A recruiter for the New Hampshire Army National Guard is accused of deceiving and coercing young women in the reserve into having sex. Jason Collins also allegedly had sex with the women while on duty as a part-time police officer.
Steven Porter of The Boston Globe obtained an internal affairs report looking into Collins’ conduct, and he spoke with NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley about the findings.
Transcript
Can you first tell us about Collins and his role in the Guard and as a police officer?
Jason Collins was a full time recruiter since 2018 for the New Hampshire Army National Guard, and he was also working part time as a police officer in Madbury. He has resigned from both of those positions. He resigned over a year ago, but details about what he had done just recently became public.
What sparked the investigation into Collins?
So there was a 25-year-old student at the University of New Hampshire who came to police in November of 2023, and she reported that she had been dating Collins for more than two years and had just recently learned that he was dating other young women who were also students at UNH and were also members of the guard – and he was married. She reported concerns about that situation to police in November of 2023, and that sparked the police investigation, which then sparked a separate military investigation that launched in December of 2023.
What did those investigations end up finding out about Collins's conduct?
I got a copy of an internal affairs report – this is from the civilian police authorities – and it showed Collins used deceptive and allegedly coercive tactics to engage in inappropriate sexual relationships with multiple young women. These adult women were about 15 years younger than Collins and serving with him in the guard. They were also enrolled as students at UNH.
Three students who had intimate relationships with Collins were interviewed by a police investigator, and two of them reported that they had engaged in sexual activity with him inside and outside his patrol vehicle while he was on duty as a police officer in Madbury, which is just north of the UNH campus in Durham. I think it's fairly obvious that police officers shouldn't be hooking up with college students while in uniform on the clock when they are supposed to be patrolling our streets, but that wasn't all that Collins did wrong, according to the internal affairs report.
One of the three students found out Collins was not only meeting up with other college students, but also was married. And when she confronted him about his marital status, he produced a court document as supposed proof that he and his wife had legally separated. But a police investigator concluded Collins had forged that document. It was fake. Again, forgive me if I'm stating the obvious here, but police officers cannot be falsifying official records.
What's more, the investigator found that the student who alerted police to what Collins had been doing also reported that she had seen him take out his firearm and make comments about potentially shooting himself, which is something that authorities later described as an allegation that he had threatened suicide if she were to refuse to maintain a sexual relationship with him.
New Hampshire's National Guard has been criticized for how it's handled sexual harassment and misconduct cases within its ranks. How did law enforcement officials and the National Guard respond to this investigation? Did Collins face any consequences from all this?
He did. Collins was not accused of committing any crime, but the New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Council – this is the civilian police authority in New Hampshire – ultimately decided in July that his behavior raised significant doubts about his credibility and his fitness for law enforcement, so the council permanently revoked his credential as a police officer. By then, he had already resigned from both the police force and the military and moved on to another career path.
We do know that a military investigation began in December of 2023 and was completed in May of 2024. Collins then resigned from the National Guard's Active Duty reserve program in July of 2024. We still don't have a copy of the military investigative report. We don't have a lot of details about that. There are privacy laws, according to the National Guard spokesperson.
Did Collins dispute any of these findings, Steven, or his credentials being revoked?
Collins did not respond to my requests for comment, but he did speak briefly during a public hearing before the New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Council. This was for his public hearing in July, and during that hearing he did not contest the factual findings of the report that was used as the basis for the disciplinary action taken against him. So at least for purposes of the civilian police disciplinary proceedings, he did not contest those findings.
And I'll add that I found out about this case because of a relatively new conduct review process that state lawmakers adopted in 2022. This was in response to nationwide protests over George Floyd's murder by police in Minneapolis in 2020. This new process in New Hampshire seeks to increase transparency and consistency in police accountability.
And under this new process, a state level committee double checks the validity of internal affairs investigations performed by local police agencies and then forwards findings to the full Police Standards and Training Council for a public hearing, at which point the internal affairs report becomes public. Collins had his public report in late July, and I got a redacted copy in early August.
And I just want to underscore that this increased transparency from civilian police authorities is notable, especially considering how much harder it was to get information from military authorities.
