Police officers in Trenton, N.J., systematically violate the constitutional rights of the city’s citizens, conduct illegal searches and needlessly escalate peaceful interactions into violence, the U.S. Department of Justice found in a report published Thursday.
Even as former prosecutors and experts in civil rights law question whether President-elect Donald J. Trump will suspend federal efforts to reform police departments around the country, a yearlong investigation by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and Philip R. Sellinger, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, documented several cases in which the police in Trenton had caused the deaths of innocent people.
In one event described in the 45-page report, police officers encountered an unarmed man as he ran shirtless around a hospital parking lot. The officers pepper-sprayed him, tackled and handcuffed him and then took turns pressing their knees into his back as they pushed his face into a patch of mulch.
The man cried, “I can’t breathe,” and, “I’m going to die.” After more than four minutes, he grew still, the report said. Doctors later pronounced him dead. The man was not identified, but the details match the case of Stephen Dolceamore, 29, of Springfield, Pa., which was reported by NJ Advance Media. He died on April 3, 2020, seven weeks before George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis.
“As I read through the report, it broke my heart,” said the Rev. Charles Boyer, a pastor with the Greater Mount Zion A.M.E. Church in Trenton. “It also made me angry. But it was no surprise.”
Police officers in Trenton regularly commit illegal stops, searches and arrests of pedestrians and drivers, the report found, and use physical force and pepper spray indiscriminately. Those practices are exacerbated by the department’s leadership, which actively discourages residents from filing complaints about police abuses and “ignores officer misconduct in plain sight,” the report found.
“Trenton police escalate encounters and use force when there is no threat of harm to officers or others,” Kristen Clarke, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, said at a news conference on Thursday. “This behavior not only violates the Constitution and inflicts serious injuries, but it also sows distrust and undermines law enforcement’s mission to keep the community safe.”
Trenton is New Jersey’s capital, a city of 90,000 people where 84 percent of the population is Black or Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Police Department employs 350 people, including about 260 officers. The city’s leaders cooperated with the inquiry and allowed federal investigators to accompany Trenton police officers on the street.
“We know of the complaints they were investigating,” Reed Gusciora, the mayor of Trenton, said in an interview on Thursday. “We take people’s constitutional rights seriously, and we look forward to addressing the U.S. attorney’s concerns.”
It is customary for incoming presidents to replace sitting U.S. attorneys, especially when the new president is from a different political party. On Thursday, Mr. Sellinger declined to comment on his career plans for after Jan. 21, the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. But he expressed confidence that his office would continue to negotiate a consent decree on police reform in Trenton even after he left office.
“Our expectation is that the work on this investigation and promoting a remedy will continue under the next administration,” Mr. Sellinger said.
Others believe the era of police reform is already over. Mr. Trump’s opposition to the practice was well established during his first term, when the Department of Justice initiated only one investigation into a local police force, fewer than under any president since the process for such investigations was created by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994.
Under Mr. Biden, the Justice Department opened 12 investigations into law enforcement practices. Mr. Trump and his appointees at the Department of Justice will inherit these, as well as 16 settlements reached between local law enforcement agencies and previous administrations.
During his latest campaign for president, Mr. Trump vowed to reverse course.
“We will give our police back their power, protection, respect that they deserve,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in October in Charlotte, N.C., during which he accused Democrats of going to war against law enforcement. Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokeswoman for Mr. Trump who has been named the next White House press secretary, did not respond to messages seeking comment on Thursday.
“What we saw when Trump was president is clearly a good indicator for what may happen in the next four years,” said Alex del Carmen, a criminology professor at Tarleton State University in Fort Worth, Texas, who has worked to oversee implementation of consent decrees with two police departments.
With only eight weeks to go before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the Justice Department has most likely run out of time to forge a consent decree with Trenton that would win the necessary support of the city’s elected officials, community members and the police union, said Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor who is now a law professor at Georgetown University who studies race and policing.
“It’s game over for consent decrees for the next four years,” Mr. Butler said.
The end of federal oversight for local police departments may not be the end of reform efforts nationwide. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union may be able to poach experienced federal prosecutors who quit or are fired by the Trump administration, Mr. del Carmen said, as could some state attorneys general.
Such efforts might achieve results more quickly than federal investigations, which tend to drag on for years, Mr. del Carmen said. Of the 12 efforts that began under Mr. Biden, only five have published reports of their findings. None has produced a final consent decree signed by a federal judge.
“I think it’s preferable to have enforcement like this done by the attorney general because they’re local, and they understand the culture and the people far better than the Department of Justice can,” said James E. Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine and a lecturer at Harvard Law School.
On the other hand, Mr. Butler said, a patchwork of efforts by attorneys general will leave citizens in some states with no protection from abusive police practices.
“If the Department of Justice shuts down its civil rights division, it’s also a tremendous loss,” Mr. Tierney said. “It sends a green light to malfeasance everywhere, all over the country.”
In New Jersey, the Trenton case could be taken up by Matthew Platkin, the state’s attorney general, who took direct control of the Police Department in the city of Paterson last year. Michael Symons, a spokesman for Mr. Platkin, declined to comment on whether the office was planning to pursue a consent decree with Trenton if the Trump administration did not do so.
“I would love Platkin to get involved,” Mr. Boyer, the pastor, said. “I consider him a friend.”
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