A Massachusetts police chief drew a five-day suspension without pay after he left his duty belt, holstered firearm included, sitting on a bench in the public lobby of his own station for roughly three minutes.
Bourne Police Chief Brandon Esip walked into the station on June 9 at about 2:30 p.m. carrying his uniform duty belt in his hands rather than wearing it. He set the belt down on a bench in the public lobby area and walked away, leaving it unattended for approximately three minutes before another officer noticed and secured it. The belt held a holstered, unloaded firearm with no ammunition, but the lapse was enough to trigger a formal disciplinary action from the town's top administrator.
Town Administrator Marlene McCollem issued a disciplinary letter calling the incident what she described as "a serious infraction of critical departmental policies" designed to govern the security and safe handling of firearms. The letter imposed a five-day unpaid suspension. Three of those days, August 20, 21, and 24, were to be served immediately. The remaining two days are held in abeyance for twelve months and will only be enforced if Esip violates the department's firearms policies again during that window.
Video captured the lapse in real time
McCollem noted that video from the station showed Esip appeared momentarily distracted by another matter when he set the belt down. The nature of that distraction was not specified in the disciplinary letter, and the type of video, whether surveillance footage or body-camera recording, was not disclosed. Nor was it clear whether the public lobby was open to walk-in visitors at the time.
Esip has not publicly responded to or contested the suspension. The disciplinary letter did not reference any specific departmental firearms policy by name, though McCollem's language made plain the town considers the safe handling of service weapons a baseline expectation, especially for the department's top officer.
The incident is the latest in a string of cases nationwide in which police chiefs have faced consequences for conduct that fell short of the standards they are supposed to enforce. A Florida police chief was fired after officers found him at a crash scene with an open vodka bottle, and in Indiana, a chief faced federal charges after a raid turned up more than a hundred firearms.
Three minutes, five days, and a twelve-month clock
The structure of the punishment itself deserves attention. Two of the five suspension days are conditional, essentially a probationary warning that hangs over Esip for a full year. If he handles his firearm properly for the next twelve months, those two days vanish from the record. If he does not, they kick in automatically.
That arrangement gives the town some leverage without removing Esip from his post permanently. But it also raises a fair question: is a three-day actual suspension proportional for a police chief who left a firearm, even an unloaded one, sitting in a space the public can access?
Rank-and-file officers in departments across the country have faced harsher discipline for lesser firearms-handling violations. A chief is supposed to set the standard, not fall below it. The case in Minneapolis, where a chief was forced out after tampering with a probe into his own conduct, is a reminder that the public holds top brass to a higher bar, and should.
Bourne is a small Cape Cod town, not a major metro area, and nothing in the record suggests Esip has a pattern of negligence. The firearm was unloaded and holstered. Another officer caught the mistake quickly. Those facts matter.
But so does this: the person responsible for enforcing firearms discipline in the department is the same person who walked away from his own weapon in a public space. Other chiefs have faced far steeper consequences for misconduct, including one in Indiana who was charged with theft and misconduct after a federal raid, and another in Florida who resigned after an investigation uncovered on-duty misconduct of a different kind entirely.
Accountability has to start at the top
McCollem's disciplinary letter used the right words. Calling it "a serious infraction of critical departmental policies" is not sugarcoating the lapse. And the suspension, modest as it is, at least acknowledges that a chief who violates his own department's rules cannot simply walk it off.
Still, the public is entitled to know more. What specific policies did Esip violate? What distracted him? Was anyone from the public present in the lobby at the time? Those questions remain unanswered, and the town has offered no indication it plans to address them.
When the person who writes the rules breaks them, three days off the job is the floor, not the ceiling.
