TRENTON, NJ– Police in New Jersey’s capital have demonstrated a pattern of misconduct, including excessive force and unlawful stops, Justice Department officials said Thursday in a report documenting arrests without legal basis, with officers escalating situations with aggression and unnecessarily use of pepper spray.
The 45-page report will follow an investigation lasting about a year 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 fair and constitutional policing,” said New Jersey U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger. “When police stopped someone in Trenton, our investigation found that too often they violated the constitutional rights of those they stopped, sometimes with tragic consequences.”
The DOJ report paints a damning picture of a department with approximately 260 sworn officers in a city of nearly 90,000 residents ravaged by poverty and crime, and uniquely deprived of a property tax base that could fund public safety because of the many state governments. 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 ready 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 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.