FALL RIVER ─ Fall River has spent a little more than $143,000 investigating former Police Chief Paul Gauvin and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep him fired after nearly three decades with the Fall River Police Department.
The cost is still climbing. Gauvin is back on the payroll as a police captain, and the city has yet to work out how much back pay and other compensation he is owed for the time since his firing on April 21, 2025.
It doesn’t look like it will be cheap.
Gauvin on the payroll but not yet back at work
The city ended Gauvin’s contract as police chief on March 31, 2025, then fired him from his civil service job as captain on April 21, 2025, according to the Civil Service Commission’s decision. The commission heard nine days of testimony on his appeal between September 2025 and January 2026.
Of the four issues Mayor Paul Coogan cited in firing Gauvin, the commission partially upheld two and found the other two unjustified.
On the two charges it partly upheld, the commission found that Gauvin left three old, unregistered guns in his locker for more than a decade without logging them, and left a knife and a bullet in the chief’s desk drawer. It called his conduct “neglectful, but not malicious” and found no proof he meant to threaten his successor as chief. It rejected the compensatory-time charge as a misreading by investigators and a “stale issue,” and found he had taken a 1920s department photograph home only to store it.
The commission ruled the city did not have just cause to fire Gauvin. It found the firing “punitive and not remedial” and reduced it to a 90-day suspension.
Gauvin was reinstated on Aug. 6 to the rank of captain.
He can’t return to duty yet. He and the department are waiting for the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission to decide whether to recertify him as a police officer. POST did not immediately respond to a request for information on the process.
In the meantime, Gauvin has been paid $6,331 every two weeks since the commission’s Aug. 6 ruling, according to Human Resources Director Nicholas Macolini. That comes to about $37,000 so far.
The commission ordered him reinstated as captain effective April 21, 2025, the day he was fired, “without further loss of compensation or benefits.” That is about 15 months before its ruling.
The police department is still calculating his back pay, according to Coogan and Macolini. Based on his current salary as captain, he is likely owed more than $202,000, not counting benefits or other compensation.
Investigator and lawyer costs
Tension between Gauvin and the department’s two unions, representing patrol officers and superior officers, began building around late 2023, according to testimony at the civil service hearings.
It led both unions to take a no-confidence vote in Gauvin in the late summer of 2024. In a September 2024 agreement with Coogan, Gauvin stepped down as chief effective Oct. 15, 2024, and was to return to the rank of captain under the reverter clause in his contract.
Coogan, who had made Gauvin permanent chief in May 2022, named Capt. Kelly Furtado to succeed him. She was sworn in as interim chief on Oct. 15, 2024, and the City Council made her permanent chief in May 2025. She retired in June 2026.
The personal animosity between Gauvin and Furtado went back years. It came to a head when Furtado said she found a knife and a bullet in a desk drawer on her first day as chief. Guns were found in Gauvin’s locker days later.
The city then hired Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting, headed by former state Secretary of Public Safety and former assistant district attorney Daniel Bennett, to investigate Gauvin on Dec. 16, 2024. Gauvin was placed on paid administrative leave the next day.
Bennett’s report sustained the allegations about the knife and bullet and the guns in his locker, which the commission later partially upheld. It also sustained allegations that he took compensatory time he wasn’t owed and removed historical photographs, which the commission found unjustified.
In May 2025, the city’s legal department hired the law firm Clifford & Kenny to defend Gauvin’s firing before the Civil Service Commission. The firm represented the city at the hearings, which ran from September 2025 to January 2026.
The Fall River Reporter obtained the invoices from Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting and Clifford & Kenny through a public records request. They show:
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Bennett’s investigation and report | $17,960 |
| Bennett’s time testifying at the civil service appeal | $7,460 |
| Clifford & Kenny, fighting the appeal (approximate) | $117,714 |
| Total | $143,134 |
