If It Were Self-Evident, Nobody Would Need the Granite

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The New Hampshire State Police carved “fairness, professionalism and integrity” into a memorial. Their department’s own reports count Drill Team parades and Facebook followers. They don’t count complaints.

Satire, with receipts. The jokes are mine. Every word quoted from the monument and the agency’s reports is real and checked against the primary source; see the fact-check table.

Outside the Department of Safety on Hazen Drive in Concord stands a gray granite monument with a gold State Police badge near the top. Under the badge, in capital letters, someone carved the words MISSION STATEMENT. Under that sits one sentence the agency would very much like you to believe.

I read it slowly. I recommend against it. Somewhere between “highest degree” and “traditions of fairness,” a thought showed up and refused to leave: things that are true rarely need a monument to say so. Nobody bolts a plaque to the ocean that reads WET. The more stone it takes to announce a virtue, the harder you should look for it. So I looked. The reports the Department of Safety writes about its State Police list the troopers’ Facebook followers as of June 1, every other year. They do not say how many complaints were filed against troopers, or how many times troopers used force.

Related GSR coverage: Our Oct. 11 report explains RSA 106-L, the 2022 law that makes every New Hampshire police agency run an internal affairs program. Its numbers are FBI officer counts by agency; the numbers below are the Department of Safety’s own unit-activity figures, so the two sets don’t compare directly.

The highest degree of what, exactly?

Start with “the highest degree.” A degree of what? Academic degrees top out at the doctorate, and I have not heard of a Ph.D. in pulling people over on I-93. Temperature comes in degrees, and nobody wants a state police force running hot.

American policing does have one famous degree, and it is not the highest. In 1931 the federal Wickersham Commission published its Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, and the first study inside it was titled “The Third Degree.” That was a national report from another century, not a finding about New Hampshire. Still, when your profession’s best-known degree is shorthand for coercing a confession, maybe reach for a different noun.

Then there’s “highest.” Highest is a ranking, and a ranking needs a scale and somebody keeping score. The monument names neither. It reads like the diner sign that says WORLD’S BEST COFFEE. I believe the owner believes it. I would still like to taste the coffee before somebody carves it into a rock.

The agency’s own website doesn’t help. Its history page describes the founding troopers’ “commitment to excellence without compromise.” Nobody has ever compromised less than a sentence on a government website.

Traditions, maintained

Now the back half: “while maintaining the traditions of fairness, professionalism and integrity.” A tradition is something you do this year because you did it last year. Turkey in November. Lights in December. A tradition needs a calendar, not evidence. Fairness and integrity are supposed to work the other way. They are supposed to hold up when somebody counts.

“Maintaining” is the quieter move. You can only maintain something you already have. The sentence skips the part where anyone shows they have it and goes straight to upkeep. Picture a used-car lot with MAINTAINING OUR TRADITION OF HONESTY over the door. You would check the odometer twice.

The words don’t even hold still. In a March 2022 Department of Safety news release, then-Col. Nathan Noyes recited the mission and promised to keep “our core values of professionalism, fairness and integrity.” Same three nouns, new order, and the traditions got promoted to core values somewhere between the quarry and the press office. Maybe that’s why they carved it. Granite is the only thing that keeps the list straight.

Then the comma. The stone runs “fairness, professionalism and integrity,” with no serial comma before “and.” The agency’s website prints it the same way, so this is house style and not a slip of the chisel. Comma wars are a matter of taste. I will only say that when you carve something meant to outlast everyone reading it, the punctuation might be worth a meeting.

A mission statement is not commercial use, and I am not claiming it is. It is the closest thing a government agency has to a slogan. This one happens to sit on a memorial to the dead.

The self-evident problem

The most famous use of “self-evident” in American history is from 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Jefferson did not stop there. He followed it with a long list of specific charges against the king, because an assertion only gets you so far. Even the founders brought receipts.

That is the gap on Hazen Drive. The monument asserts. It does not show. Fairness can be measured. It lives in complaint files and how they were resolved, in use-of-force reviews, and in what happens to the trooper who crosses the line. None of that fits on a granite face. So I went looking for it somewhere with more room.

I went looking for the receipts

First stop, the State Police website. Its Documents and Forms page offers mooring permits, explosives licenses, a school bus roster form and a dental-records form for missing persons. It has no complaint form. On Oct. 19, I ran the site’s own search for “use of force.” Zero results. A search for “complaint” returned 23 hits: motorists calling in bad drivers, criminal complaints filed in court, a page on reporting forged registrations, the troopers’ benevolent association bylaws. Not one told you how to file a complaint against a trooper. The Department of Safety’s main site returned zero results for “use of force” too.

Second stop, the paperwork the department does publish: its biennial report, the agency’s own account of itself, addressed to the governor. The FY2025 edition runs 111 pages. The State Police section counts nearly everything that moves. Troop A stopped 18,476 vehicles. Marine Patrol issued 4,782 mooring permits. The D.A.R.E. program reached nearly 66,000 students. The Drill Team marched in 33 events, and the report tells you which parades.

Then you reach the Professional Standards Unit. The report says the unit handles internal investigations of complaints against troopers and is responsible for “investigating and reviewing all use-of-force incidents, pursuits, and at-fault crashes.” That is the whole entry. No count of complaints. No count of use-of-force reviews. No outcomes. The Crisis Negotiation Unit got a number, 23 calls, and a note that it was six more than the year before. The unit that checks whether troopers behaved got a job description.

So I pulled the two reports before it. The FY2023 and FY2021 editions describe the Professional Standards Unit in nearly the same words, and neither attaches a single figure to it. All three do report one number with the precision of a bank statement: Facebook followers. The page counted 71,292 on June 1, 2021, then 110,098 two years later, then 143,079 in 2025. It roughly doubled in four years, and the department wrote down every follower.

To be fair, and the stone insists on fairness: the department does real accountability work it never brags about in numbers. Troopers get at least 24 hours of in-service training a year, use of force included, and the report credits the governor’s 2020 police accountability commission for the jump from eight hours. A Policy and Compliance Unit audits body-worn camera use. The Digital Evidence Unit processed 104 Right-to-Know requests last fiscal year. Eleven troopers became instructors in 2022 for ABLE, a Georgetown Law program that trains officers to step in when a colleague crosses a line. All of that is in the report. None of it answers the question.

Nor can you get the answer from the state. That 2020 commission, known as LEACT, found “no state-wide database to track complaints made to or against individual officers or agencies.” The 2022 law that followed created a public register of complaints reviewed by a new state committee, then wrote the agency’s name out of it.

Add it up. The largest police agency in New Hampshire carved fairness into granite. Its Professional Standards Unit investigates complaints against troopers and reviews every use of force. The last three reports the department wrote about itself put a number on none of it. The followers got counted. The fairness got carved.

The part that is not a joke

The lower half of the monument reads IN MEMORIAM, and under it are names: the New Hampshire troopers killed in the line of duty, from Trooper Raymond A. Elliott in 1947 to Staff Sergeant Jesse E. Sherrill in 2021. Those names are not the joke. They are the only thing on that stone that proves anything.

That is what bothers me about the top half. The names are evidence. The paragraph above them is marketing, and it borrows their weight the way a car commercial borrows a flag. The troopers on that tablet earned their place. The claim to “the highest degree” hasn’t earned anything yet. It just got carved higher.

So here is the offer. Keep the mission statement. Every institution gets to describe itself kindly. If the pattern holds, the next biennial report covers fiscal 2027, and it will count the Drill Team’s parades again. Put the Professional Standards Unit’s numbers on the same page: complaints received, how they came out, use-of-force incidents reviewed. Give fairness the same treatment as the Facebook page. If the numbers live up to the granite, I’ll write that story too, and I’ll bring my own chisel.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. This piece is satire and commentary on publicly displayed government language, paired with a review of the State Police’s published reports. Every quotation and figure was checked against primary sources; see the fact-check table. It makes no allegation of misconduct against the State Police or any trooper; the finding is about what the agency publishes, not what it does. The names of the fallen are not its subject. GSR did not seek comment from the Department of Safety for this piece. The department is welcome to respond, and GSR will publish any response in full. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.