Police in New Jersey’s capital have shown a pattern of misconduct, including excessive force and unlawful detentions, Justice Department officials said Thursday in a report documenting arrests made without legal basis, with officers escalating situations with aggression and unnecessary use of pepper spray.
The 45-page report comes after a roughly years of research to Trenton police, taken after an officer shot and paralyzed a young black man who tried to drive away when officers didn’t tell them why they were stopping him.
The Justice Department has determined that police practices violate the Fourth Amendment and the report makes more than 20 recommendations for remedial action.
“The people of Trenton deserve nothing less than a fair and constitutional police force,” said New Jersey U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger. “When police stop someone in Trenton, our investigation shows that too often they have violated the constitutional rights of those they stop, sometimes with tragic consequences.”
Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora said the city will continue to work with the DOJ to make changes to the police department. Gusciora added that city officials did not receive a copy of the report before Thursday’s release.
Gusciora said the DOJ recommended improved training, better oversight and better administration for police. He claimed the city and police department had already begun “changing policies and practices that prioritize community safety, accountability and respect for civil liberties.”
“One of the most important changes is the creation of the Internal Affairs Bureau, which consists of the Internal Affairs, Professional Standards, Human Resources and Training Units,” the mayor said in a statement.
The DOJ report paints a damning picture of a department with approximately 260 sworn officers in a city of nearly 90,000 residents that is ravaged by poverty and crime and uniquely deprived of a property tax base that could fund public safety because of its many state buildings. in the city.
The report details an incident in which a violent crimes unit officer chased a 16-year-old boy who matched the description of someone with a gun. The officer grabbed the boy by the neck, slammed him against the hood of a car and insulted him. The boy was not armed. The boy’s teacher approached the officer and told him the boy was running away because he was afraid of police, the report said. The officer said police are there to assist.
“That’s not how a black man sees it,” the teacher explained.
“That’s how an intelligent man would see it,” the officer said, according to the report.
In another case, a Black woman was sitting in her parked car on a Trenton street in 2022 when a man who was her boyfriend approached her to talk. An officer saw him take something from his bag and concluded that the woman had bought drugs. Officers drove in the wrong direction down a one-way street. The man ran away and another officer opened the woman’s car door and grabbed her wrist. She asked what was going on and the officer used a vulgarity to tell her to get out of the car and threatened to pepper spray her. Police found no drugs and an arresting officer said he did not know why she had been stopped.
Similar scenes have played out repeatedly on the streets of Trenton. With inadequate supervision and little training on the legal rules and generally accepted police procedures that should constrain their behavior, Trenton police officers engage in a pattern or practice of violating those rules,” the report said.
