By Paul Cuno-Booth, Granite State News Collaborative
For The Concord Monitor and Granite State News Collaborative
Mark Ramirez was driving a tractor-trailer on I-95 one Friday in August 2019 when New Hampshire State Police Trooper Timothy Berky pulled him over.
Ramirez, a Latino man who owns a Houston-area moving company, was transporting furniture and other belongings for a wealthy client from Texas to Maine. Berky had Ramirez exit the truck and told him he wanted to search it, saying drugs were a big problem in New Hampshire. Another trooper ran a drug-sniffing dog around the truck.
Troopers seized the truck over the weekend and searched it. They found no evidence of any crime.
According to a lawsuit Ramirez filed last year, troopers drilled holes in the truck’s gas tank and damaged its cargo during their search. His customer refused to pay because of the delay and the damage to her property. Between that and other expenses — including several days of hotel bills while stuck in New Hampshire — Ramirez says the traffic stop cost him more than $30,000.
Ramirez’ lawsuit accuses Berky of racially profiling Ramirez and other violations of his rights. It also seeks to hold the Department of Safety’s leadership responsible for what it alleges is a pattern of unlawful stops by the drug-interdiction squad Berky was assigned to, the State Police Mobile Enforcement Team.
The unit has come under scrutiny in recent years, as civil-rights advocates have criticized its use of pretextual traffic stops and one of its members, Haden Wilber, was fired for misconduct — a case now at the center of a public-records lawsuit at the New Hampshire Supreme Court that could have major stakes for police transparency.
Lawyers for the state have moved to dismiss Ramirez’ lawsuit, contending there’s no evidence of racial profiling or other unlawful actions. And state officials — while condemning Wilber’s specific actions in the case that got him fired — have generally defended the Mobile Enforcement Team and its practices.
But an investigation by the Granite State News Collaborative found multiple cases from the same time period in which Berky and other MET troopers violated people’s rights.
Judges or prosecutors threw out at least 17 vehicle stops the unit made between late 2016 and early 2020 because of illegal searches and seizures, including five by Berky and six by Wilber. More than half involved cars with Black or Latino occupants.
According to court orders and prosecutors’ records, troopers unlawfully prolonged roadside detentions, expanded what should have been brief traffic stops into drug investigations without cause and stopped cars for things that don’t violate New Hampshire law, like having an air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror.
“They're losing cases because of these individuals violating people's constitutional rights,” said Buzz Scherr, a law professor at the University of New Hampshire and former public defender. “ … You don't regularly see out of a single department, or a unit, this kind of consistent misbehavior.”
New Hampshire State Police issued a new policy for the MET in 2021, around the time it fired Wilber. In a statement to an N.H. PBS show after an earlier version of this story ran, Tyler Dumont, a Department of Safety spokesman, said the reporting is based on “the comments of an already-terminated employee and a small fraction of years-old Mobile Enforcement Team cases.” But he declined to answer questions about the unit’s current practices. The department has also declined multiple interview requests.
“The New Hampshire State Police is proud of its efforts to combat the presence of illegal drugs in our communities, in our schools and within our homes, and we will continue to collaborate with our prosecutorial partners and the Office of the Attorney General to ensure that best practices are maintained,” Tyler Dumont, a spokesman for the Department of Safety, said in a statement.
Berky, now a trooper in the State Police Investigative Services Bureau, did not respond to an email requesting comment. Wilber declined to comment through an attorney.
Evidence suppressed, charges dropped
State Police formed the Mobile Enforcement Team in 2015, tasking it with intercepting drugs on the state’s highways. Wilber said in an administrative hearing last year that MET troopers were encouraged to use minor traffic violations as pretexts to stop and check cars for drugs.
Police around the country have long used such tactics. Multiple studies have shown officers disproportionately stop and search Black and Latino drivers when doing so — even when they find contraband on them less often than on white drivers.
Col. Nathan Noyes, the head of N.H. State Police, testifies about the internal investigation into former Trooper Haden Wilber at a hearing before the Personnel Appeals Board on in 2022.
And the vast majority of drivers stopped by police turn out to be innocent, raising questions about pretextual stops’ effectiveness as a crime-fighting strategy.
In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, defense lawyers and racial-justice advocates raised those concerns about the Mobile Enforcement Team before a state commission meant to consider reforms to policing.
Some advocates pointed to a pair of critical court rulings from a year earlier, in which judges had suppressed evidence from two vehicle stops made by MET trooper Michael Arteaga in early 2018. In both cases, Arteaga followed and stopped Latino men in out-of-state cars — claiming to find them suspicious in part because they held the steering wheel at 10 and 2 — and then illegally expanded or prolonged their roadside detention without basis while questioning them about drugs.
Department of Safety Commissioner Robert Quinn said those cases did not indicate any wider issues with the unit’s conduct.
“Are we looking at systemic, pervasive problems here?” he said in one August 2020 meeting. “Or are we dealing with isolated events?”
The Collaborative’s review of court records and other documents found more instances of MET cases that were dropped due to constitutional issues than has been previously reported.
In the same 30-day period as those other two stops, Arteaga stopped a third out-of-state car with Latino occupants who, he claimed, were suspicious in part because the driver clutched the wheel at 10 and 2. Prosecutors dropped all charges from that case in 2020 because they determined a judge would likely suppress the evidence, according to court documents.
Arteaga has since moved to State Police’s Justice Information Bureau, where he was recently promoted to sergeant. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Judges also suppressed evidence from at least three vehicle stops Berky made in 2018 and 2019 due to constitutional violations. Prosecutors then dropped at least two more of his cases, from late 2019 and early 2020, for similar reasons.
In one March 2020 stop, Berky asked a Latino driver to get out of a car solely because he was “traveling from PA to ME in his sister in law’s vehicle with very little luggage, and that the passenger appeared overly nervous,” John Mara, a prosecutor in the Rockingham County Attorney’s Office, wrote in a June 2020 memo.
Those facts weren’t enough to legally justify their continued detention. According to Mara’s memo, federal prosecutors initially planned to take the case, but balked due to Berky’s illegal expansion of the stop. Rockingham County prosecutors dropped the resulting drug charges for the same reason.
Mara noted in his memo that State Police had received “multiple suppression orders similar to this.”
‘To the absolute max’
Pretextual stops are legal under the state and federal constitutions, but officers have to stay within certain bounds. It’s illegal to prolong a traffic stop or expand it into a roadside drug investigation without reasonable suspicion of a crime.
Reasonable suspicion isn’t a bright line, and current and former police chiefs say officers can make mistakes. But Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law and former official in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, said the nature of pretextual stops — compared to something like routine speeding enforcement — makes it more likely that officers will push too far.
If the “real reason for the stop is to explore these other suspicions you have, which may be completely unfounded, you’re going to be more likely to hold the person longer than you’re supposed to,” Lopez said.
“You’re just fishing,” she added. “And in that fishing, you might easily cast your rod, your line, a bit too far.”
In an interview with an internal investigator in 2021, Wilber said his immediate supervisor during his time with the MET, then-Sgt. Mark Hall, had wanted troopers to make as many arrests as possible. Wilber said Hall encouraged them “to push the envelope and get drug seizures.”
“I mean pushing it to the absolute max, like that fine line of what you’re lawfully allowed to do and what you’re not,” Wilber said.
Robyn White was driving north on I-95 in Portsmouth in February 2017 when Wilber pulled her over and arrested her, after allegedly finding a small amount of heroin residue in her car.
Wilber insisted White also had additional drugs hidden on her person, though she strenuously denied it. On the basis of an electronic body scan — which testimony and other evidence would later indicate was inconclusive — Wilber charged her with smuggling drugs into jail.
White spent 13 days in jail. That time included a strip-search and days in a “dry cell” where corrections officers could monitor whether she passed anything. Before her release, she was forced to submit to another electronic scan, then an invasive anal and vaginal cavity search at a hospital.
No drugs were found.
Former N.H. State Trooper Haden Wilber testifies in front of the Personnel Appeals Board in 2022.
“I thought it was complete horseshit, but [Wilber] and his supervisor don’t want to hear that they’re doing anything wrong,” a State Police sergeant, Melissa Robles, wrote in an April 2017 email when the case’s prosecutor sought her opinion.
Prosecutors eventually dropped all charges, after determining Wilber had no legal basis to detain White for as long as he did, question her and search her car after the initial stop. The prosecutor, Aaron Dristiliaris, “vividly remembered” Wilber “being very upset and disagreeing with him over the issues” when informed about the decision, Dristiliaris later told a State Police investigator.
That case was one of at least six stops Wilber made in an 18-month period that could not be prosecuted because judges or prosecutors determined he had violated someone’s rights.
In January 2018, the Rockingham County Attorney’s Office decided to drop drug charges stemming from a stop Wilber had made two months earlier. In a memo, Assistant County Attorney Ryan Ollis wrote that Wilber had no lawful basis to stop the car — and even if he had, he then illegally expanded the scope of the stop without justification when he had the driver get out of his vehicle for questioning.
“Trooper Wilber disagrees and demanded case law” showing he was wrong, Ollis wrote.
During the administrative hearing last year, Wilber said Rockingham County prosecutors were often declining to prosecute Mobile Enforcement Team drug arrests around that time because of what they viewed as constitutional violations. Wilber said he and his supervisors simply chalked that up to prosecutors not being aggressive enough.
Judges suppressed the evidence from at least four more of Wilber’s vehicle stops between October 2016 and February 2018 because he illegally stopped or detained someone without cause. Two of those stops came just weeks after Ollis’ memo.
Hall, the MET’s direct supervisor at the time, has since been promoted to a major in State Police’s Operations Bureau. He did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Safety did not answer specific questions about Hall’s supervision of the MET.
During Wilber’s time on the Mobile Enforcement Team — including the year he stopped White — he consistently received glowing performance reviews, according to evidence presented during his employment appeal. In May 2019, State Police put him on camera for a celebratory profile of the MET on WMUR. That September, the agency’s Twitter account posted about an award he had won.
A month later, White filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit over her 2017 arrest. After a review by the N.H. Attorney General’s Office, State Police opened an internal investigation in December 2020. (The Department of Safety would not say whether it looked into Wilber’s conduct at any point before White sued.)
Federal prosecutors dropped at least one more of Wilber’s cases after learning he was under investigation — a drug arrest Wilber had made in February 2019 after following and stopping a Black man in his 20s, claiming to find it suspicious that his car had been recently washed and polished.
The internal investigation found Wilber wrongfully charged White with bringing drugs into jail and mishandled her case in various other ways. It also uncovered the fact that he illegally looked at text messages on her phone without a warrant after her arrest. Wilber admitted to doing those kinds of “cursory” illegal phone searches on other occasions as well.
Internal investigators also concluded that Wilber was dishonest with them during their interviews, which he denies.
Wilber’s conduct in the White case has become public only because of her lawsuit and his unsuccessful attempt to challenge his termination in front of the state’s Personnel Appeals Board, which holds open hearings and released extensive documentation in response to public-records requests.
The ACLU of New Hampshire has gone to court seeking additional records about Wilber, saying they could shed more light on how State Police supervised Wilber and the workings of the Mobile Enforcement Team.
State Police officials have refused to turn those over, arguing that police disciplinary files are entirely exempt from public records requests under state law. The New Hampshire Supreme Court heard arguments in the case last month. The court’s decision could determine whether the public ever has a right to view internal records documenting police misconduct.
State Police completed its investigation of Wilber in July 2021 and fired him the next month. Col. Nathan Noyes, the agency’s director, wrote in a termination letter that the inquiry had “revealed disturbing facts regarding your investigatory habits and overall integrity as a law enforcement officer.”
Around the same time, on July 28, 2021, State Police issued a policy specific to the Mobile Enforcement Team. Among other things, it brings the team under the control of the Narcotics Investigations Unit, requires periodic reviews of the MET’s cases with lawyers from the N.H. Attorney General’s Office and says all stops should be conducted “while scrupulously honoring the human and constitutional rights of those whom they come in contact.”
Dumont, the Department of Safety spokesperson, has declined to answer repeated questions about whether state troopers are still making pretextual stops.
He said Noyes assigned the MET to the narcotics unit “to accommodate increased requests for service” and creating a specific policy for it was “part of a larger effort to create, update and review Division policies.
These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative as part of our Race and Equity Initiative. The story was edited by The Concord Monitor, a partner in The Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.