An audit of the Canton Police Division is ready to drop the identical day the Karen Learn homicide retrial begins — practically a month earlier than its contracted due date.
The contract the City of Canton inked Oct. 25 with 5 Stones Intelligence, Inc., was for a “comprehensive and exhaustive Independent Police Audit” to be accomplished by April 30 and budgeted for $198,000. It was a contentious course of attending to the end line, in response to earlier Herald reporting.
The report might be turned over to the Canton Police Audit committee on Tuesday and it’ll even be instantly obtainable to the general public on-line, in response to 5 Stones director Matthew Germanowski.
The timing of the report’s completion has some which means, because the Karen Learn case is likely one of the two instances that triggered the city’s need for an audit.
“Recent events involving the unfortunate and untimely death of a Town resident have sparked concerns regarding how the department operates every day in police matters,” the audit prospectus states. “This concern resulted in a vote at the November 2023 Special Town Meeting to engage an independent consulting firm to ‘audit’ most aspects of the Police department’s operations.”
The audit request happened as a result of intense scrutiny because the setting of two high-profile instances.
The primary was the Feb. 1, 2021, dying of Sandra Birchmore in her Canton condo, which native authorities first chalked as much as suicide however the feds thought in any other case and introduced fees in opposition to Stoughton cop Matthew Farwell, who they accuse of grooming Birchmore since she was a woman after which killing to cowl up their relationship and her being pregnant.
The following is the dying of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, a resident of Canton, whose physique was discovered Jan. 29, 2022, frozen on the Canton entrance yard of a BPD colleague. Learn, his girlfriend on the time, is charged along with his homicide.
Learn confronted a trial final 12 months however that resulted in mistrial. Jury empanelment is ready to start on Tuesday for what guarantees to be a white-hot retrial.
The case in opposition to Farwell seems to be in a holding sample as hearings have been rescheduled repeatedly, largely as a result of “voluminous evidence” prosecutors say attorneys should course of.
Tennessee-based 5 Stones was in the course of an audit of the U.S. Capitol Police in addition to the U.S. Nationwide Guard deployment through the riot in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, in response to settlement paperwork, when it signed the deal. Regardless of that heavy workload, the staff mentioned they believed they might ship the audit forward of schedule.
It is a growing story.
Initially Revealed:
