A cop watched one evening in August 2014 as a teenage girl stepped out of the truck of his colleague, Joe O’Connell. A sergeant had asked the cop to monitor O’Connell’s interactions with the teenager that night; their coworkers had heard rumors that O’Connell, a patrol officer with the Coxsackie Police Department assigned to a local school, was known at his previous police department for inappropriate interactions with underage girls, according to a report written by a local official.

In an interview later at the police station, O’Connell admitted that he had a sexual relationship with the girl, whom he’d met “while acting” in his “capacity” at the school, according to disciplinary records. The relationship wasn’t illegal, he insisted. She had turned 17, New York’s age of consent, before it became sexual.

In January 2023, the mayor of the Village of Chester, in Orange County, received an anonymous letter from a village police officer about the police chief.

The letter said that, starting in 2020, Chief Timothy McGuire, then a sergeant in the department, repeatedly met a woman he was in a sexual relationship with at the police station. McGuire would brag about his affair, the letter alleged — and he would recruit his police underlings to help him hide it.

The officer described McGuire’s behavior as “immoral, unethical, and illegal.” The mayor acted quickly, tapping a village lawyer to launch a formal investigation.But 10 months later, after the lawyer drafted his initial investigation report, the Village of Chester Police Department claimed that it didn’t exist.

He was late more often than he was on time. He fell asleep during trainings and high-stakes hearings. He sometimes didn’t show up for hours, with barely an explanation. One of his colleagues surmised that he was a “narcissist.”

Former state budget director Robert Mujica’s consulting work for a powerful hospital lobbying group this year raised questions about his adherence to a law seeking to limit the revolving door between public servants and outside interests.