After $100k payout, Northampton PD settlements top $215k since 2022

When Northampton settled a civil rights lawsuit against its police department earlier this month, it was unclear how much the city paid out. Like many municipalities, Northampton’s insurance company handles such lawsuits, and officials hadn’t yet learned how much the firm had settled the case for.

But now, the city has released the amount it paid out to Eric Matlock, who police pepper-sprayed and arrested on the steps of City Hall in 2017.

That settlement came to a total of $100,000.

Matlock’s case is just the latest against the Northampton Police Department that the city has settled in recent years. The six-figure payout brings the total amount of such settlements the city has made since 2022 to $215,500, according to figures City Solicitor Alan Seewald released to The Shoestring.

Northampton’s insurance provider, the Massachusetts Interlocal Insurance Association, deals with those cases instead of the city’s law department. The firm hires attorneys and decides whether to bring a lawsuit to trial or settle it. Because the city has liability insurance, those settlements don’t come directly out of the city’s budget but can lead to higher insurance premiums in subsequent years. 

For the current fiscal year, Northampton budgeted $112,858 for general liability insurance and $292,565 for public employees liability insurance — increases of 5% and 25.8% over the previous fiscal year, respectively.

Matlock had been holding a one-man protest on City Hall’s steps in August 2017 when police alleged he was blocking doors. That led to police pepper-spraying and arresting him. They charged him with disorderly conduct, assault and battery on a police officer, and resisting arrest. A jury acquitted Matlock of those charges the following year. He then filed a lawsuit over the incident in 2020.

The Shoestring relies on reader support to make independent news for western Massachusetts possible. You can support this kind of labor-intensive reporting by visiting our donate page.

In addition to the $100,000 settlement with Matlock, Northampton has settled civil rights lawsuits against its police department in three other cases in recent years, according to the figures Seewald released.

Those cases include one settlement The Shoestring has previously reported on. In September 2023, the city agreed to a $75,000 settlement with Jenison Retzlaff, who alleged that during a 2019 wellness check, police officers tackled and kicked him, beat him with a baton, pepper-sprayed and arrested him. 

“Officers claim Mr. Retzlaff was uncooperative while two officers kneeled on his body, holding him down,” Retzlaff’s lawyer alleged in a letter to the city. “While Mr. Retzlaff lie face-down on the ground the officers administered knee strikes, used a baton on Mr. Retzlaff, and blasted ‘O.C.’ spray in Mr. Retzlaff’s face.”

The city has also reached two other settlement agreements that have previously gone unreported in the media.

In 2022, Seewald said that Northampton paid out a $15,500 settlement to Benjamin Maddison, who had alleged that police had harassed him by pulling him over multiple times and used the fact that he frequently filmed police as a reason to suspend his driver’s license.

The following year, Northampton settled a lawsuit brought by city resident Debra Horton, who alleged that she “suffered injuries to her shoulder, back, face, head, wrist, and other body parts as well as emotional distress, pain and suffering” when police arrested her in 2017 outside Cooley Dickinson Hospital. Horton’s lawsuit said she was 58 at the time and was at the hospital seeking treatment for alcoholism.

Seewald said the city settled Horton’s case for $25,000.

Currently, Northampton police are facing another civil rights lawsuit in federal court.

Last year, Holyoke resident Marisol Driouech sued the city over her violent arrest in April 2023, when she was 60 years old. An officer had pulled her over for a broken headlight and, within five minutes, he and other officers had pulled her out of the car, wrestled her to the ground, pepper-sprayed her, and arrested her. Prosecutors dropped all of the charges against her after she admitted to the broken-headlight infraction.