In February, Acting Springfield Police Commissioner Cheryl Clapprood took the reins of a department shaken by newly unveiled allegations of false police reports with a pledge of accountability.

In one case, video footage cast doubt on the account of a desk officer who grabbed a complaining civilian in the Springfield Police lobby and then arrested him on a patch of grass outside the station. In another, video contradicted the report filed by a school resource officer who shoved a student into a wall at the High School of Commerce and arrested him. In a third, a Springfield Police narcotics officer told a grand jury that he had lied to internal investigators to cover up the alleged kicking of a handcuffed suspect.

“Police officers, who will never be productive officers for our city, just bring down morale of the department and compromise the trust of our community,” Clapprood said in a statement at the time.

Thirty years ago, Clapprood was nearly branded one of those officers herself.

“I hope that I can grow both the necessary respect and trust between the members of this department and members of the community. Towards that end, transparency will be a top priority of my agenda,” Clapprood wrote in a statement to The Republican this week. “In that spirit, I want to share with you an off-duty incident that I was involved in as a Sergeant 30 years ago. In that incident I was wrongly accused of assaulting a subject in the course of an arrest and of filing a false report for failure to include that I had been driving a Department vehicle off-duty. After court proceedings and Departmental hearings, I was cleared entirely of any wrongdoing in this matter.”

Clapprood no longer has any of those charges on her criminal or disciplinary record. But the truth is more complex than her statement suggests.

Following an off-duty police chase in an undercover vehicle in 1989, Clapprood was indicted on charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, civil rights violation and filing a false report.

She was found not guilty of the two felony charges and was convicted of misdemeanor false report charge. While she had the internal discipline against her overturned in arbitration, that false report conviction stayed on her record for 21 years, as she maintained an otherwise clean record and rose steadily through the department ranks.

In 2013, she and her attorney Michael Jennings filed a motion for a new trial that went unopposed by then-District Attorney Mark Mastroianni, who proceeded to drop the charge against her.

“When the trial came out and people testified, I think some very important people saw that there was an injustice done to me through different schemes and lying and problems. They ended up getting it right,” Clapprood said in an interview with the editorial board of The Republican and MassLive Wednesday. “It may have taken until 2013 when the last charge was a nolle pros.”

But Clapprood did not contest that she filed the false report, Jennings told MassLive. Rather, her petition to clear her record was based on a claim of ineffective representation by her original defense attorney, who had failed to warn her that even a misdemeanor conviction relating to her job could result in her losing her pension decades down the line.

“That was the end of the case,” Jennings said. “Pension preserved, and everybody went on their way.”

Clapprood acknowledged in the interview that she did not contest that she wrote the false report, but said it had never prevented her from testifying credibly in court. And she attributed much of the reaction to the incident to resentment from other officers who were content to “slide through [their] careers.”

“It was a tough place to work for women in 1989, and the jealousies there and the rivalries there and the competition there was tough,” she said. “I found that the most jealous people in the department were those who disliked those who worked. They made it tough if you worked.”

“There were some wrongs done and I screwed up out of naïveté and inexperience, and I was called on it,” she continued.

At Clapprood’s request, Jennings then moved to seal the case in 2013 – a standard procedure when a client’s record is cleared, he said. That case remains sealed. And while Clapprood has released a criminal history report showing that the charge was dropped, she declined to let MassLive review her full case file and said she would object to efforts to unseal the file in court. Clapprood also declined to talk in any detail about what happened that night in 1989.

“Because people have died, other people will be hurt, people are now sick, people have moved on. And I’m all about moving on,” she said. “I have forgave, I have learned, I have overcome, and the way [to] change and move forward is to change and move forward. I don’t want to see anyone else hurt.”

Springfield Police Lt. Cheryl Clapprood discusses new police dispatch computers in this 1998 photo.

The chase

The incident in question dates back nearly 30 years – to the early morning of Sept. 22, 1989, when Clapprood, after finishing her shift, drove an unmarked department vehicle to the Ale House bar to meet with other off-duty officers.

According to an arbitrator’s report, Clapprood parked across the street and was about the enter the bar when a Chevrolet Impala driven by 21-year-old American International College student Rex Hayes backed into her unmarked car.

The unmarked car, a Saab sedan, slammed from the impact into a truck belonging to Officer John Martel, who was also at the bar, according to the arbitrator’s report. Clapprood reportedly yelled at Hayes to stop, and when he failed to do so she and Martel gave chase in the Saab.

The off-duty officers pursed Hayes through Springfield, eventually pulling him over at gunpoint. Hayes and his friend Antonio Costa, who was also in the vehicle, claimed that neither Martel nor Clapprood identified themselves as police officers, while Martel said he did identify himself and had to jump out of the way of the car as Hayes accelerated toward him.

The chase continued into I-291 and through the exit onto Page Boulevard, before Clapprood and Martel came across the Impala stalled in front of a doughnut shop. The off-duty officers arrested Hayes and Costa.

At some point during the encounter, Hayes sustained a traumatic injury to his groin that required surgery. He later testified that Clapprood had kicked him forcefully in the groin while he was handcuffed, a charge she denied and for which she was found not guilty at trial. Hayes later filed a lawsuit against the city which ended in a settlement.

“If they wouldn’t have paid attention to me while I was in jail, I would have bled to death,” he said in an interview last week.

Before that, however – before the internal investigation, demotion, suspension, and eventual victory in arbitration – Clapprood gave an inaccurate account of the night’s events that concealed her use of a department vehicle to visit a bar while off-duty.

In her report on the incident, Clapprood wrote that she was driving past the intersection of Spring and Worthington Streets when she saw the Chevy hit Martel’s truck – when, in fact, the Chevy had struck her vehicle after she had parked it and walked toward the Ale House.

After a years-long disciplinary process, Clapprood was suspended for 30 days and demoted for four months for conducting an “unauthorized high-speed chase,” filing a false report and causing other officers to author false reports, according to the arbitrator. Disciplinary charges that she used excessive force and failed to identify herself as a police officer were dismissed.

The sustained charges were also overturned in 1991, when the arbitrator ruled that the Board of Police Commissioners had failed to properly notify her of the charges against her, giving her back her rank and awarding her back pay.

But the arbitrator made clear that despite the Police Commission’s procedural failings, it was apparent that Clapprood had filed a false report.

“I note in concluding that I would have found sufficient facts to warrant a finding that Clapprood knowingly filed a false report and suffered others to do the same in violation of the department’s rules. The defense that part of a report may be deliberately falsified is not persuasive,” the arbitrator wrote. “The facts indicate that Sgt. Clapprood did not exercise good police judgment in filing her arrest report, perhaps because she was personally affronted by the suspects behavior and refusal to recognize her authority.”

Though her job was restored, Clapprood’s legal troubles were just beginning. She was indicted in 1992 on felony charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, civil rights violation and a misdemeanor count of filing a false report. After a bench trial, she was found not guilty of of the two felony charges and was convicted of the false report allegation. She was ordered to pay $675 in fines and court fees.

Springfield Police Sgt. Cheryl Clapprood listens to Atty. Austin Joyce during her appearance in Superior Court in Springfield, on April 8, 1992.Republican file photo

Clearing her record

With her trial behind her and her disciplinary record cleared, Clapprood went back to work, ensuring she did not waste her second chance at a career. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s she avoided further controversy and rose through the ranks of the department.

“She did good work in the community,” said former Springfield Police Chief Paula Meara, who led the department from 1996 until 2005.

But the conviction for filing a false report remained as a black mark on her otherwise clean record – one she was eager to erase. In 1998, Clapprood petitioned the governor’s office for a pardon.

The state’s Advisory Board of Pardons sent Meara a letter asking for her recommendation on the matter.

“It is the position of the Chief of Police that it would serve no legitimate law enforcement purpose to support this individual’s petition for a pardon,” she wrote.

Asked why she did not then support Clapprood’s bid to clear her name, Meara told MassLive in an interview that she felt she had to place the credibility of the department over the needs of any individual officer.

“Out of respect to my oath of office and fairness to the community, understanding the role of truthfulness in all types of police work, I just felt the fair thing to do was not support it,” she said.

Clapprood did not receive the pardon, but renewed her efforts to clear her name 15 years later amid concerns that her decades-old misdemeanor conviction could threaten her pension, said Jennings, who was her attorney at the time.

Clapprood said that with support from former District Attorney William Bennett, she and Jennings filed a motion for a new trial with District Attorney Mark Mastroianni. The motion argued that her attorney in 1992 had not warned her of the pension implications of even a misdemeanor false report conviction, and had not sought other resolutions – like continuing the case without a finding – that could have protected her retirement payments.

Mastroianni did not oppose the motion, and then when it was granted dropped the charge, electing not to seek a new trial.

“Some people in positions to do so granted a new trial, because some wrongs were done and some injustice was done. They agreed – those are hard to get,” Clapprood said. “I got one, and the final charge was nolle prossed.”