Police credentials intact for former officer
Loophole allows alleged bad actors to resign, evade final discipline
A former East Greenbush police officer kept his law enforcement certification after allegations surfaced three years ago that he had pursued women he encountered in the course of his official duties — including a woman in her 20s who had sex with the officer in his patrol car hours after he arrested her for shoplifting, according to internal police records.
The case exposes the loopholes that remain four years after the state amended its police certification regulations to prevent officers who are under investigation for misconduct, including potential criminal charges, from resigning or retiring from a department — and avoiding a disciplinary investigation — so they can seek employment at another law enforcement agency.
In the shoplifting incident, the 33-year-old former officer, Matthew C. Wyld, was alleged to have had a sexually charged conversation with the woman as he drove
her to the police department following her June 2017 arrest at a Walmart. After she was processed at the police station and given an appearance ticket, he drove the woman back to her vehicle where she had been arrested. Along the way, she sat in the front seat of his patrol car, and Wyld allegedly put his hand down her pants and fondled her during the ride.
According to police records obtained by the Times Union under a Freedom of Information Law request, Wyld contacted the woman later that night and they met behind a Holiday Inn while he was in uniform and still on duty. They allegedly had sex in and “on the hood” of his patrol car as he had promised her they would earlier that day during her arrest.
In another incident a few weeks later, Wyld was alleged to have used Facebook to contact a 17-yearold he encountered during a traffic stop the prior evening, when he and another officer approached a pickup truck being driven by the teenager’s boyfriend. Wyld, according to text messages later obtained during an internal investigation, commented on the girl’s “great smile.”
“I’m too old to be hitting on you, hahaha,”
Wyld wrote after asking the teenager whether her boyfriend was there. “Not illegal but you prolly (sic) don’t want some ole guy flirting with you. ... I do have to say you def don’t look 17 or 18. ... I thought your face and physical attributes looked older. ... Put it this way, if you were in a bar I would have totally hit on you.”
The internal investigation of the former officer had never been made public, and the misconduct allegations were never forwarded to the Rensselaer County district attorney’s office for review. The state attorney general’s office, which learned about the officer’s alleged misconduct from an independent source more than a year ago, subpoenaed the department’s files on the matter but has not pursued a criminal case, according to law enforcement sources and town officials.
Wyld subsequently sought employment with at least four other police departments after he
We did investigate it, and we had an internal conversation as to whether we should refer this to the district attorney. The question came down to, at some level, was this coercive. It was decided internally that it was consensual.” — Jack Conway, East
resigned from the East Greenbush police force Aug. 16, 2017 — six days after he was suspended from duty by then-police Chief Christopher Lavin.
It’s unclear whether East Greenbush officials followed the state’s regulations, which were amended eight months before Wyld’s sexual encounter with the woman he arrested for shoplifting. The amendment expanded the definition of “removal for cause,” which would
result in decertification of police credentials, to include an officer retiring or resigning from a police department while disciplinary charges are pending that may result in removal.
A week before Wyld resigned from the police job he had held for more than four years, Lavin sent a memorandum to Wyld with the subject “personnel complaint.” The memo notified the officer he was alleged to have “used the
opportunity of a shoplifting arrest by making suggestive sexual advances ... that had nothing to do with the police business of a shoplifting arrest.”
“You will not engage in any type of law enforcement activity until further notice,” wrote Lavin, who retired in June 2019. “You will surrender your gun and badge to me at this time.”
Town Supervisor Jack Conway said the department initially requested
that the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, which maintains a central registry of police and peace officers, revoke Wyld’s certification. But they resubmitted the form and rescinded the request for revocation, Conway said, after Ennio Corsi, the general counsel for Council 82, a police union that represents East Greenbush police officers, complained that the decertification request was improper because the department had never served Wyld with a formal notice of discipline.
“In retrospect, I wish we had maybe finessed it a little bit so that he was terminated, but the shortest distance between him working here and him not working here was getting that resignation,” said Conway, who is in his first year of his second term as town supervisor. “We did investigate it, and we had an internal conversation as to whether we should refer this to the district attorney. The question came down to, at some level, was this coercive. It was decided internally that it was consensual.”
DCJS did not make any inquiries with East Greenbush about why the decertification request was rescinded. The state agency has declined to promptly release its records on Wyld’s certification status — including whether he was ever employed at another agency.
In a statement issued late Friday, DCJS said: “Hiring, firing and disciplinary decisions are made at the sole discretion of the police agency. DCJS has no role in those determinations. ... DCJS does not receive the underlying facts of those matters, which result in decertification.”
Looking back, Conway believes the town mishandled that aspect of the case.
“This was the mistake of not getting him decertified. He went on to apply to maybe four or five other agencies,” Conway said. “But what I told him and
Greenbush Town Supervisor
Ennio, the day he resigned ... is if I get a phone call — and I will — I’m going to tell them word for word what happened here. Ennio is a smart guy and he said he understood that.”
The Albany Police Department and Albany County sheriff’s department are among the agencies that received job applications from Wyld.
In a telephone interview last week, Wyld said he is “not in the police field” and wanted to know why his disciplinary case was being reported three years after the allegations were made. The delay was due, in part, to the Times Union obtaining the records after legislation went into effect this year rescinding a section of state Civil Rights Law that had prohibited the disclosure of police officers’ disciplinary records for more than 40 years.
“I don’t even know what was (alleged) toward me,” Wyld claimed. “I wasn’t able to have that information.”
When pressed on whether his conduct with women he encountered on duty was appropriate, Wyld said, “I’m not having any comment on this,” and ended the conversation.
The internal files also raise questions about why East Greenbush police did not immediately investigate when they learned of the allegations two months before Wyld resigned. The records indicate that the mother of a teenage girl who was arrested along with the woman who allegedly had sex with Wyld in his patrol car had called East Greenbush police the next day to complain that her daughter was going to “take the fall” for the shoplifting incident. The mother said the woman arrested with her daughter had told the daughter that the officer allegedly indicated her charges would be dropped because she had sex with him.
A sergeant, Richard Edberg, called the girl’s mother back several days later and informed her that she was making serious allegations — although she had text messages to back them up — and that she should contact the police chief if she wanted to make a formal complaint. She never did.
“I also advised her that if she could get the text messages and bring them to myself or the chief it would be very helpful,” Edberg wrote in an Aug. 15 memorandum, explaining how he had handled the complaint. “I never heard back from (the woman) or the chief in regards to the incident and was under the opinion that she was satisfied with my handling of the incident.”
In another incident in late July 2017, a woman told police that Wyld had contacted her 15 minutes after she was arrested for a minor offense and released. She said that Wyld said he had texted her mobile phone, which had been listed in her arrest paperwork, because he couldn’t find her on Facebook.
When Wyld drove her back to her vehicle in his patrol car following her arrest, he disclosed that had been accused of groping another woman during an earlier arrest but that the chief had accepted his explanation. Wyld also disclosed to her intimate details of his personal life, including that his girlfriend “doesn’t put out.”
“He mentioned nights was the best shift because you can pull into anyone’s driveway or pull over on any side road,” she said in a statement two weeks after the encounter. She added that Wyld had also told her that police officers, nurses and firefighters are “sexually crazy.” The woman had told police she was a volunteer firefighter.
“After I received the text/email from Officer Wyld I was increasingly scared because he now knows everything about me,” her statement reads. “I’m scared to be outside when it’s dark now for fear he could be somewhere in the dark waiting for me.”
Wyld’s ability to retain his police certification is not unusual. Increasingly, police labor unions have also challenged whether the process of decertifying a police officer — which inhibits their ability to gain new employment in law enforcement — is being undercut.
Earlier this month, a former Albany police officer, 36-year-old Christofer M. Kitto, filed a petition in state Supreme Court seeking to have his certification restored because he said the department had agreed to withdraw disciplinary charges against him last year after he fatally shot a man who tried to rob him at knifepoint while Kitto was with a prostitute in Utica.
More than 12 months later, Albany police told DCJS that Kitto had left the department due to incompetence and misconduct. That notification by the department resulted in Kitto’s police certification credentials being invalidated.
The fallout, Kitto’s lawsuit alleges, is that he has been prevented from obtaining a job with another police agency.
Kitto’s lawsuit alleges that because the disciplinary charges against him were dropped by the department his certification should remain valid.
Two days after he resigned, in May 2019, Chief Eric Hawkins signed a letter confirming Kitto’s resignation, but the letter did not include any information about the officer being removed for incompetence or misconduct, according to the lawsuit.
The case is pending in Albany.
After I received the text/email from Officer Wyld I was increasingly scared because he now knows everything about me. I’m scared to be outside when it’s dark now for fear he could be somewhere in the dark waiting for me.” — From a statement made by a woman in July 2017