TRENTON, N.J. – Police in New Jersey’s capital have shown a pattern of misconduct, including using excessive force and making unlawful stops, the Justice Department said Thursday, in a report documenting arrests without legal basis, officers escalating situations with aggression and unnecessary use of pepper spray.
The 45-page report comes after a roughly yearlong investigation into the Trenton Police Department, undertaken after an officer shot and paralyzed a young Black man who attempted to drive away when officers didn’t tell him why they had stopped him.
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The Justice Department found the police department’s practices violate the Fourth Amendment and the report makes more than two dozen recommendations for remedial action.
“The people of Trenton deserve nothing less than fair and constitutional policing,” said U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Philip Sellinger. “When police stop someone in Trenton, our investigation found that all too often they violated the constitutional rights of those they stopped, sometimes with tragic consequences.”
The DOJ report paints a scathing picture of a department with about 260 sworn officers in a city of nearly 90,000 people, where many struggle due to poverty and high crime rates. The city is uniquely deprived of a property tax base that could fund public safety because of the many state government buildings.
The report outlines an incident in which an officer from the department’s violent crimes unit chased a 16-year-old boy who matched the description of someone with a gun. The officer grabbed the boy by his neck, slammed him into 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 ran because he was scared of the police, the report says. The officer said the police are just trying to help.
“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 instance, a Black woman was in her parked car on a Trenton street in 2022 when a male friend approached her to talk. An officer noticed him take something from his bag and concluded the woman must have been buying drugs. Officers drove the wrong way down a one-way street. The man ran and another officer opened the woman’s car door and grabbed her by the 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. The police found no drugs and an arresting officer said he didn’t know why she had been stopped.
"Similar scenes have played out repeatedly on Trenton’s streets. With inadequate supervision and little training on the legal rules and well-accepted police procedures that should constrain their conduct, Trenton police officers engage in a pattern or practice of violating those rules,” the report said.
Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora said in a statement that the city has cooperated and will continue to cooperate with the department, and that it has so far disbanded two police department street units that officials said violated the constitution.
“The City will continue to work cooperatively with the USDOJ, our state partners at the Department of Law and Public Safety and the Department of Community Affairs, local community organizations, and residents to implement the recommendations highlighted in the Report as quickly as possible,” Gusciora said.
The report recommends that the police department improves its use of force policies, implements better force training, boosts accountability and enhances data collection. It wasn't immediately clear how the Justice Department would ensure the recommended changes are implemented, but Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said the department would cooperate with city officials and police.
“We look forward to rolling up our sleeves and working with officials to put in place the reforms necessary to address the two core violations that we have identified,” Clarke said.
Asked if the recent investigation of police practices in Trenton or any other city could result in a consent decree, Clarke replied that her focus Thursday was on making the findings about Trenton public. The Justice Department has opened investigations of 12 other police departments under the Biden administration, including in Louisville, Kentucky; Minneapolis; Phoenix; and Memphis, Tennessee.
The Trenton Police Department isn't the only one in New Jersey facing scrutiny for officer behavior and department practices. Police in Newark, the state's biggest city, entered into an agreement with the Justice Department nearly a decade ago to implement more community-oriented policing after a similar probe. In Paterson, the state's attorney general took over the police department after officers fatally shot a crisis intervention worker who had barricaded himself inside an apartment.
A once thriving manufacturing hub whose wire rope industry contributed to the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, Trenton is suffering. Its poverty rate is over 26%, far in excess of the national rate of 11%, and home ownership and high school graduation rates are below the state’s average.
Darren “Freedom” Green, a community advocate in the city, said the report shone a light on a known reality and that Trenton must now agree to earnest engagement and policy reform.