North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council

The North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council or "NEMLEC" is a private corporation formed by 58 police agencies in Middlesex and Essex County, Massachusetts.[1] It pools police resources to provide specialized units in its service area. NEMLEC units include;[2]

• dive team
• SWAT unit
• computer crime unit
• motorcycle unit
• detectives
• internal affairs

The organization is headquartered at 314 Main Street, Suite 205 in Wilmington, Massachusetts.[3] In 2014 its president was Michael Begonis, the chief of the Wilmington Police Department.[4] By the next year, press reports indicated the president was John Fisher, chief of the Carlisle Police Department.[5] As a private corporation, NEMLEC claimed in 2014 that it was able to keep its internal organization and operations out of the public's view.[6] It would not respond to open records requests.

As a result of a lawsuit by the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, in 2015 it changed policy and released documents requested by the public.[7] Days later the Washington Post published an article based on the documents describing an "excessive" use of SWAT teams for routine police matters.[8]

In late 2014, the group took down its website offline after the media noticed its "mission statement" page.

The disorder associated with suburban sprawl as people migrated from larger cities, the development of the interstate highway system, the civil rights movement and the growing resistance to the Vietnam War threatened to overwhelm the serenity of the quaint, idyllic New England towns north and west of Boston,

— NEMLEC mission statement[9]

Agencies that belong to NEMLEC include:[10]