Bristol County police chiefs’ frustration grows over Ash Street Jail refusals

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As Bristol County’s Ash Street Jail continues to refuse local arrestees after medical or mental health screenings, an increasing number of local police chiefs are criticizing the practice, saying it’s straining their departments.

After a July refusal, Swansea Police Chief Mark Foley sent a letter to Bristol County Sheriff Paul Heroux decrying the refusal policy. “The level of disservice that the citizens and police departments of Bristol County are currently receiving is completely appalling,” Foley wrote.

For decades, Bristol County police departments have relied on Ash Street to hold people awaiting arraignment. But since Heroux tightened medical and psychological screening to reduce risk and liability, refusals have risen, forcing departments to find other places for arrestees, The Light reported last month. 

Chiefs say that can mean hours at hospitals, borrowing cells from neighboring towns or keeping officers to guard detainees, pulling them off patrol and driving up costs.

Records obtained by The Light show Ash Street refused arrestees 135 times after medical or mental health screenings in 2025, up from 32 in 2022. Through August of this year, there were 92 refusals compared to 1,720 arrestees accepted. 

Under state law, the responsibility for arrestees rests with municipalities, not the sheriff. Cities and towns with more than 5,000 residents are required to maintain secure holding locations. 

“If state law doesn’t require that we do it, how we do it is up to us if we choose to do it,” said Heroux recently. “I’m trying to run this place in a responsible way, where we don’t just do what the police want, which is to take anybody with a heartbeat. But that’s not responsible because we have first, and foremost, our responsibilities to the inmates that the courts send us.”

Despite the requirement, some departments lack holding cells, including New Bedford, which has not had them since 1999. Others have long relied on Ash Street because it is more convenient. 

“Ash Street is our only choice,” Swansea Police Chief Foley said, adding that despite having eight holding cells, the department does not have the manpower to assign officers to watch detainees. Refusals create a “huge financial constraint on the town,” he said.

“It’s getting frustrating, to say the least.” 

“I get their frustration,” said Heroux, who added that, as a former mayor, he understands the need to keep police officers on the street. But he said the chiefs’ frustration is misdirected because sheriffs are not legally required to accept pre-arraignment detainees.

“These police chiefs, if they are really frustrated, they shouldn’t direct their frustration at us. They should direct it at their own mayors or municipal councils for not being in compliance with state law. Because we’re bailing them out on their operation, but we can’t let that compromise our operations.”

Since 2023, Bristol County police chiefs and the sheriff’s office have been working on a memorandum of understanding intended to set clearer terms for what Heroux is willing to accept at Ash Street and what police departments need from the regional lockup. Chiefs say an agreement is still far from being reached. And as refusals rise, tensions with Heroux are growing, making an already difficult negotiation even harder.

When arrestees report self-harming thoughts 

If you get arrested on a Friday night in Bristol County, police must find somewhere to hold you until a judge can arraign you Monday morning. Whether you spend the weekend in a jail cell, a hospital bed or handcuffed to a bench at a police station can depend on what happens when you reach Ash Street Jail and get medically and psychologically screened.

Two police chiefs — New Bedford’s Jason Thody and Fairhaven’s Daniel Dorgan — said they believe some repeat offenders have learned that reporting suicidal thoughts or not answering at all can prompt Ash Street to turn them away. They must still appear in court, but may spend the night at a hospital or police station instead of the jail.

“If they just don’t say anything, if they don’t answer any questions, Ash Street will not take them,” said Thody in July.

“We’ve been told by arrestees that they’d rather sit in St. Luke’s or our station or Mattapoisett’s, rather than go to Ash Street for the weekend,” Dorgan said. 

Concern that an arrestee might be reporting suicidal thoughts to avoid a night or weekend in jail came to a head after Ash Street refused a Swansea arrestee on July 10.

In a July 22 email to Heroux, Foley described an hourslong ordeal. Charlton Memorial Hospital had medically cleared the man but had not documented a psychological clearance. 

Foley wrote that hospital staff believed the man was reporting suicidal thoughts to avoid incarceration.

Swansea could not easily hold the man for the weekend because many officers had been assigned to provide security at a three-day event. The arresting officer instead took him to a crisis center, where he waited more than four hours for an evaluation. New Bedford police were eventually called to assist.

“It was determined that his issues were behavioral in nature,” Foley wrote to Heroux. “This was the same conclusion that the staff at Charlton Memorial Hospital had come to hours and hours earlier.”

After clinicians cleared the man, the officer returned the man to Ash Street for a second time. 

“Upon this second attempt at intake,” Foley wrote, “the nurse at Ash Street questioned the regional, to paraphrase, ‘you sure you don’t want to harm yourself? I don’t feel comfortable with you.’”

Foley called the incident “extremely concerning” and questioned whether it stemmed from an earlier complaint he made against one of Heroux’s captains for speaking negatively about the sheriff. Foley had sent Heroux a recording of a phone conversation between the captain and a Swansea police sergeant, describing the captain’s conduct as extremely unprofessional and insubordinate.

“I will not tolerate vindictive and inappropriate behavior regarding professional services that we are seeking through the Sheriff’s department,” wrote Foley.

Heroux said he shares Foley’s concern and he opened an internal investigation, which examined the alleged comments by crisis center personnel and Ash Street staff that suggested sheriff’s department personnel were retaliating against Swansea police along with other incidents reported by Foley. The internal affairs investigation report, released to The Light, concluded that the allegations were unfounded.

“To say the least, I am completely disappointed with what this basic process has become,” concluded Foley’s letter. “How we got to this point is astonishing to me. The level of disservice that the citizens and police departments of Bristol County are currently receiving is completely appalling.”

When Ash Street says no

Fairhaven, Swansea and Westport police chiefs say the sheriff’s jail refusals are straining their departments — echoing complaints from the chiefs in New Bedford and Dartmouth, which The Light reported last month.

Fairhaven Police Chief Dorgan said refusals put pressure on departments with limited staffing, as officers can spend hours taking arrestees to hospitals for medical clearance. He said refusals can also be inconsistent, leaving officers unsure whom Ash Street will accept.

“All of a sudden, they get all the proper paperwork, or what we believed up until recently was the proper paperwork, and then they’re refused anyway,” said Dorgan.

For Fairhaven, a refusal creates another problem: the department has nowhere to hold someone for long. “We have a booking room with a bench and a handcuff. So that’s not proper or decent to keep someone for six hours handcuffed where they can move maybe a radius of six inches,” Dorgan said. He said that Fairhaven has kept arrestees at its police station “many times” for hours after an Ash Street Jail refusal. 

Other times, Fairhaven has turned to police departments in Mattapoisett or Acushnet for a cell, Dorgan said. But the detainee remains Fairhaven’s responsibility, requiring the department to provide officers to transport and guard the person.

That makes a refusal considerably more expensive for the town. A patrol officer costs about $520 per eight-hour shift, Dorgan said. Keeping someone for a full day can cost the town about $1,500; a weekend can reach $3,000. Ash Street, by comparison, charges municipalities $75 a night.

“The cost could be significant based on the amount of time if you’re holding an arrest for over the weekend,” said Westport Police Chief Christopher Dunn, who described a similar burden on his department. “There is a financial impact and it’s also an impact with the amount of officers we have on the street.”

Foley said sometimes he simply doesn’t have the manpower necessary to handle refusals. “It’s going to be a fiscal restraint for the cities and towns,” he said. “We’re not equipped to watch prisoners 24/7. When this happens, we’ve got to go to McDonald’s and we’ve got to pick up meals. We do what we have to do, but let’s face it, we’re not a jail.”

Heroux has said he could reduce the number of refusals if he could renovate the Dartmouth House of Correction to hold arrestees there. He said a Dartmouth jail renovation, which would allow him to close Ash Street Jail entirely, would require $10 million to $20 million in state funding. 

The sheriff has applied for a grant to fund the renovation from the state’s Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, which has not announced a timeline for its review of sheriffs’ grant proposals. The Light’s public records request for a copy of the grant application was denied because the grant is still in the “pre-award stage.”

An unfinished agreement 

Bristol County police chiefs and Heroux’s office have been negotiating a new memorandum of understanding since 2023. The process, however, has moved slowly.

“I think it’s stagnant,” Dunn said. “It’s the same issue that arises all the time.”

Dunn said meetings between the sheriff’s office and police chiefs have largely focused on individual refusals rather than moving the agreement forward. Chiefs say the proposed MOU has not developed in the direction they had hoped.

“We’ve tried,” said Foley. “We’ve met, I don’t know how many times, and it just seems like the goalposts keep moving.” 

“I think the Bristol chiefs need to convene and figure out the best course of action to move forward,” said Dunn.

Heroux said the process is slow largely because all the chiefs need to be on the same page and agree before signing. “We’re just waiting on them,” he said. He said his office requested a meeting with the chiefs in July, but they said they did not think a meeting was necessary.

The Light requested access to the draft MOU, but Heroux declined to make it available because he said it is still under discussion and has not yet been signed.

According to Dorgan and Foley, some provisions in the draft are raising concerns about how the agreement would work in practice, including whether police departments would need to intervene after the jail takes custody of a pre-arraignment detainee. 

“Until we can really hammer this out and see what the impact is going to be to us, then I think that there’s going to be some reluctance to sign,” Dorgan said.

If the chiefs cannot find common ground, Dorgan said, they have discussed other options, such as sharing holding facilities among departments.

“I just think it’s becoming a problem where we do need to come up with an alternative plan of action in case this relationship with the sheriff’s department doesn’t go anywhere.”

State law offers no clear solution to the dispute. Chapter 40, Section 34 requires cities and towns with more than 5,000 residents to maintain a secure and convenient lockup, and does not require sheriffs to accept people awaiting arraignment.

Dunn said he is aware of the state law. He says the Legislature could address the situation by requiring sheriffs to accept pre-arraignment detainees.

Heroux said sheriffs need discretion because each jail operates with different needs and resources, much as individual police departments do.

“We get to run our houses as we see fit based on the needs and the resources we have. So just like every police department runs their police station slightly differently, we all follow state law,” he said. “But then when a state law is silent, we then get to use our discretion.”

Email Eleonora Bianchi at ebianchi@newbedfordlight.org.