Allegations of Excessive Use of Force, Rudeness, Threatening, Yelling at Citizens and Other Abusive Conduct
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In response to the previously mentioned public records request the Plymouth
Police Department produced 197 pages of civilian complaints, witness statements,
Internal Affairs investigation reports, and other related documents concerning
approximately a dozen separate incidents involving Vecchi during his tenure with the
Department. Considering the fact that Vecchi has been with the Plymouth Police
Department for less than twenty years, he has accumulated an extraordinarily high
number of citizen and internal Department complaints for allegations of misconduct, and
unprofessional, rude and abusive treatment of the citizens of Plymouth.
It must be noted that as a general rule, when it comes to the Department's
investigation of civilian complaints against police officers, with the exception of the
existence of an independent, third party's corroboration of the offending conduct, the
benefit of the doubt is given to the officer. Therefore, when there is not a third person
present at the scene, who is also willing to come forward to support the complainant's
allegation of misconduct on the part of the officer, the complaint is generally dismissed
"for lack of independent corroborating evidence." Where it is simply the word of the
civilian against the officer, the officer is generally exonerated. For that reason, some
officers tend to be more respectful in dealing with the public when there is more than one
person on the scene of certain police encounters. Needless to say, most of the civilian
complaints filed against Vecchi arose out of one-on-one encounters with members of the
public.
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