A Concord police officer acquitted in January of assaulting a homeless man remains on unpaid leave amid an ongoing internal affairs investigation, according to city attorney John Conforti.
Richard Cobb, 42, has been on leave from the police department since May 2023, when the attorney general’s office opened a criminal investigation into a pair of incidents that occurred six days apart in March and April of that year.
In the April incident, in which a Merrimack County Superior Court jury found him not guilty, Cobb was accused of conducting an unjustified leg sweep of a man as he and another officer were attempting to arrest him outside of Sal’s Pizza on Storrs Street.
In the March incident, Cobb had been charged with assaulting a pair of women who he said were interfering with the preservation of a traffic accident scene. Those charges were dropped in February of this year, following the trial in the other case.
Conforti confirmed the internal affairs investigation remained ongoing in response to an inquiry about the status of a right-to-know request submitted by the Concord Monitor earlier this year. The city has declined to release any investigatory or disciplinary records requested due to the ongoing investigation.
In early September, Conforti said he predicted the investigation would get resolved “in the next few weeks”, but acknowledged it had taken “much longer than I anticipate[d].” Asked for an update earlier this month, he said that he now expected the investigatory process would “go through the end of the year.”
He did not directly explain the reason for the change in estimated completion, but he said that the investigation had been paused during the criminal process.
Cobb, who was living in Arizona at the time of his trial, could not be reached for comment. His lawyer during his trial, Eric Wilson, did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week.
It is not clear whether Cobb would choose to return to the city’s police force even if he were reinstated.
A police spokesperson, Deputy Chief Barrett Moulton, declined to comment, characterizing the investigation as an “ongoing personnel issue.”
The assault case involving the homeless man required jurors to determine whether Cobb had exceeded the significant power afforded to law enforcement personnel to use force when they have a reasonable belief that they or someone else is in danger.
On the evening of April 1, 2023, Cobb responded to the Storrs Street pizza shop for a report of a man muttering to himself that he was going to shoot an “invisible person,” assistant attorney general Dan Jimenez said during his opening statement in the trial.
The interaction began relatively calmly before devolving as the man, named Blake Haney, struggled with the handcuffs that Cobb and another officer attempted to place around his wrists, according to testimony during the trial.
Cobb, who testified during his trial, said he grew worried that Haney’s partially clasped handcuff could become a weapon if the officers lost control of his arms. That was when he knocked Haney to the ground by kicking out his legs. Haney sustained lacerations to his face.
In the other incident, which occurred a week prior, Cobb wrote in an affidavit that he used an arm bar against one woman when she made physical contact with him and used a leg sweep against another.
Cobb began working for the department in 2017 after serving in the military. A 119-page personnel file obtained through a right-to-know request did not contain any other instances of use-of-force or disciplinary issues, though it is possible that they would have been withheld pending the current investigation if they existed.
Cobb was placed on leave on May 1, 2023, exactly one month after the second incident. A letter from Concord Police Chief Bradley Osgood announcing the decision on that date stated that the department had “been made aware that the New Hampshire
Attorney General’s Office intends to open a criminal investigation into alleged
inappropriate conduct by you resulting from use of force on March 26, 2023 and April 1, 2023.”
The letter indicates that Cobb received pay for the first week of his leave, but has been on unpaid leave since
It is not clear what prompted the attorney general’s office to initiate its investigation. A bystander to the Sal’s Pizza incident testified during the trial that she thought Cobb “was going to kill” Haney, though her testimony was stricken from the record.
The personnel file does not include any performance reviews for Cobb. It does, however, include several military honors, including a Purple Heart awarded to Cobb in 2008 for “wounds received in action.”