Feds accuse Trenton police of pattern of unconstitutional brutality and stops

A Trenton police officer who suspected a 16-year-old boy had a gun grabbed the unarmed teenager by the neck and slammed him into the hood of a car, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office of New Jersey. (Screengrab courtesy of U.S. Attorney’s Office of New Jersey)

Trenton police routinely brutalize and pepper-spray people and stop and search pedestrians and drivers without legal justification, resulting in unlawful arrests, upending prosecutions, and undermining public safety, federal prosecutors announced Thursday after a yearlong probe.

The 260-officer force in New Jersey’s capital city has a pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing that has left multiple people dead, maimed, or traumatized and cost the city $7 million in lawsuit settlements since 2021, officials said during a morning news conference.

“This unconstitutional conduct needs to stop, and it must stop now,” said Philip Sellinger, U.S. attorney of New Jersey. “We have found that after unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests, all too often, police rapidly escalate their interactions with Trenton residents without even providing people a chance to comply with orders. This unreasonable escalation, plus dangerous forms of physical force and the unreasonable use of pepper spray, have had deadly consequences.”

Investigators outlined their findings in a scorching, 45-page report that contained 26 recommendations for reform.

The Justice Department could compel changes by suing and securing a court-ordered consent decree, as it did in Newark in 2016.

But Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, said Trenton officials cooperated with the investigation and agreed to implement reforms.

“Today marks a new chapter. We are making public the violations identified and look forward to working with the city to put the police department on a path to reform,” Clarke said.

Trenton Mayor W. Reed Gusciora, a Democrat, said city officials plan to enact recommended changes “as quickly as possible.”

“All residents of the City of Trenton, and the thousands of people who come here to work and visit on a daily basis, want and deserve a police department which keeps them safe while upholding the rights afforded by the U.S. Constitution,” Gusciora said in a statement. “Trust within the community is absolutely critical to the mission of the TPD, and the members of the TPD must work at building and rebuilding that trust every day.”

The report comes just two months before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, giving federal prosecutors limited time to seek court-ordered remedies. Often, officials in federal departments, including prosecutors, get replaced as presidential administrations change, and Trump, in particular, has targeted the Justice Department for overhaul.

Sellinger declined to say whether he expects to be ushered out or how the Trump administration might regard their findings in Trenton and a handful of other cities around the country where investigations are underway or have uncovered problems.

“Our expectation is that the work on this investigation and promoting a remedy will continue under the next administration,” Sellinger said.

Insufficient training and oversight

In Trenton, investigators reviewed police records and body-worn camera footage, interviewed city and police leaders, officers, and citizens, and tagged along with officers as they worked, identifying a slew of problems relating to the department’s use of force and stops and seizures.

Officers across the agency often use physical force and pepper spray even when there’s little to no danger or resistance, racking up 815 use-of-force incidents between March 2020 and December 2023, investigators found. They also conduct stops and searches and arrest people without reasonable suspicion or probable cause, illegally entering their cars, prolonging traffic stops, and arresting them wrongfully, they found.

“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,” Clarke said.

Both problems have festered because of deficiencies in training, supervision, and accountability and despite red flags dating back years that should have alerted bosses to the need for scrutiny and reform, the feds’ report says. Even a $1.9 million lawsuit settlement — in the case of an unarmed 29-year-old man in mental crisis who suffocated after officers held him face down in the dirt, ignoring his pleas that he couldn’t breathe — did not trigger any review, the report says.

“Trenton’s police officers do not receive the training they need, including in crucial areas like use of force and the legal rules for stops and searches,” Clarke said. “Supervisors do not provide sufficient oversight of officers’ actions, and the police department does not conduct thorough investigations when people file complaints.”

When citizens report mistreatment, investigators typically don’t try hard — or even bother at all — to interview the complainant, writing them off as uncooperative, investigators found. Internal affairs detectives often misclassify misconduct complaints, listing them simply as “other rule violation,” making it impossible to track trends, the report says.

Officers also routinely turn off their body-worn cameras in violation of policy and use boilerplate language on use-of-force reports that don’t give a true picture of an incident — or sometimes don’t file reports at all, investigators found.

Officers were almost never faulted or disciplined for misconduct, even when it was “in plain sight,” investigators said. The department’s internal affairs investigators didn’t sustain a single allegation of excessive force or illegal stop or arrest in the cases it closed from 2018 through 2023, according to the report.

The report offered example after example of brutality and constitutional violations, many of which disproportionately impacted Black people and Latinos in this city of almost 90,000 residents:

• An officer arresting a man last year repeatedly stomped on his hand, kneeled on his head, and kicked his shoulder even though the man was on the ground.
• Officers pepper-spray people who criticize or insult the police even though such speech is protected under the First Amendment. In one incident, a cop pepper-sprayed a man who warned he would call a lawyer after seeing how the officer handled a car crash. In another, a cop turned off his body-worn camera and pepper-sprayed a man — five times — who had made provocative remarks and hand gestures at him. The officer then activated his camera and yelled, “You want to make a threat at me? I’m locking you the f*** up.”
• Officers taunted an elderly man who refused to allow them inside his home without a warrant in 2020, threw him across the porch, pepper-sprayed him in the face while he was handcuffed, and later lied on paperwork that he had presented a threat to officers. The man, Joseph Ahr, died 18 days later in the hospital.
• Members of the department’s street crimes unit approached a young Black man sitting in a parked car in 2022. When the driver, Jajuan Henderson, drove away because the cops refused to say why they approached, one opened fire, hitting Henderson four times and leaving him paralyzed from the chest down.
• Officers who spotted a Black man talking to a Black woman in a car in 2022 suspected a drug deal and sped the wrong way down a one-way street to arrest both. As two cops chased the man, a third dragged the woman from the car and handcuffed her, even though cops found no drugs in the car. When one asked another why he arrested her, the arresting cop replied: “I don’t know.”
• One officer, speaking to a Black man while executing a search warrant at his home, called the man “boy” and “dirty as sh**” and said the family was “living like animals here.”
• An off-duty officer working at a soup kitchen hit a woman in the head more than a dozen times with her police radio, blows she later claimed were “inadvertent.”

Such incidents decimate public trust, Sellinger said.

“Community members have told us they’re afraid of the police,” Sellinger said. “They feel disrespected and degraded by officers, and they do not view the officers as their protectors.”

Road to reform

After investigators began their probe in October 2023, the police department disbanded two street enforcement units deemed to be most problematic.

But the problems were more pervasive than that and require “reforms that go beyond restructuring units,” investigators wrote. Besides, officials reassigned the units’ officers to other patrol units “where they continue to have daily opportunities to violate the Constitution,” investigators added.

The Justice Department recommended 26 reforms, mostly requiring closer supervision, expanded training, more accountability, and better recordkeeping.

The department should review policies and procedures with an eye on expanding de-escalation techniques, examining use-of-force incidents and stops and searches to identify violations and take disciplinary action, and improving data collection to assess and address trends, investigators urged.

Other recommendations include:

• Officers who deactivate their body-worn cameras should be disciplined.
• Officers should be required to attend in-person diversity, de-escalation, and cultural competency training.
• Supervisors should be held accountable for failing to report or address misconduct.
• Internal affairs should be overhauled to make it easier for the public to report misconduct, improve procedures for investigation interviews, and track disciplinary outcomes.

The Justice Department plans to hold community meetings to brief the public on their findings and solicit input on remedies. People can also recommend remedies by email at USANJ.Community.Trenton@usdoj.gov or by phone at 973-645-2801.

Gusciora said the department had begun changing policies even before the federal investigation.

“We believe that the safety of our residents and the protection of their constitutional rights is paramount, as is supporting those members of law enforcement who do their best every day,” Gusciora said.

Amol Sinha, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said the feds’ report confirms what city residents have been saying for decades — that officers engage in rampant misconduct with impunity and at an immense human cost. It also shows the need for sweeping police reform statewide, Sinha added.

“For New Jersey to live up to its values, our state must reimagine policing as we know it,” Sinha said. “That means strengthening internal affairs and disciplinary systems, modernizing training to end unconstitutional stop-and-frisk practices, implementing comprehensive accountability measures, and empowering communities to engage in oversight of the law enforcement officers who are meant to protect them.”

Sophie Nieto-Muñoz contributed.