John Landers, a former Northeastern police officer who has been criminally prosecuted, voluntarily relinquished his law enforcement certification as of Dec. 18.
Landers’ voluntary relinquishment request was granted by the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST, Commission without any conditions, POST Commission spokesperson Alia Spring wrote in an email to The Huntington News. Landers can reapply for certification in the future.
Initially, the POST Commission published two applications for voluntary relinquishment of certification Dec. 15 for public comment — one for Landers and the other for Stephen Gondella, a former Massachusetts State Police officer.
The Northeastern University Police Department, or NUPD, hired Landers in 2021. He worked for four years before retiring in September, according to Spring. Before joining NUPD, Landers worked for Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, or MBTA, police for 29 years, from 1992 to 2021. Before he voluntarily relinquished his certification, Landers was certified until July 1, 2026. (Officers must be re-certified every three years.)
In Landers’ application, which he filed at the end of September, he checked “Yes” for having been criminally prosecuted. The News could not confirm what Landers was prosecuted for. During his tenure at the MBTA and NUPD, Landers acquired no sustained incidents of misconduct, according to the spokesperson. Landers could not be reached for comment.
Originally introduced by the POST Commission in April, voluntary relinquishment of certification is not a form of discipline, according to the POST spokesperson. Officers may have their own reasons to request voluntary relinquishment, such as obtaining a private investigator license.
It is unclear why Landers applied to have his certification relinquished. The university did not respond to requests for comment from The News about the details around Landers’ employment and departure from the force.
According to Landers’ application, NUPD initially certified him in 2023.
Of NUPD’s 61-member force, six officers have sustained incidents of misconduct, according to POST’s disciplinary database. Three NUPD officers were added to the database in the past year, one for supporting an ex-MBTA officer convicted of raping two women on duty in 2012. The database, which has records going back to 1984, listed three NUPD officers when it was first launched in 2023.
Currently, NUPD has one of the lowest numbers of officers on the POST disciplinary database among private universities in the Boston area. Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology both have over a dozen officers in the database, while Harvard University has more than double that.
Correction: This article was updated Dec. 30 at 10 a.m. to clarify the difference between a certification being “revoked” versus “relinquished.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated Dec. 30 at 10 a.m. to include additional information that Landers’ application for voluntary relinquishment was approved.
