Geoffrey Noble has some major cleaning up to do at the Massachusetts State Police, but his resume has at least one longtime critic of the agency hopeful for a successful tenure.

“I believe he’s as good as anyone who has come along for a while. We’re very hopeful for him,” Dennis Galvin, the president of the Massachusetts Association For Professional Law Enforcement, or MAPLE, told the Herald about former New Jersey State Police Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Noble, who Gov. Maura Healey tapped to be the next leader of the MSP.

“This particular colonel appears to meet the qualifications we’ve been asking about,” Galvin said.

Noble’s NJSP background gives him experience in the command staff of an agency of similar size — it’s even larger, as the NJSP has about 1,000 more staff than the MSP — and similar complexity, “and that’s very important,” Galvin said.

Noble also saw that agency go through judicial reforms under a consent decree, which Galvin says gives him experience in making the tough changes the MSP will have to implement to reform not only its operational effectiveness but also its public image.

“He is going to have to set a tone so that everyone in the agency knows there is a certain conduct and decorum that is expected of them,” Galvin said. “He also has to convince the public that there’s a change, that’s very important.”

He said he and his group “commend the governor for doing what she did” by appointing a candidate from outside the agency — something only made possible by a 2020 police reform bill signed by her predecessor, Charlie Baker.

“There’s a real crisis of confidence and she understood that and she looked outside,” Galvin said. “He will be more objective as he comes in outside of any internal faction.”

Tarnished image

The MSP has been rife with bad headlines for years. The public airing during the Karen Read murder trial of the significant personal and professional failings of some of the State Police investigators involved has only made matters worse.

Chief investigator Trooper Michael Proctor described Read as a “whack job,” “a babe” who had “no (butt)” and texted his sister that “hopefully (Read) kills herself,” according to evidence presented by Read’s defense lawyers.

Proctor was pulled off duty, and then suspended without pay, within hours of that trial being declared a mistrial earlier this summer, but the damage is still being felt as prosecutors announced Friday that content in his cell phone, if exposed in subpoena, could hurt other cases he worked on.

Before the Read trial exposed Proctor — and reportedly had or has the work of the whole Norfolk MSP detective bureau under a federal microscope — and set the agency’s public image ablaze, a preceding saga of scandal and fraud already had the fire primed.

Fraud cases in recent years are nearly too numerous to recount. A quick look back of some lowlights include members of the MSP’s Commercial Driver’s Licensing unit getting strung up on a 74-count indictment alleging that they traded favors in exchange for unearned commercial drivers licenses; 46 members of Troop E submitting false records for overtime they didn’t work between 2015 and 2017; and thousands of convictions getting tossed because of shoddy and criminal behavior at MSP drug labs.

While the MSP did do some shifting and discipline in the wake of some of this behavior, the foundation still appeared to be rotten because the scandals kept coming.

Polishing up

Noble’s got the outsider angle down, but he’ll still have a bit of a rude adjustment, Galvin said, now that he’s moving into Massachusetts politics.

Gov. Healey “made this pick and there is undoubtedly an expectation that there will be some changes and this once-great agency will come back,” Galvin, who himself served in the MSP for 29 years and left at the rank of major, said.

“Conflicts will occur,” he said. “You will start to see pressure brought to bear on the colonel. … If she continues to stand by him, that’s really going to be a good mark on her record, a feather in her cap.”

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Putting out the public image fire will be the first step, and Galvin said that Noble will then be able to move on to much-needed structural changes, if he can get any help in the state legislature.

“MAPLE has been on record since probably 2018 recommending what we would call a blue ribbon commission, and this is something the colonel could help facilitate,” Galvin said.

The perfect model would be the St. Clair Commission, which in 1992 issued what Galvin called a “revolutionary” report on how to fix the Boston Police Department in the wake of the Charles Stuart case debacle back in 1989 and 1990.

In that case, the BPD quickly accused two black men, Alan Swanson and Willie Bennett, of the shooting murder of a pregnant Carol Stuart — when the murder was her husband, Charles Stuart, all along.

“I think it was a revolutionary report that brought the Department into the future,” Galvin said, “and I think the same thing needs to happen to the Mass. State Police.”

Lt. Col. Geoffrey Noble, as seen in his New Jersey State Police uniform. (Courtesy/Gov. Maura Healey’s office)