DOJ Investigation Proves That If A PD Isn’t Known For Its Constant Rights Violations, It’s Because It Hasn’t Been Investigated Yet

I’ve been doing this for more than 10 years and I can assure I have yet to read a DOJ civil rights investigation report that has concluded everything looks pretty OK at this cop shop. Every — and I mean every — DOJ investigation is followed by a report that can be accurately described as “scathing.” And that’s often an understatement.

That’s how the Associated Press describes this report [PDF], which was released earlier this month by the Department of Justice.

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 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.

And so it is. There’s no good news in here. There’s only the things you expect when you read a DOJ report. That the city’s residents are suffering further indignities — like the unique-to-a-state-capital public funding shortfalls — only makes the findings worse. Where compassion and connection would matter most, the Trenton PD has decided to go in the other direction, apparently deciding residents should be further punished for having the misfortune of residing in this neglected capital city.

The report opens with an incident that seems to have been ripped from the pages of the “Training Day” script.

On a May afternoon in 2022, a Black woman sat in her parked car on a Trenton street and spoke to her friend, a Black man who was standing in the street, through the car window. Three Trenton Police Department (TPD) officers assigned to a unit that focused on drug and gun crimes noticed the man reaching into his satchel and concluded that the woman was buying drugs. The officers drove the wrong way down the one-way street toward the parked car. The man ran off and two of the officers chased him. One officer stayed behind, opened the car door, and grabbed the woman by the wrist. As the woman asked, “What is going on? Why are you arresting me?”, the officer handcuffed her and pulled her by the handcuffs. The woman protested that the officer was hurting her. “Get the fuck out of the car or you’re going to get pepper sprayed,” the officer said. The police found no drugs after searching the woman and her car. The other officers returned to find the woman handcuffed in the back of the police car, and they asked the arresting officer why he arrested her. “I don’t know,” the officer replied.

Not an anomaly. This is the next paragraph of the DOJ’s report:

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.

That’s a nice way of saying cops don’t care what they do to Trenton residents and, more importantly, their supervisors and superiors don’t care what these cops do either.

The DOJ initiated this investigation last October. Its investigation involved dozens of interviews, full reviews of PD incident and arrest paperwork, as much information as it could gather on internal discipline, and whatever else it was able to access. The upshot?

We find that Trenton police officers, particularly those in specialized enforcement units, conduct illegal pedestrian stops and searches, and unlawfully prolong traffic stops. They arrest people without a legal basis. They are quick to escalate situations through their aggressive tactics and refusal to answer people’s legitimate questions. Officers use unreasonable force against people who are not threatening them, including spraying them with pepper spray.

The other upshot? A city already hurting from a scarcity of public funding has asked its residents to pay more than $7 million in lawsuit settlements over the past couple of years. That may not seem like much when compared to larger cities with much larger police forces, but this is a community of less than 90,000 people being served by 250-260 sworn police officers. That’s a big ask when Trenton’s poverty rate is twice that of the rest of the state.

While officers interviewed by the DOJ “expressed appreciation for the City of Trenton and its residents” as well as expressing a desire to “improve” the PD’s relationship with the community, we must always remember actions speak louder than words. And these are the actions:

TPD officers frequently use force that violates the Fourth Amendment. TPD officers rapidly escalate everyday interactions, resorting to unreasonable force without giving people a chance to comply with orders. TPD officers use unreasonable physical force where they face little or no threat or resistance. And TPD officers use pepper spray unreasonably. Officers spray people who pose no threat but merely challenge officers’ authority—which, on its own, is not grounds for the use of force.

If you can’t visualize what this means in terms of day-to-day interactions, the DOJ has thoughtfully provided a real-world example of the behavior it noted and criticized in the previous paragraph:

For example, a man died after TPD officers escalated an argument to the point of throwing him to the ground and pepper spraying him, even though the man posed no threat. TPD officers went to arrest a young man in connection with an earlier domestic incident. The man’s 64-year-old father, who was not involved in the domestic incident, met the officers outside his front door and told them he would not let them into his house without a warrant.

While waiting for a supervisor to arrive, one of the officers continued to escalate the conversation, taunting the father and son—saying the son was talking like he was “retarded” and asking if the father was “crazy” and “need[ed] to go to psych.” After the father turned the doorknob of the front door, officers threw him across his front porch and against the railing, and slammed him face down on the porch steps. While officers handcuffed him, another officer pepper-sprayed him in the face.

The officer who escalated the encounter inaccurately reported that the father physically presented a “threat/attack” to the officer. He also claimed that he grabbed the father because he feared that a dog inside would come out—a factor that no other officer mentioned and that video footage discredited. The father died at the hospital 18 days later from respiratory failure.

That’s basically it: one cop escalated a situation, reacted violently to his own provocation, killed an innocent person, and then lied repeatedly to cover it up.

If that doesn’t move you to rage, how about the actions of this uniformed piece of shit?

In another incident, an officer beat a woman in the head with a police radio over a dozen times at a soup kitchen. The officer had told the woman she was not allowed at the building and had to leave. The officer claimed that the woman hit first and that the officer “inadvertently” hit back in self-defense. Even if this were true, it did not justify the officer repeatedly striking the unarmed woman’s head—a form of deadly force under TPD’s policy. The officer stopped only when staff and other clients pulled the officer and the woman apart. The beating left a three-inch gash on the woman’s scalp and a bruise above her eye.

Or this officer, who undoubtedly has plenty of strong opinions about the thinness of blue lines:

In one incident, an officer learned that a driver involved in a car accident had an expired registration and suspended license. The driver was upset to learn that her car would be towed, argued that she did not want to leave her car, and bumped the officer with the car door while the car was parked. Without warning, the officer pepper-sprayed the woman as she sat inside her car and her seven-year-old child watched just outside the car, also at risk of exposure to the spray. Rather than helping the officer gain control, the spray had the opposite effect as the woman wailed in pain and refused to get out of the car. The officer then pulled her by her pant legs, bringing the woman’s pants down and exposing her buttocks for over three minutes. When a family member asked how she could file a complaint against the officer, the officer replied that she could file a complaint, but said, “[I]t’s going nowhere.”

The first part is awful. The last sentence, unfortunately, is the truth. That’s another thing exposed by this investigation. The Trenton PD has zero interest in punishing cops for misconduct, rights violations, or excessive force deployment.

TPD supervisors overwhelmingly sign off on force reports without meaningfully reviewing them.

Even when supervisors claim to have reviewed use of force incidents, it’s clear that they either (1) haven’t or (2) are just going to pencil-whip whatever until the officer under “investigation” is cleared of wrongdoing.

Even when supervisors include more, the additional approving language is conclusory and boilerplate, using phrases like “Use of Force report reviewed and I concur with the level of force used as it relates to this incident,” “Defendant resisted arrest,” or “BWC reviewed,” without explanation or analysis. Moreover, we saw no evidence that supervisors regularly review all available information about force incidents or ask officers about their decisions to use force.

How do you fix this? Well, we can be sure a DOJ investigation, while useful in terms of information, seemingly has zero effect on police work going forward. The heat an investigated cop shop will feel is intense, but brief. The DOJ has a whole nation of police to police. Smaller locales are limited in both tools and budget to instigate meaningful reform. Like any true change, the entity that needs to change has to want to do it. And that’s something that can’t be accomplished, no matter the intensity of the criticism or the public shaming that accompanies it.

We need better cops, which means we need better law enforcement officials. And that means we need local politicians who care as much about accountability as we do. But until all of these interests combine, we’re just going to be left with the police forces we have — ones that will do whatever they want for as long as they can get away with it.