We hope the next time Salem police Sgt. Harry Rocheville has a hunch about a crime taking place, he'll do exactly what he did last February when he noticed suspicious activity outside the shop where he'd taken his son to get his hair cut.
Rocheville, a veteran and well-regarded cop, informed Detective William Jennings of what looked like a drug transaction involving one of the barbers and another man. Police obtained a search warrant, saying they wanted to search the barber's Mercedes for cocaine, and came up with a bag of marijuana plus a Ruger 9 mm automatic handgun with a defaced serial number and 50 bullets.
It's pretty obvious the pair was up to no good, particularly since one, a Peabody man, has not been seen since.
Unfortunately, the case against the barber had to be dropped this week after Salem District Court Judge Richard Mori ruled police did not have sufficient grounds to search his vehicle in the first place.
It's easy for the courts the parse the law after the fact. Police officers must make decisions on the fly.
Last December in this space, we cited the case of Danvers police Chief Neil Ouellette, whose search of a car in a Route 1 parking lot was deemed improper by the court. He recovered $4,600 in cash, several dozen oxycodone pills and a notebook that appeared to contain records of drug transactions, but the court found that his suspicions regarding what was taking place did not justify a search of the vehicle.
"If I'm driving through a parking lot and I think a crime is going on, I'll still try to find out what was going on," Ouellette told a reporter at the time.
His Salem counterpart, Robert St. Pierre, says he tells his officers the same thing. "What would citizens want?" he notes.
Our guess is they want aggressive enforcement. By his actions, Rocheville got an illegal lethal weapon off the street. And while charges were dropped against one of the defendants, there's now an arrest warrant out on the other for failing to appear at his arraignment.
To the average citizen, that's grounds for suspicion.
