State certifications for two former law enforcement officers were permanently revoked by the Vermont Criminal Justice Council last week.
Christopher Matott, a former Winooski Police Department officer, and Christopher Mason, a former Manchester Police Department officer, lost their certifications because of instances of domestic violence, according to the council.
The officers are the third and fourth decertified by the council since last September.
Matott’s decertification stemmed from a 2019 incident that led to a guilty plea on a domestic assault charge last year. An affidavit of probable cause details the 2019 incident, in which Matott threatened to kill a woman with whom he was in a relationship.
Citing an audio recording, the affidavit quoted Matott as saying to the woman, “I’ve never wanted to hit anybody but you … You deserve to have your face broken. The old me would have slit your throat open … I wanted to murder you in your sleep.”
The Winooski Police Department began an internal investigation into Matott’s actions and discharged him in March 2020, according to a release from the criminal justice council. Matott pleaded guilty to domestic assault and criminal threatening last October and received a 120-day to two-year suspended sentence, South Burlington’s The Other Paper reported. According to that report, Matott faced a separate charge of aggravated domestic assault for a different incident in which he allegedly “grabbed a woman around the neck until she lost consciousness” in November 2018 after she threw him a surprise birthday party.
Matott did not answer a request for comment on Wednesday.
The second decertified officer, Christopher Mason, resigned from the Manchester Police Department in November 2020. That department, as well as the Dover Police Department, opened investigations into his alleged criminal conduct involving domestic violence, the criminal justice council said.
In a signed statement, Mason admitted to hitting a child in the back with a ladle after he “felt that (the child) did not wash a plastic ladle well enough.” The strike left the child with “a baseball sized welt.”
In a separate incident, Mason admitted to dragging a minor off a couch, grabbing his neck and kicking him in the butt.
Last month, Mason pleaded guilty to cruelty to a child, simple assault and reckless endangerment, the Manchester Journal reported, in connection with the domestic violence incidents. He received a one- to two-year suspended sentence, according to the Journal.
Mason did not return requests for comment on Wednesday.
According to Christopher Brickell, deputy director of the Vermont Criminal Justice Council, permanent decertification is the “maximum action” the council can take — one that is not “a regular occurrence.”
Category A offenses — those that involve a law enforcement officer committing a crime while on or off duty — are often the offenses that lead to permanent decertification, Brickell said. The council found that both Matott and Mason had engaged in Category A conduct.
“If you have an officer that’s convicted of a criminal offense — or even charged with a criminal offense — very likely there’s going to be some sort of decertification process,” he said. “That would just stand to reason, right? If there’s a law enforcement officer convicted of a crime, then likely they shouldn’t have their certification.”
Both Matott and Mason reached agreements with the criminal justice council rather than taking the case to a hearing. While those agreements can limit how much information the council is able to share publicly, Brickell said the council “wants as much transparency as they can have.”
“They want the public to be able to see the actual action that led to an officer’s decertification,” he said, “rather than just hearing ‘Oh, they were convicted of a crime, and so they were decertified.’”