At tonight’s Greensboro City Council meeting, a $1.75 million dollar settlement to be paid by the City of Greensboro to the family of Joseph Lopez will be publicly announced. The settlement is believed to be the largest ever paid by the City in a police shooting case, and will be accompanied by an official public apology to the family of Joseph Lopez.
On November 19, 2021, Greensboro police canine officer Matthew Hamilton, only seconds after unleashing his dog and instructing him to bite, fatally shot Joseph Lopez in the face. It is uncontested that Lopez was unarmed, and evidence developed during pre-trial discovery including audio evidence enhanced by experts, established that Joseph was coming out from where he was hiding with his hands up in conformance with Hamilton’s commands when Hamilton shot him from a distance of about 15 feet.
Also during discovery, Lopezes’ lawyers retained police practices expert Fred Fletcher whose experience includes previously serving as a detective investigating police shooting cases; as the Special Operations Lieutenant in command of the Austin, Texas Police Departments’ full time SWAT team, its Patrol K9 Unit, and the Hostage Negotiation Team; and as the Chief of the Chattanooga, Tennessee PD. Among his many relevant opinions, Fletcher found:
· Hamilton’s actions in using his police K9 and using deadly force deviated from reasonable police practices, and was an excessive and unreasonable use of force.
· The incident reflects significant procedural and command failures. The lack of active supervision, oversight, and control points to systemic issues in which supervision and accountability are abdicated to the responding officers [which] grants them impunity to act without concern for repercussions.
· There is a distinct lack of training on dealing with these situations as the sergeant and ranking officer on scene did not know the department definition of barricaded subject and Hamilton had not trained on distinguishing deadly objects such as guns from everyday objects commonly held in a hand such as cell phones.
While the settlement speaks for itself as a significant and hard fought victory for the Lopez family and its lawyers, we call on the City to guarantee that Hamilton will never be re-hired by the GPD, and urge the Department to take heed of expert Fletcher’s opinions and, with the unjustifiable Lopez shooting as a guide, implement revised training and supervision to deal with the systemic problems that Fletcher has identified.
