of whether the inquiry has reached a conclusion. The practice, which is not unique to the state police and has been the subject of previous reporting in the BDN, has been criticized for allowing police officers to avoid being disciplined, which would otherwise create a public paper trail of past misconduct. (Final discipline records in Maine are public, but internal personnel complaints and investigative reports are not.) The optics can often fuel suspicion around the circumstances of an officer’s departure.
Scott said he decided to change the agency’s practices in 2022 to improve transparency. It no longer discontinues internal investigations into officers if they resign ahead of a conclusion, he said. The previous year, the BDN and the Portland Press Herald co-published a series of articles that examined a lack of transparency in the agency’s discipline records, which were often written in such vague language that people could not discern the underlying conduct for which an officer was punished.
So when Leach chose to retire Aug. 1, internal investigators continued their inquiry and determined that Leach’s excessive hours violated the agency’s rules because he did not have approval to work as much overtime as he did.
Unable to discipline someone who was not an employee, Scott drafted a letter of proposed discipline — a written reprimand — to document the finding. The agency considers the letter a public record under the same provision in state law that makes final disciplinary records public, Scott said.
Ross and Scott deferred questions about why Leach resigned to Leach himself, but they stressed that the investigation uncovered no evidence of criminal misconduct.
“This isn’t one of our serious cases,” Ross said. “Jon was guilty of working too much.”
Still, Scott said, “If we have a problem with someone, we’re going to address it swiftly, firmly, and we’re not going to allow someone to retire and then go and get a job somewhere else if we believe, and we did in this case, that there were sustained policy violations.”
The state police believe that potential future employers should have a complete understanding of an officer’s record when making hiring decisions, he said.
The state police also disciplined Leach’s former supervisor, Lt. Jason Madore, for failing to catch the excessive overtime shifts that Leach logged in the agency’s payroll system without proper approval. The lieutenant received a written reprimand on Sept. 17, according to a copy of the discipline record.
The agency’s office of professional standards also looked into two other officers whose excessive hours came to light during the audit, Scott said. Unlike Leach, those officers were not disciplined because they had proper justification to work their shifts, he said.
The lieutenant colonel said he believed the episode with Leach was only the second time the state police sustained findings from an internal investigation after an officer departed the agency.
This first incident involved a new recruit who deceived his former department in order to collect sick pay, Scott said.
On June 1, 2023, the state police hired a former Philadelphia Police Department officer, Bradford Conlon, who had been recuperating from an on-duty injury around that time. Less than a month later, Pennsylvania police officials notified Maine that Conlon had misrepresented his start date with the Maine State Police, so he could continue to collect sick time benefits from his old department even though he had already started working in Maine — benefits he became ineligible for after gaining new employment, according to records from the Maine Criminal Justice Academy.
Though Conlon left the Maine State Police on Aug. 17, 2023, the agency completed an internal investigation into the matter last March and, believing the findings were subject to discipline by the academy, forwarded them along.
The academy’s board of trustees, which has the power to punish officers for certain conduct, even if it occurred in another state, revoked Conlon’s certification to serve as a law enforcement officer on Oct. 30, according to a written decision. Conlon did not appeal.
Reporter Callie Ferguson may be reached at [email protected].
