Trespassing Charges Create “Dragnet” in Holyoke, Public Defenders Say

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HOLYOKE — Dropping in for a visit one February morning, Osvaldo Soto-Berrios was on his mother-in-law’s rear porch on Appleton Street when two police officers climbed the stairs and quickly arrested him and two others on trespassing charges. 

The police alleged Soto-Berrios had no “legitimate purpose” to be at the apartment building. But that was a surprise to Soto-Berrios, who often visits to help with house care. His mother-in-law has a foot injury that makes it hard for her to move around the 40-unit apartment building, he told The Shoestring, and that day he was taking out the trash for her. 

“I don’t have the key to the front so I have to go around back,” Soto-Berrios said in Spanish ahead of a June court date in the case. “I don’t want to be seen as a bad person for going there to do a favor.”

His attorney, public defender Alex Weinstein, said the charges lacked the factual information needed to prove that Soto-Berrios was “without right” to be at the apartment. Arguing to dismiss the case in front of a Holyoke District Court judge, Weinstein pointed out that the majority of the Holyoke Police Department’s report on the incident described the “pursuit, search, and arrest of an unrelated individual” and only mentioned Soto-Berrios three times. 

On June 10, Judge William Hadley denied Weinstein’s motion, moving the case closer to trial, when the prosecutors would have to provide higher standards of evidence for their allegations. Weinstein requested the judge reconsider his decision, but on July 29, before Hadley could rule on that request, the prosecutor dropped the charges against Soto-Berrios. 

Sotto-Berrios’ case is not unique. 

It’s a consistent pattern in Holyoke District Court, according to data obtained by The Shoestring and interviews with the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the organization that represents clients in Massachusetts who can’t afford their own attorney. Public defenders such as Kate Murdock, the attorney in charge of the CPCS office in Holyoke, say many of their clients are affected by arrests on trespassing and other misdemeanor charges, leading to “surprising and problematic results.”

In a phone interview, Murdock said she has seen Holyoke police charge a wide range of people for trespassing, from those who have never been arrested before to those currently serving probation. She said that’s particularly true at certain buildings that “appear to be monitored by police with regular frequency” — places that landlords, residents, or police have identified as central locations for drug-related activity in the city.

Even if charges are dropped later on, the experience can be “pretty traumatizing,” create stigma, and stay on people’s permanent records when applying to jobs, she said. Even just being arrested can be a violation for those who are out of jail on parole.

“I don’t think trespass is a serious crime, but it just becomes a gateway for more serious police presence and interaction that can lead to serious consequences for people,” Murdock said. 

Speaking in court, Soto-Berrios said he felt good about the dismissed trespassing charges. However, he said police should have never pursued charges against him in the first place. He was arrested and had charges hanging over his head for months, attending multiple court dates before prosecutors decided to drop the case.

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Soto-Berrios’ mother-in-law lives in one of several buildings that, over the years, police and the media have designated as “hot spots” for drug sales — all of them located in the city’s predominantly Hispanic, lower-income neighborhoods. Going back at least a decade, the same story has played out again and again: residents complain about drug activity in the area, police make big arrests at those buildings, and the cycle repeats. 

For example, in 2015, WAMC reported that then police chief James Neiswanger called the owners of those buildings “slumlords” after police arrested 21 people on drug charges at 365 Appleton St. — the same building where Soto-Berrios was arrested. Just last year, police again raided the property and made three arrests on drug charges, according to reporting from 22 News. 

Mayor Joshua Garcia declined an interview with The Shoestring for this article. Interim Police Chief Isaias Cruz did not respond to an interview request.  

In 2022, Garcia — the first Latino ever elected as mayor of Holyoke, a city where more than half of residents identify as Hispanic — held a press conference at another “hot spot” on Elm Street, promising to reduce drug crime in the area.

“If you suffer from the disease of addiction, we are here to help you,” Garcia said at the time. “Because Holyoke is a community of compassion and second chances. If you’re caught up in gangs and drug dealing and you want out, we are here to help you because Holyoke is a city of hope and opportunity. But if you’re trafficking drugs and ruining lives and devastating our neighborhoods, we are coming after you.”

But drug arrests aren’t the only ones police are making at those buildings. Several “No Trespassing” signs are posted outside and within those apartment complexes, and public records show that police have frequently arrested people they claim shouldn’t be there. 

Using public records requests, The Shoestring obtained data on the number of trespassing arrests since 2020 at three different hot-spot buildings in Holyoke: 294 Elm St., 365 Appleton St., and 145 Essex St. The data show a large number of trespassing arrests at those locations — 201 in total from January 1, 2020, to June 17, 2024.

Murdock said her office represents many clients who got arrested for “merely being present at a building,” whether that was because they were staying with family, visiting a friend, or passing through. Although police officers have legal authority to stop people and ask questions about their whereabouts, Murdock said this can lead to a wide “dragnet” of court cases.  

“These things always affect the most vulnerable,” Murdock said.

Data show that those arrests have only increased since October of last year, when a stray bullet from a shootout at the intersection of Maple and Sargeant streets, just half a mile away from Appleton Street, injured 29-year-old Selena Santana while she was riding the bus and resulted in her unborn baby’s death. 

In response, Garcia proposed “Ezekiel’s Plan,” which would have funneled an additional $1 million to the police department, largely to hire 13 more officers and install a city-wide camera system. Though the City Council vetoed the proposal, Garcia and his police department still increased police patrols and housing inspections. In December, The Republican reported police enforcement increased largely in Holyoke’s historically poorer neighborhoods. Many of the arrests police made were on simple drug-possession charges, according to the newspaper. 

In July, the Daily Hampshire Gazette quoted Garcia saying that over the past seven months, Holyoke police have made “more than 200 arrests for criminal activities such as drug trafficking and firearm possession.” It’s unclear whether those arrests included trespassing and how many of them were for lower-level drug possession charges. 

According to police records, between Jan. 1, 2020 and Oct. 4, 2023, when Santana was shot, officers made 137 trespassing arrests at the three hot-spot locations The Shoestring examined. That’s three arrests per month in a 45-month period. Between Oct. 4, 2023 and June 17, 2024, police made 64 arrests — nearly seven per month.

However, in the vast majority of these cases, police did not find any evidence of drug distribution or trafficking. Arrest data show that of the 64 trespassing arrests made at those three locations since the October shooting, police only charged three of those people with drug-distribution or trafficking of any kind. By comparison, police charged 25 of those 64 people with drug possession charges but no drug-dealing charges.

What’s more, the extra security steps don’t seem to have deterred drug use in the area. 

Soto-Berrios’ ex-wife Iris Campos, whose mother Soto-Berrios was visiting when he was arrested, said “it’s not safe” at the building. And that’s not just because of the drug trade, she said. The increased police presence deters Campos from visiting her mother. She said she is often ticketed for being on the property, and the expenses prevent her from buying necessities for her family. 

“My concern is that I can’t go to my mom’s house because I don’t want them to think I’m using drugs, and I’m [actually] there with my kids,” Campos said.

Officer Melissa Rex was patrolling Appleton Street on Feb. 22 when she wrote in her police report that she observed Soto-Berrios and two other men sitting on the connected rear porches of the building. She proceeded to chase one man up the stairs while another officer “stood by with” Soto-Berrios, according to her report. 

The chase is detailed in Rex’s report, but she wrote no description of any interactions with Soto-Berrios. He is not mentioned again until the end of the report, when she and a third officer arrested him and the other men after confirming none of them lived there.

Although Soto-Berrios acknowledged the amount of crime in Holyoke, he said he does not like how police target “regular people” with charges and arrests. “Not all the people who go there are looking for drugs,” he said. 

“I don’t have nothing against police, but sometimes they’re nasty,” Campos added. “They need to leave poor people alone here.”

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Murdock said that the heavy policing of certain parts of Holyoke has caused “community distrust” of the police and has other impacts on people’s lives, too. She said it’s common for people to try to avoid police contact at all times.

“When people interact with police it makes them nervous, uncomfortable, and they don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she said. “They know that this person has all of this authority they don’t have and they don’t know how things are going to end up for them.” 

Murdock said that in Holyoke, there is a lot of pressure on leaders to focus on issues of substance use. “That is something the mayor is under a lot of pressure to do,” she said. But using heavy policing as a solution leaves negative impacts on neighborhoods designated as hot spots.

“I think if people thought about that, how it’s like having police come up on the street all the time, they’d see it’s not a great way to live,” she added. “It’s a burden on the people who live there.”

That’s certainly how Soto-Berrios feels. He told The Shoestring that he thinks the city’s police need to give priority to cases that have “a lot more meaning.”

“Because they’re out there abusing the people who are picking up cans or asking for money at the light,” he said. “And the people who are actually out there selling drugs, the people who are really doing bad things, they don’t mess with them.”

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Additional reporting contributed by Story Young and Dusty Christensen.

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