Last year, when allegations surfaced that four Connecticut State Police troopers had years earlier fabricated hundreds of traffic tickets, the agency’s leader moved swiftly to reassure the public that false reporting of tickets was an “isolated” issue of the past.
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He also dismissed concerns that fake tickets could have infiltrated a database used for identifying racial profiling by police officers conducting traffic stops. “They could not have skewed that,” Colonel Stavros Mellekas said in an interview last August.
But the findings of a monthslong audit released Wednesday cast significant doubt on Mellekas’ past statements.
The audit found there is a “high likelihood” hundreds of Connecticut State Police troopers collectively submitted tens of thousands of false traffic ticket records over much of the past decade.
The findings also show that misreporting “had a substantive and statistically significant impact” on racial profiling data making it appear troopers ticketed more white drivers and fewer minority motorists than they really did.
Reached by phone Thursday, Mellekas declined to answer some questions citing ongoing investigations, but he said his comments last year were based on information he had at the time and his recollection of what had happened in 2018.
This week, Mellekas acknowledged there are reasons to believe the situation may have been worse than...
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