Haverhill is sending 13 new recruits to the police academy and one member of the class may have unwittingly played a role in the city’s refusal in the last year to turn over a secret report on an investigation into the Highway Department. For more than a year, WHAV’s investigative team mounted several challenges to gain release of an 83-page report detailing Haverhill Police’s 2018 investigation of the city’s Public Works Department. After being ordered by the state to turn an unredacted copy over to WHAV, the city won a reprieve last April. The city’s outside counsel, attorney Michelle E. Randazzo, claimed the report was needed to help the city defend itself against a discrimination case brought by a then-unnamed Highway Department employee. “While we believe that this complaint has no merit, we are obligated to defend it and will do so vigorously,” she said, adding the unnamed individual “directly implicates the matters addressed in the requested record.”
Timothy Campbell, one of the city’s new police recruits, told WHAV Wednesday he is dropping the complaint before the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination.