The news cycle in the past few weeks has been saturated with allegations of corruption and impropriety lobbed against the highest levels of public office at the city and state levels.
The state police is dealing with a stream of scandals, starting with alleged political favoritism towards a judge's daughter that led to a turnover at the top tiers of its command structure. The new superintendent, Colonel Kerry Gilpin, is also dealing with fallout from an internal investigation that revealed years of abuse of overtime pay, prompting her to launch a department-wide audit. There's an investigation into a trooper involved in a shooting with a history of making racist comments and another investigation into alleged nepotism that led to unscrupulous hiring practices. On Monday, The Boston Globe peeled back another layer, revealing that payroll data for some of the department's highest earners has been kept out of the public eye for at least seven years.
But the state's top police force isn't the only power circle with allegations of corruption or nepotism swirling at its edges. Last week a federal judge threw out an extortion case against two top officials in Mayor Marty Walsh's administration. Kenneth Brissette and Timothy Sullivan faced charges for allegedly threatening to withhold permits to force the Boston Calling music festival to hire union workers, a major political base for the former labor leader turned Mayor. WGBH's legal analyst Daniel Medwed says that federal prosecutors are likely to retry the case after arguing the judge overseeing the trial set a unrealistic threshold to land a guilty plea.
Governor Baker, who has received criticism for not further pushing reform within the state police, is also pushing back against inquiries about why Michael Heffernan, the head of the Department of Revenue, is hiring friends and neighbors to fill posts some say they are unqualified for.
Medwed spoke to WGBH's Morning Edition to put all of this in context.
To hear the full conversation, click on the audio player above.
