Black Police Officer Stands Up to Racist Taunts by Breonna Taylor Protesters
A black member of the Los Angeles Police Department stood stoically as masked protesters taunted him on Wednesday night, some using racial slurs, during a demonstration against the grand jury decision in the Breonna Taylor case in Louisville, Kentucky.
LOS ANGELES: Agitators yell slurs at black police officer. pic.twitter.com/Eff67JtQk2
— Tomas Morales (@TomasMorales_iv) September 24, 2020
A grand jury indicted one officer for wanton endangerment, but declined to indict any officers directly in Taylor’s death, because they were fired upon by Taylor’s boyfriend after they knocked on the door of his apartment to serve a search warrant. At least one witness had been able to corroborate officers’ account that they identified themselves as police.
Protests and rioting broke out in Los Angeles, as elsewhere in the nation.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
Several hundred people gathered Wednesday evening in downtown Los Angeles to demand the ouster of Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, but the protest was turbocharged by an outpouring of anger that only one of three Louisville, Ky., police officers involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor will face criminal charges — and none for killing her.
…
Residents peering out of upper story windows were greeted with a different line: “I can’t get no justice, you can’t get no sleep.”
Two officers were shot in Louisville and several cities experienced violence, looting, and arson Wednesday night into Thursday morning.
Left-wing activists frequently single out black police officers for abuse during protests and riots, describing them as traitors and worse.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
WATCH: Rioters Set Police HQ on Fire in St. Louis
Violent rioters set fire to the police headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, Wednesday night amid nationwide unrest following a Kentucky grand jury decision to not charge police officers in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor.
“St. Louis, Mo.: The police headquarters was set on fire by rioters,” reported Post Millennial editor-at-large Andy Ngo.
St. Louis, Mo.: The police headquarters was set on fire by rioters. #BLM pic.twitter.com/GoiRKDlGhk
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) September 24, 2020
Rioting has once again broken out across American cities after a grand jury in Kentucky ruled that three police officers did not deliberately murder Breonna Taylor, a woman who was killed earlier this year in a gunfight between her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, and the three officers serving a warrant at Taylor’s apartment.
It has been wrongly reported the raid was a “no-knock” raid, meaning that officers did not knock on the door of the residence before entering. While the officers were originally granted a “no-knock” warrant, their orders were later changed to “knock and announce.”
A witness confirmed that the police did knock and announce their identity before forcing entry, after which Walker opened fire on the officers. Taylor was killed by police in the ensuing gunfight.
One officer was charged with “wanton endangerment” by the grand jury, while the other two were not charged. None of the officers were charged with murder.
Two officers have already been shot in Louisville, KY, during Wednesday’s riots. They are currently in hospital and in stable condition. President Donald Trump took to Twitter to offer a statement of support for the law enforcement officers.
“Praying for the two police officers that were shot tonight in Louisville, Kentucky. The Federal Government stands behind you and is ready to help,” said President Trump. “Spoke to @GovAndyBeshear and we are prepared to work together, immediately upon request!”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
The Seattle City Council overrode Mayor Jenny Durkan’s veto Tuesday evening and forced through budget cuts that activists say are a “down payment” on an effort to defund the police in the city by 50%.
In July, a veto-proof majority of council members backed a proposal to defund the police by 50%. Those cuts could not be implemented in one year, however, so the council settled on cutting 100 officers from the department this year as a “down payment.”
Mayor Durkan, who had initially backed the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) or “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest” (CHOP) protest in the summer, vetoed the proposal, but her veto was ineffective.
The Seattle Times reported:
The Seattle City Council voted Tuesday to override Mayor Jenny Durkan’s vetoes of council bills meant to start shrinking the police force and scaling up community solutions this year. Council members chose to stick with the 2020 budget bills instead of a substitute proposal that the mayor had said she could accept.
The veto-override votes on the three bills were preceded by more than an hour of public comments, with most speakers urging council members to “hold the line” against the mayor and demonstrate they were listening to the Black Lives Matter movement. Several council members then sharply defended the bills as reasonable first steps toward revamping public safety in Seattle.
…
Councilmember Kshama Sawant credited “ferocious” pressure by the Black Lives Matter movement in recent days for Tuesday’s result, noting several colleagues kept constituents in suspense until the last minute.
Police chief Carmen Best resigned over the council’s efforts to cut her salary and her department’s budget.
The Seattle vote happened the night before riots associated with Breonna Taylor protests.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
L.A. SHERIFF IS GANG INFESTED CLUB OF NEO-NAZI LYING MURDEROUS THUGS!
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
Los Angeles sheriff terrorizes residents and attacks critics following shooting of two deputies
21 September 2020
No arrest has been announced more than a week after a surveillance video captured a gunman shooting two Los Angeles Sheriff Department (LAPD) transit deputies sitting in their SUV outside the Compton Metro light rail station. There is no evidence of any motive for the attack.
The reward, which was initially $100,000, has grown to over $675,000. According to press reports, over a dozen LASD homicide detectives are assigned to the investigation. There are anecdotal reports from Compton and nearby communities of deputies using warrants and the presence of probationers to ransack homes scouring for leads and terrorizing residents, but so far without results.
The wounded deputies are recovering. One, a 24-year-old male, was released from the hospital Wednesday. The other, a 31-year-old female, remains hospitalized, but her wounds are not life threatening.
Speaking to the press in the hospital parking lot three hours after the shooting on September 12, Sheriff Alex Villanueva had described both deputies as “clinging to life” before his provocative, evidence-free statements that blamed the shooting on recent demonstrations protesting police violence.
Immediately after Villanueva’s press conference, deputies attacked Josie Huang, a reporter for the local National Public Radio station KPCC who was covering the events at the hospital. Video of the arrest by a television news crew immediately exposed an LASD tweet that Huang obstructed deputies, failed to identify herself as a reporter and did not have press credentials to be demonstrably false.
The demonstrations began with the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but have been boosted locally by the LASD killings of Andres Guardado, an 18-year-old security guard, and Dijon Kizzee, who was shot 19 times after being detained for riding his bicycle on the wrong side of the street.
Despite his department having been exposed
as brazen liars, Villanueva continued attacking
Huang. Villanueva told the Associated Press
last Monday that Huang “crossed the line from
journalism to activism.”
“All I can say is, in the heat of the moment when these protesters are calling or chanting for the death of the deputies in the emergency room, she picked the worst time possible to try to get an up-close of the deputies making an arrest,” Villanueva said. “That’s on her.”
At the same time the LASD was caught in more lies about the events leading up to Huang’s arrest. Kevin Wharton Price, a local activist, acknowledged that he and three other members of his “Africa Town Coalition,” carrying Pan-Africa flags, were responsible for the obnoxious but tiny and non-violent demonstration outside the hospital. Price, who denies any affiliation with Black Lives Matter, Antifa, or any of the other whipping boys of the right wing, claimed his group wanted to focus attention on the presence of violent deputy gangs in the LASD, including “The Executioners” at the Compton station.
Despite a plethora of video cameras, the LASD has produced no video evidence to back up their claims that Price and his three companions ever tried to block a hospital entrance or force their way into the emergency room.
Villanueva during a radio interview taunted LeBron James, the Los Angeles Lakers basketball superstar who, like many professional athletes both black and white, has supported demonstrations against police violence. Singling out James, who has made no public comment about the shootings, Villanueva said he should “step up to the plate and double” what was then $175,000 in reward money “because I know you care about law enforcement.”
“I’ll be very curious to see what his response is, if any, and we just, we’ve got to get people to start thinking big picture,” Villanueva said. Once again pointing blame at his critics, Villanueva added, “Words have consequences. We need to tone down the rhetoric.”
Villanueva’s appeal to James was slammed by Vanessa Bryant, the widow of former Lakers star Kobe Bryant, who died tragically last January in a helicopter accident with their daughter and seven others. She shared an Instagram message reading, “How can [Villanueva] talk about trusting the system? His sheriff’s dept. couldn’t be trusted to secure Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash scene, his deputies took and shared graphic photos of crash victims.”
In a stomach-churning display of the racism that thrives within the LASD and other major US law enforcement agencies, Juanita Navarro-Suarez, an LASD public information officer, tweeted a photograph of a black man fanning currency in front of two others with the caption “And here’s the neighborhood homies and enemies ‘bout to come up’ on that $100,000 #REWARD because $100,000 dollas is $100,000 dollas.”
Another Navarro-Suarez tweet, this one over an image of a black woman saying “Make that money, girl,” reads, “My advice to all the ex-girlfriends, side pieces, friends, wifey, ol’ lady, dime, queen, baby momma who know the #ComptonAmbush shooter of 2 LA Sheriff’s about getting that $100,000 #REWARD.”
While the LASD has dedicated extraordinary resources to identifying the Compton shooter, investigations of most murders in Compton and the surrounding working-class communities are investigated with little zeal. During 2019, there were 21 criminal homicides reported to the Compton Sheriff’s Station. Only seven arrests were made.
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
Video footage exposes police shooting of 13-year-old autistic boy in Salt Lake City
23 September 2020
Body camera footage released by the Salt Lake City (Utah) Police Department on Monday has shed more light on the horrific police shooting of 13-year-old Linden Cameron on September 4. Cameron remains in the hospital after somehow surviving being shot nearly a dozen times. He suffered broken bones and serious organ damage when bullets pierced his intestines, bladder, shoulder and ankles.
Cameron, who is white and has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, was shot 11 times as he ran from the police. They had been called to his home by his mother, who was seeking help getting him to the hospital for mental health treatment. She had alerted the 911 dispatcher that her son possibly had a toy gun and had a previous confrontation with police in the neighboring state of Nevada, but that he did not possess a real weapon. “My biggest fear is that, I don’t know, I just don’t want him to die,” Golda Barton said on the call, asking specifically for the aid of a mental health worker.
Multiple videos show that Barton had met a team of four officers down the street from her house to warn them that Cameron was afraid of the police, but that she desperately needed help getting him safely to a hospital, as he was suffering a meltdown. “He sees the badge and automatically thinks you are going to kill him, he freaks out,” she explained.
A screenshot from body camera footage shows Linden Cameron, a 13-year-old boy with autism, lying on the ground after being shot 11 times by police on Sept. 4, 2020. (Credit: Salt Lake City Police Department/YouTube)The four officers then discussed how they would approach and apprehend Cameron. One officer questioned why they would be entering the home of a boy suffering a “psych problem.” She suggested they call their sergeant “and tell him the situation. Because I’m not about to get in a shooting because [Cameron’s] upset.”
A second officer, who shot the boy a short time later, presciently remarked, “Yeah, especially when he hates cops, it’s going to end in a shooting.”
Despite these apparent misgivings, the group of officers proceeded to approach the home to confront Cameron under the assumption he was armed, despite Barton’s assurances to the contrary. Having spotted the police, the boy took off running down an alley behind his home and the police pursued on foot.
As the officers caught up to Cameron, one of them screamed at him several times, ordering him to get on the ground, before opening fire in rapid succession. A second officer can be heard asking Cameron to pull his hands out of his pockets just as the first officer opens fire.
“I don’t feel good,” Cameron told the officers as he lay on the ground. “Tell my mom I love her.”
Since George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25, sparking multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests demanding an end to police violence and racism across the country and internationally, at least 300 people have been shot and killed by the police, according to the tally kept by killedbypolice.net. At the current rate, police in the US are on track to kill nearly 1,000 people, a grim toll that they have exacted every year since 2015.While Cameron narrowly avoided being one of the more than 714 people killed by police thus far this year, his grandfather, Owen Barton, 66, was one of the first victims of 2020, having been shot and killed by sheriff’s deputies in Lyon County, Nevada on January 16. As with most police killings, details are sparse, but the official account claims he had advanced on deputies with a handgun, forcing them to shoot and kill him.
African-Americans, along with Native Americans, are disproportionately killed by the police, but the largest share of victims continues to be white. The victims, regardless of race or ethnicity, are overwhelmingly poor and working class. Like Cameron, many were dealing with some sort of mental illness. A significant proportion of those killed by the police were suffering a health emergency when they were shot.
Floyd’s murder and that of Breonna Taylor, who was killed when police opened fire in her home during a no-knock warrant raid in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, have garnered attention from the Democratic Party and the Black Lives Matter organization. However, they have paid virtually no attention to white victims like Cameron, his grandfather, and 25-year-old Hannah Fizer, who was shot dead by police in Sedalia, Missouri last June.
Friends, family and community members have protested largely in isolation to demand justice for Fizer, a convenience store clerk who was killed by a deputy during a traffic stop. Last week, a special prosecutor ruled that the shooting was justifiable and that there would no criminal charges. In July, a protest was held in rural Wilson, Oklahoma to demand criminal charges in the killing of 28-year-old Jared Lakey, who was tased more than 50 times and choked to death by police in 2019.
Even as they feign sympathy for the black victims of police violence and proclaim their commitment to confronting “white supremacy,” the Democrats have slapped down demands for defunding the police and other mild reforms. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has repeatedly rejected the notion that police budgets should be cut, instead highlighting his plan to give local police $300 million in additional federal funding. The former vice president launched a massive “law and order” ad campaign earlier this month denouncing “violent protesters” against police brutality as anarchists and arsonists.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is waging a fascistic reelection campaign, appealing to the police and whipping up the far-right elements of his base. Trump has defended the 17-year-old militia member, Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two anti-police-violence protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while also praising the federal police squad assassination of Portland protester Michael Reinoehl as “retribution.”
Despite months of protests, police violence is not abating. Rather, the repressive arm of the state is being built up further in an effort to suppress all signs of opposition from the working class. The Department of Justice on Monday targeted New York City, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington as “anarchist jurisdictions,” paving the way for them to lose federal funding.
A state of emergency was declared in Louisville, Kentucky yesterday in anticipation of protests over an imminent decision by the state’s attorney general on whether to bring charges in the Breonna Taylor case. Police began erecting concrete barricades around the downtown business district Monday, and the federal courthouse has been boarded up. One of the officers involved in shooting Taylor, Sergeant John Mattingly, sent an email to his colleagues early Tuesday morning defending his actions and encouraging them to confront protesters and to “be the Warriors you are.”
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
The Window for Major Police Reform Might Be Closing
Protesters in New York. Photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
New polling from Gallup shows that the American public has less confidence in the police than at any point in the last three decades, the entire time the organization has been tracking views on the subject. This seems like good news for reformers, and abolitionists in particular. But a yawning racial gap in the Gallup poll, ideological quirks that appear in other surveys, congressional gridlock, and Republicans’ increased use of law enforcement as a wedge issue all bode poorly for major change. Piecemeal implementation of policing reduction efforts, meanwhile, seems bound to leave a sour taste in people’s mouths regarding the burgeoning “defund” movement. And the pitched atmosphere generated by President Trump’s authoritarian antics — and his bungling of the pandemic response — has an expiration date, whether it’s a few months or a few years from now.
In short, the outlook for any reforms beyond several that have mostly been tried in the past — and failed to measurably reduce police violence nationwide — is less encouraging than in recent weeks, and there are signs that it will deteriorate further. Gallup’s 2020 survey of faith in American institutions aptly distills the mood of the last two months, which has at times bordered on insurrectionary. Since the pollster began collecting data on the subject in 1993, the share of Americans who’ve expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police has hovered between 52 and 64 percent. This year, it dropped to 48 percent — the lowest total yet recorded, and the first time it’s fallen below the level of a majority. The numbers are even starker when accounting for race. Confidence among Black adults has always been significantly lower than for white adults, with a high of 37 percent. But this year’s measure of 19 percent marks an all-time nadir, and boasts the widest racial gap in confidence (37 points) ever measured by Gallup on this topic.
This shift is attributable to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25. Nationwide protests, intermittent rioting, and often-vicious police crackdowns have drawn ever-greater numbers of Americans into the streets, while prompting many more to reassess the merits of racist and unaccountable law enforcement. For a time, this reassessment seemed to be transpartisan. Six years after the Black Lives Matter movement’s onset highlighted partisan rifts — and became a focal point of the Republican National Convention in 2016 — almost half of Republicans today think the criminal-legal system needs either “major changes” or “a complete overhaul,” according to a recent Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. Lawmakers initially responded accordingly. Republicans and Democrats in Congress each submitted reform bills; President Trump issued an executive order conceding that some officers have “misused their authority,” and called for better training, credentialing, and reporting of abusive police. Most Americans support bans on choke holds and no-knock warrants, duty-to-intervene standards for officers who see others using excessive force, and requiring the use of body cameras. At times, their sympathies have verged on radical: A Monmouth University poll conducted in late May and early June found that 54 percent of Americans thought the torching of Minneapolis’s Third Police Precinct by rioters was at least partially justified.
One might intuit that a public so open to this brand of destruction would hold revolutionary views on what should be done about policing. But more often, surveys uncover a more complicated set of beliefs. Polling conducted by Morning Consult around the same time found that 58 percent of Americans supported dispatching the military to U.S. cities to quell unrest. Marist pollsters found that a combined 56 percent felt the nationwide police response — which, to that point, had included brutal assaults and mass deployment of tear gas by agencies like the NYPD — was either “mostly appropriate” or not aggressive enough. Their taste in reforms has been accordingly milquetoast. With the notable exception of outlawing “qualified immunity,” which protects officers from being held personally liable for constitutional violations, the policy changes supported by wide majorities of Americans are already in place in many departments, and to little avail. Among the most popular — body cameras — have no measurable impact on rates of police violence. Choke holds were banned in New York when one was used to kill Eric Garner in 2014; officers were obligated to intervene in Minneapolis when they saw Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, and yet they did not. In some places, this dissonance has failed to sway even those who recognize it. After Rayshard Brooks was killed in June, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced a plan to better train police officers in the same speech where she admitted that existing training programs had failed.
Meanwhile, more radical reforms have not found popular purchase. Despite the increased prevalence of cries to “defund” or “abolish” the police, neither proposal has even close to majority support. Nor have most officials who’ve rushed headlong to embrace their spirit done so holistically, as most abolitionists envision. Abolition calls for a reorientation of society toward robust investments in housing, health care, employment, and anti-poverty measures, framed by a new infrastructure for resolving harm. Instead, politicians heeding its slogans have simply withdrawn the police from duty. According to the New York Times, the CHOP zone in Seattle saw several acts of violence against which victims found no protective infrastructure. That police had been prohibited from venturing inside by city officials bodes poorly for a movement that, while meritorious, has plenty of hearts and minds left to win over — including the majority of Black Americans, many whose experience with government neglect, including from police they call for help, holds strong associations with rampant shootings, robberies, and assaults in their communities. This remains so even as most black people plainly don’t trust officers and consider them racist. Experiments like that proposed in Minneapolis — where the city council recently voted to disband the police department and reenvision public safety — would be wise to reckon with this legacy in its totality, rather than offering piecemeal concessions to what they think are abolitionist demands.
The national picture is even less heartening. Congressional talks have since imploded, and a policing-reform deal seems to be off the table. As rioting resumed in Portland and gripped Chicago’s Miracle Mile over the weekend, the president and his allies continued their timeworn tack of demagoguing protest, which has been their main strategy since late June and their default for much longer. Trump has cast the unrest as bedlam caused by Democratic leaders — even as bad policing sparked it and his deployment of federal troops to Portland escalated it. His surrogates on Fox News and others like Rudy Giuliani have gone back to characterizing Black Lives Matter activists as part of a terrorist hate group. One of Trump’s main lines of attack against Joe Biden is the false claim that his Democratic rival wants to abolish the police.
The future remains uncertain, but broadly speaking, the reformist sentiment that seemed transpartisan and was enthusiastically supported by the majority earlier this summer has regressed to a site of partisan bickering, muddled by the ideological inconsistencies of a public whose abstract sympathies often clash with its preferred realities. And hope for structural change that reckons with the more banal violence of policing — as opposed to its more extreme forms, like on-camera killings — rests with localities whose proposed changes, in many cases, have either echoed failed efforts past or engaged in piecemeal abolition that’s left potential allies skeptical. There are other complicating factors at play. In the likely event that the unrest is fueled by antipathy toward Trump — on whose watch hundreds of thousands of people have died from COVID-19, and millions have lost work — protest energy seems bound to flag further once he leaves office, which could credibly happen in January. Absent changes to these trends, the opportunity for major reform seems increasingly tenuous. Even at this historic moment, eroded trust in the police could be greeted with yet another thwarted effort to change them.
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
Violent, secretive fascistic networks operating inside California police stations
7 August 2020
A whistleblower in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has exposed a violent right-wing extremist gang operating within the Compton station known as the “Executioners.”
The “Executioners” network, according to a report on July 30 in the Los Angeles Times, is composed of sworn law enforcement officers who all have matching tattoos featuring “a skull with Nazi imagery” and an assault rifle. The gang “celebrates deputy shootings and the induction of new members with ‘inking parties.’”
An estimated 20 deputies are members of the “Executioners” network, most of whom work at night. According to the whistleblower’s claim, which was submitted on June 23 and more recently came to light, the “Executioners do not allow African-American or female members.”
Instead of using official police channels, the gang members communicate with each other through WhatsApp. “Members become inked as ‘Executioners’ after executing members of the public,” the whistleblower complaint states with emphasis, “or otherwise committing acts of violence in furtherance of the gang.”
According to the whistleblower complaint, the gang “wields vast power at the Compton station,” which covers an area of Los Angeles that is historically home to a large proportion of working-class black residents.
The whistleblower, deputy Thomas Banuelos, was targeted, threatened, and attacked by a member of the Executioners. “It was a very serious, violent and bloody assault which could have killed Deputy Banuelos,” the whistleblower’s attorney Alan Romero reported. A member of the Executioners “had him on the ground and was literally just bashing his head in with his elbow over and over and over again.”
When another deputy attempted to anonymously report the attack on Banuelos through an internal tip line, his identity was exposed and turned over to the Executioners, and he found graffiti scrawled on the keypad in front of the station accusing him of being a “rat.”
“I think the scariest thing,” Romero said, “is that he did what he was supposed to do. He called the authorities, and they betrayed him. They turned him right over to the gang. It’s a whistleblower’s worst nightmare.”
On the website WitnessLA, an inside source identified the three deputies in this video as members of the Executioners gang. On the video, which was published in June, the deputies savagely beat a man who is pinned to the ground.
“We have a gang here that has grown to the point where it dominates every aspect of life at the Compton station,” Romero told the Los Angeles Times. “It essentially controls scheduling, the distribution of informant tips, and assignments to deputies in the station with preference shown to members of the gang as well as prospects.”
When members of the right-wing extremist “Executioners” network do not get what they want within the sheriff’s department, the gang members threaten “work slowdowns — which involve ignoring or responding slowly to calls.” In addition, they set illegal “arrest quotas.”
The “Executioners” are only the latest subject of a string of exposures of right-wing extremist gangs, networks, and cliques operating in California police stations.
But Lavin’s own history illustrates something else. A state law
enacted more than a decade ago to jail criminal officers and other public
officials who abuse their authority hasn’t worked as intended.
Lavin is one of dozens of New Jersey officers who have been
criminally charged with official misconduct but avoided the jail time called
for under the law, an investigation by the Asbury Park Press and ProPublica has
found.
Lavin was indicted in 2014 when he worked as a Mercer County
sheriff’s officer. The indictment accused him of using pepper spray on a
handcuffed woman, filing a false report about the encounter and encouraging
other officers to fake their reports, too.
The charges included three counts of second-degree official
misconduct, which is reserved for public employees who are accused of
criminally misusing their position. A conviction on each charge should come
with mandatory jail time — up to five years with no parole, in this case —
according to state law.
But Lavin received no jail time, no probation, no criminal
record. In exchange for his resignation from the force, in October 2015 he
entered a “pretrial intervention” program ordinarily reserved for low-level crimes.
It wiped the charges from his record.
Sean Lavin, a New Jersey sheriff’s officer who was criminally
charged with official misconduct, avoided the jail time called for under the
law. (Screenshot of a broadcasted
Senate Law and Public Safety hearing on July 15)
Plea deals are common in criminal court. But in 2007, a
sentencing law was passed and attorney general’s guidelines were enacted to
make such deals the exception for official misconduct crimes. Instead, they
have become the norm, the news outlets found.
All told, from 2013 through 2017, prosecutors charged law
enforcement officers with official misconduct at least 118 times, the
investigation found. Less than one-third of them received jail time.
The charges were not based on minor complaints of tardiness or
failing to maintain one’s uniform. More than a dozen officers were accused of
serious acts of violence, like pistol-whipping a suspect or attempted murder.
Among the sexual misconduct charges was one in which an officer allegedly used
his badge and gun to coerce a woman into having sex. Officers were charged with
smuggling drugs, stealing and using cocaine, and tipping off drug dealers.
Other cases alleged bribery, cover-ups, lying, intimidation and more.
“If the sentencing structure is designed to deter conduct we
find particularly reprehensible and it all ends up being lip service, that is
outrageous, that’s a fraud,” said Jennifer Bonjean, an attorney who has filed
misconduct lawsuits against police departments in New Jersey.
Compared with other types of public employees, law enforcement
officers charged with official misconduct go to jail less often, our analysis
showed.
Prosecutors and judges have consistently downgraded charges in
ways that fail to carry out the law that calls for putting public servants
convicted of official misconduct in jail.
Now lawmakers in Trenton are trying to erase the law completely.
An anonymous amendment, first reported by Politico, was tucked into a sentencing reform package that passed the
state Senate and could be considered by the Assembly on Thursday. Gov. Phil
Murphy, who could veto the bill, said he doesn’t support getting rid of the
mandatory minimum jail time for official misconduct.
The amended bill would ease the penalties for officers convicted
of misconduct in a state where police discipline is secret. New Jersey is one
of few states where officers aren’t yet licensed. So, short of a criminal
conviction, the state has little ability to remove officers or prevent them
from moving to another department.
The tendency to go easy on officers who abuse their power is “a
problem,” said Thomas Shea, a former Long Branch police assistant patrol
commander who now works as program director at the Seton Hall University Police
Graduate Studies Program. “And it’s a problem widely agreed upon within law
enforcement.”
It may surprise the general public, Shea said, but good cops are
outraged when bad ones get away with misconduct. Shea once ran internal affairs
investigations and described how officers see police misconduct: Did an officer
have a momentary lapse in judgment or did they consciously hurt someone? For
the latter, he said, punishment should be severe — including jail time.
“There needs to be deterrence and a mandatory minimum for those
cases, so anybody thinking of doing something like that thinks twice,” he said.
When contacted by a reporter, Lavin denied the charges and
declined to comment further. Lavin, who has been fighting to recover his
taxpayer-funded pension, pointed to documents that included a report by an
expert witness he hired who found he had used force appropriately.
“I would love to make a statement,” said Lavin, 49. “But right
now, I cannot due to pending litigation.”
His union defends him. “What occurred with him and happened with
him was purely retaliatory because of his union activity,” said Bob Gries,
executive vice president of the New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police.
Lavin’s profile on the police union’s website gives no
indication that his career took a turn because of charges of criminal
misconduct. Instead, it says he retired from the sheriff’s office due to “severe
knee injuries received in the line of duty.”
Current and former prosecutors say accused officers are often
offered lighter sentences in exchange for their resignations from the police
force. The state’s criminal justice system makes it difficult to seek the
maximum penalties, as the law calls for, they say.
Philip M. Stinson, criminal justice professor at Bowling Green
State University in Ohio, maintains one of the few national databases of
criminally charged police officers. He said the analysis by the Press and
ProPublica shows how the system fails to stop police misconduct. “It’s not
until you aggregate these things, like you’re doing, that you start to realize
that these are systemic problems,” Stinson said of the findings by the news
outlets. “And when you add up the numbers, it’s quite troubling.”
Sending a Message About
Misconduct
When she was a Marlboro town councilperson in October 2002,
Ellen Karcher got a strange letter in the mail.
The letter offered her a free grave. A $1,687 value.
But the offer appeared to have some kind of a catch. It was
signed by a developer who stood to gain from zoning changes Karcher opposed on
the township council.
“I didn’t know if this was a bribe attempt or a threat, but I
knew I needed to get help,” Karcher later said. “So I called the FBI.”
About three and a half years after the letter arrived, Karcher
was serving as a New Jersey state senator from Monmouth County crusading
against public corruption. She recalled her personal experience standing up to
threats and declining bribes.
“My house was vandalized. My mailbox was blown up. I got scary
phone calls, warning me that it wasn’t good for my health to be standing
between powerful people and millions of dollars,” she said in 2006 as a member
of a Senate committee discussing a bill to harshly punish public employees who
abuse the public trust.
How we used court records, charging documents and news clips to
show how often criminal cops avoided jail time with reduced sentences.
“We can send the message that we recognize the grave economic
and social costs we all must bear when those in positions of authority abuse
the public’s trust,” she argued.
Lawmakers sent that message. The law, signed in 2007, calls for
jail time for law enforcement officers and other public officials convicted of
a list of charges like bribery and tampering with public records, as well as
for other misconduct that takes place on the job, including violence or sexual
misdeeds. Under the law, defendants should be jailed for as many as 10 years
for a first-degree offense.
“This law forever changes the culture of tolerating public
corruption and makes those who tarnish their offices pay for their crimes,”
Karcher said in a statement when the bill was signed into law. Karcher declined
to comment for this story.
The policymakers directed then-Attorney General Stuart Rabner,
who is now chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, to draft guidelines
for prosecutors to describe the rare occasions they could deviate from the
mandatory minimum jail time.
Rabner wrote that prosecutors are supposed to pursue the
“enhanced punishment” — that’s jail time — provided by the law. Plea offers
should “discourage other public officials from abusing their office and
violating the public trust,” Rabner wrote.
Rabner noted that under the law, prosecutors could cut a softer
plea deal if a defendant provided valuable help to an investigation. A judge
could deviate only if “extraordinary circumstances exist such that imposition
of a mandatory minimum term would be a serious injustice,” the law says.
In other words, the state is ordinarily supposed to send a
message with stiff penalties for public corruption.
But often it does not.
Tallying Official
Misconduct Cases
New Jersey doesn’t keep a public database of official misconduct
cases.
So the Press and ProPublica built one. The news outlets gathered
records from prosecutors’ offices, court data and examples from news stories to
examine official misconduct cases between 2013 and 2017. It is almost certainly
not a complete accounting because some records are incomplete or inaccessible.
Some of the agencies, including the Attorney General’s Office, denied a request
for the official misconduct charges they filed. The charges are public records,
and the request was submitted in May, but the office called it “overbroad.” The
prosecutors’ offices that did provide records cover about 89% of the state’s
population. Court data and news stories cover the whole state.
Among the 398 official misconduct cases reviewed, law enforcement
officers were overrepresented, constituting 30% of the caseload but only about
8% of New Jersey’s public employees, according to 2017 pension data. There were
118 cases involving law enforcement personnel: 67 police officers, 11 sheriff’s
officers and 40 corrections officers. By comparison, teachers make up about 35%
of public employees but accounted for 10% of the official misconduct cases.
“It shouldn’t be this way,” said Stinson, the Bowling Green
professor who studies criminal allegations against police. “The public has an
expectation that officers are true to their oath, that they’re upholding the
law, not breaking the law. We expect police officers to be the good guys and
good gals. They’re not supposed to be criminals with a gun and a badge.”
Twenty-two of the officers charged with official misconduct had
cases related to sexual crimes, such as a patrolman who allegedly exposed
himself to drivers during traffic stops. He was sentenced to probation not for
indecent exposure, but for tampering with public records by switching off his
car’s dashboard camera during the stops.
Eighteen officers were accused of various forms of violence,
from beating up inmates to brandishing a gun during a road-rage incident.
Often, charges were reduced in plea deals. In 46 of the cases,
the accused officer was given an outcome more lenient than jail time, like
probation or pretrial intervention.
Sometimes, the official misconduct charge did not get reduced,
but the conviction still did not result in jail time, which goes against the
minimum sentencing law. The Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office gave three
officers deals for probation for official misconduct convictions. One was
accused of voiding a friend’s ticket. Another admitted to using cocaine while
in uniform, and the third admitted to trying to buy sex in his patrol car,
according to two news reports. The office’s
spokeswoman, Donna Weaver, didn’t respond to questions about why those officers
got probation. A man who answered a call to a number listed for former Atlantic
County Prosecutor James P. McClain, who was in office at the time of the deals,
declined to comment.
Last September, records and news reports show, a Monroe Township
police sergeant pleaded guilty to official misconduct after he was accused of
engaging in oral sex with a fugitive in his patrol car, helping her pay off a
drug debt and tipping her off about police activity so she could avoid arrest.
Again, the prosecutor made a deal with the sergeant for probation. The
Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office didn’t explain why this officer got
probation. Former Gloucester County Prosecutor Charles A. Fiore declined to
comment.
In rare instances, the accused officers not only received no
jail time, but ended up back on the force. One officer who allegedly tried to
get a state trooper to dismiss his cousin’s drunken driving charge returned to
work in 2017 after striking a deal for pretrial intervention, according to
court documents and a news story. Another officer accused of improperly
accessing a confidential database went back to duty after he was pardoned in
2017 by former Gov. Chris Christie.
How One Officer Got No
Jail Time
“Sometimes, violence is the answer,” Jeffrey Profitt says in the
trailer for his film “Violent Justice.”
It appears Profitt’s art may have imitated life.
At the same time Profitt wrote, produced and starred in the
low-budget movie about a vigilante cop who took the law into his own hands by
beating up and killing suspects, he served as a Millville patrol officer, where
he was accused of beating up multiple suspects. His case shows how even
criminal charges of violence on the job may not put an officer in jail.
Profitt was accused in a 2019 indictment of pummeling citizens
on five occasions over three years, documents show. Three involved throwing a
person to the ground, face first. In one incident, Profitt was accused of
trying to put his police handgun in a suspect’s mouth, then hitting the man
with the pistol. His indictment included 24 counts, on charges of official
misconduct, aggravated assault, endangering a person, tampering with physical
evidence, terroristic threats and more.
The last incident detailed in the indictment occurred one
afternoon in April 2016. As Profitt told the Press and ProPublica, he responded
to a call at a liquor store and found a drunken man screaming incoherently.
Back at headquarters after the arrest, the man resisted when Profitt and some
EMTs were trying to take him to the hospital. Profitt, who court records showed
weighed about 205 pounds, said he “fell on top of” the man, and he hit the
ground “like a tree going down.”
The indictment said Profitt forced the man to the ground in such
a way that his feet left the floor and he hit the concrete face first. The man
lost consciousness and “a substantial amount of blood,” the document shows.
Profitt was soon contacted by internal affairs and put on desk
duty as an investigation unfolded. About two months after the last incident
listed in the indictment, the first promotional footage for the film
was posted to Profitt’s YouTube channel. A trailer for the film posted a few months later shows Profitt starring as Detective John Davis, who resigns from his
department to mete out justice on his own terms. The trailer shows the
protagonist digging what appears to be a grave, knifing a bad guy and
conducting an interrogation with a hatchet.
An excerpt of Jeffrey Profitt’s “Violent Justice” trailer.
Correspondence from the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office to
Profitt’s attorney, obtained through a public records request, shows
prosecutors offered to cut Profitt a deal. If he pleaded guilty to a single
aggravated assault charge and quit his job, he could still see jail time, but
the prosecutor’s office would not pursue him for six other crimes, including
the official misconduct charge.
He didn’t take the offer.
Profitt’s case went before a grand jury. He recently told a
reporter that he was told he’d be able to speak to the grand jury but that he
wasn’t allowed to. The grand jury indicted him on 24 charges.
In the end, the prosecutor’s office returned to its initial
offer. He could plead guilty to a single charge of aggravated assault and quit
his job. Cumberland County Prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae declined to comment
on Profitt’s case.
In the interview, Profitt acknowledged using force against each
of the people noted in the indictment. But he contends it was appropriate given
his official capacity.
Profitt is one of many accused officers who were represented
under their police union’s legal protection plan. The unions have a war chest
officers pay into, similar to malpractice insurance for doctors, to fund
attorneys who represent cops in legal trouble. The state’s largest union
advertises that it spends $3 million a year on legal defense for its members.
The presidents of the state’s largest two unions didn’t respond
to a request for comment.
Profitt said he took the plea deal because he reached the limit
of what his union’s plan would pay for his defense. He figured the deal was his
best option.
The state argued for Profitt to spend 364 days in jail,
according to a news story. But he caught a break: Cumberland County Superior
Court Judge Robert Malestein downgraded the sentence. Malestein concluded the
aggravated assault charge Profitt pleaded guilty to in place of official misconduct
wouldn’t ordinarily require jail time for a defendant, according to a news
story.
So he suspended the jail sentence and let Profitt go with two
years of probation. A call to Malestein’s office was passed to a court
spokesman who declined to comment.
Judge Robert Malestein in 2011. While the state argued for
Profitt to spend 364 days in jail, Malestein downgraded the sentence and let
Profitt go with two years of probation. (Adam Monacelli/Daily Journal)
“I already knew he was going to get probation,” said Mitchell
Broughton, 29, of Millville, whom Profitt used force against in 2013, according
to police records.
Why?
“Because he’s a cop,” Broughton said. “He probably never got in
trouble before, so when you plead your first plea, it’s like — you get
probation.”
Broughton didn’t know about Profitt’s film career.
“What the hell!?” he exclaimed as he watched the trailer to
“Violent Justice.”
“That’s the way he acts for real,” Broughton said. “Violence.”
Osiris Pereyra, one of those against whom Profitt is accused of
using force in the indictment, said Profitt injured him.
He said his mom was angry and called the police after he came
home from a party in the middle of the night in May 2015. Officers arrived and
Pereyra, then 18, said he wanted to be present when they talked to his mother
inside their home.
Pereyra said without warning, Profitt pulled him to the ground,
struck him in the back of the head and pushed his face into a gravel driveway.
He said his lip was cut, his nose was busted and bleeding, and his face was
bruised.
“It was just super unnecessary,” Pereyra said. “Especially when
I wasn’t harming anyone. I wasn’t being disrespectful. I was just asking the
officer if I could step inside with my mother so we could talk the situation
out. And then without any warning, I got pulled down to the ground.”
The form Profitt filed about using force on Pereyra claims he
wasn’t injured. The criminal charges filed against Profitt claimed that his
force against Pereyra was excessive, and that he filed false reports about that
use of force and others. Profitt said he was trained not to report an injury
unless a person received medical attention.
The arrest report shows Pereyra was charged with underage
drinking, obstruction and resisting arrest. He said he pleaded guilty and paid
a fine.
Profitt, now 41, wouldn’t say what he does for work now. He said
he’s no longer a cop and no longer living in New Jersey. He is still releasing
movies.
He doesn’t think he got off easy. He lost his job and he expects
the case to follow him for life, no matter what becomes of his movie career.
“Ten years from now, I’ll be doing an interview about a movie and somehow it’ll
come back to this case,” he said.
Profitt acknowledged that critics of his creative endeavors can
have their say. He believes it’s entertainment. He did notice an upside to the
backlash: It boosted the views on his trailers and films.
A Clean Slate
Other than dismissal, the best outcome for an officer charged
with official misconduct is pretrial intervention. The program is intended for
first-time defendants and wipes the slate clean after a period without other
criminal charges.
Pretrial intervention records are secret under court rules,
making it difficult to know why an accused officer got the deal.
Rabner, the attorney general who wrote the 2007 guide, amplified
the law’s emphasis against the use of pretrial intervention. The law “creates a
presumption” that a public official charged with corruption can’t get pretrial
intervention, Rabner wrote. He instructs prosecutors to appeal the rulings of
judges who want to reduce the mandatory sentence when the prosecutors disagree
with it. And if prosecutors want to approve a pretrial intervention deal, they
have to seek approval from the attorney general.
The investigation by the Press and ProPublica found 14 officers
who received pretrial intervention in the five years examined. Half of the 14
cases involved alleged acts of violence. Among the accused was Lavin, the union
leader, who pepper-sprayed a handcuffed suspect. Another case involved a
Trenton officer accused of assaulting a patient at a psychiatric hospital.
Others were related to the integrity of the officers. Three
Woodbridge officers were charged with covering up an officer’s car crash.
Pension records indicate two of them are still employed in other roles with
their township. The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office declined to answer
questions about why the officers got pretrial intervention.
Police officer Clifton Gauthier at a court hearing on March 17,
2015, on charges of official misconduct and witness tampering. Gauthier, who
was able to keep his job, is back on the beat in Rockaway Township, New
Jersey. (Bob Karp/Asbury Park Press)
Patrolman Clifton Gauthier of Rockaway Township was charged for
trying to get a drunken driving ticket dismissed for a relative. He entered pretrial intervention and did not have to plead guilty
or admit wrongdoing, according to a news story. He kept his job and unsuccessfully appealed for back pay for
the three years he missed while he was under investigation. He’s back on the
beat in Rockaway. He and his chief didn’t respond to calls seeking comment. The
Morris County Prosecutor’s Office declined to explain how Gauthier got his
deal.
The pretrial intervention deals for accused cops are still being
made under Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, New Jersey’s highest law enforcement
officer. Grewal is known for instituting police reforms. But during his time in
office, Jersey City officers accused of violent official misconduct secured
pretrial intervention deals that called for the approval of Grewal’s office.
It’s unclear if he signed off. Grewal’s office declined to comment on the case
against the officers.
In 2017, the Jersey City officers fired shots at a fleeing
suspect during a car chase, the indictment against them shows. Then, when the
suspect’s car ran an innocent person off the road, some of the cops beat the
uninvolved driver, who was engulfed in flames at the time, breaking four ribs
and causing abrasions, according to a video of the incident and a Press interview with the
driver. Two of the four officers charged were accused of attempted murder, in
addition to official misconduct. One of them got probation, the other pretrial
intervention. The two others charged received pretrial intervention deals, and
one got to keep his pension. All four lost their jobs. A spokesman for the
Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office declined to comment on the cases.
Why Deals are Made
Monmouth County Prosecutor Chris Gramiccioni called the actions
of two Asbury Park officers a “textbook definition of a breach of the position
of trust.” In 2019, he charged the officers with official misconduct for
vandalizing the cars of a citizen who complained about them.
Yet Gramiccioni cut the officers a deal nearly a year after the
incident. Though he still considered it “spiteful retaliation,” his office
reduced the charges and agreed to push for probation after the officers pleaded
guilty to fourth-degree criminal mischief. They haven’t yet been sentenced.
Gramiccioni’s stance on the deal helps explain how accused officers
in some cases have been able to secure court outcomes that appear to conflict
with the Legislature’s intent for official misconduct.
Apparently, it comes down to one word.
Though the attorney general’s guidelines say that an official
misconduct plea “should” mean jail time, “should” is not the same as “shall,”
Gramiccioni noted in a written response.
“Our criminal justice system depends upon the practice of plea
bargaining,” Gramiccioni wrote. “The system is not designed for prosecutors to
seek the maximum charges and sentence for every single defendant on every
single case.”
Making plea deals “alleviates burdened court dockets and allows
prosecutors’ offices to direct more resources to defendants charged with more
serious offenses,” Gramiccioni wrote.
Monmouth County Prosecutor Chris Gramiccioni charged two
officers in 2019 with official misconduct for vandalizing the cars of a citizen
who complained about them. He cut them a deal nearly one year after the
incident. (Tom Spader/Asbury Park Press)
Gramiccioni said the officers will be barred from public
employment. They also have to pay the citizen for the damage to his cars and
they’ll have to serve probation.
The attorney general’s office agreed that removing abusive
officers from their jobs is the top priority. “Protecting the public from a bad
officer is an important goal that may, in many cases, be more important than
getting a longer jail or prison sentence,” Steven Barnes, the attorney
general’s spokesperson, wrote in an email.
Yet the standard described by Barnes doesn’t seem to fit with
the guidelines Rabner wrote to guide prosecutors. The authorities should
require the defendant to plead guilty to the “most serious, readily provable
offense” that would subject them to the “enhanced punishment” of the mandatory
minimum sentence, Rabner wrote.
Elie Honig, a former director of the New Jersey Division of
Criminal Justice who oversaw the branch of the attorney general’s office that
handles criminal prosecutions confirmed the intent of the law was to send a
stern message on various forms of public corruption. But those who enforce the
law might not agree it’s right for each case, he said.
“A primary purpose behind the [official misconduct] statute and
the mandatory minimum was deterrence, the idea that we should have very little
tolerance for corruption and that acts of corruption will be punished
severely,” said Honig, who is now executive director of the Rutgers Institute
for Secure Communities, a law enforcement research group. “That said, I think
if you surveyed prosecutors and defense lawyers and even judges, you would find
a broad consensus that in some cases the mandatory minimums are excessive.”
Former Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato, who left office
in 2018, said he agreed with the mandatory minimum sentence for official
misconduct and said he didn’t know anyone in law enforcement who was opposed.
Prosecutors want to achieve deterrence, he explained, but they also risk losing
cases if they go to trial.
Coronato lost one such case. News stories and a video show
Tuckerton police officer Justin Cherry was charged in 2014 with official
misconduct after an incident involving a driver. Video from the police
dashboard camera shows officers pulling the female driver out of a car and onto
the ground. Then Cherry’s police dog attacks the woman for almost 30 seconds,
the video shows. Cherry was charged with official misconduct and simple
assault, according to a news story. He was acquitted in a bench trial, before a
judge and not a jury, according to a news story.
Reached by a reporter, Cherry said his use of force was
appropriate and he’s appealing in court to get his job back after he was fired
by his department in April.
Police officer Justin Cherry was charged in 2014 with official
misconduct and simple assault. Cherry was acquitted in a bench trial before a
judge and not a jury. (Paula Scully/Asbury Park
Press)
“You want to send a clear message out there,” said Coronato, who
declined to specifically discuss the case against Cherry. “But are you willing
to roll the dice because you want to put somebody in jail? You could end up
with the police officer back on duty that you have questions about.”
As a result, Coronato explained, a plea deal for a lesser charge
might be “the smarter way to go.”
Law enforcement experts also say another dynamic may be at play:
the close relationships between the county prosecutors who charge cops with
misconduct and the officers or their police agencies. Prosecutors depend on
officers to investigate and testify in their cases. That could color the
decision-making when it comes to charging officers and cutting deals, experts
said.
Profitt, the movie-making former Millville officer, agreed
prosecutors may be too familiar with officers they charge with official
misconduct. “I think if you had it set up so that maybe all police cases were
handled by the state attorney general, then there would be less of a conflict
of interest,” he said.
Similarly, in many cases the accused officers and the
investigators who work in the offices of the prosecutors, though not the attorneys
charging them, are represented by the same union, said Rich Rivera, a former
West New York officer who testifies in court as a use-of-force expert.
Documents show the New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association
represents the investigators in at least 18 of the 21 county prosecutors’
offices in the state — as well as officers in those areas. Those union
connections could contribute to lighter outcomes for officers charged with
crimes, according to Rivera.
“They all go to the same conference,” Rivera said. “They all
follow the same bylaws, they’re all expected to follow the same rules. They are
in lock and sync. And if you deviate from that, well then you’ll get kicked out
of the union. So why would you want to ostracize yourself — lose all of your
social bearings, potentially lose family ties — when it’s just easier to go
along and get along?”
Trying to Remove
Mandatory Punishments for Official Misconduct
Protests against police brutality roared through New Jersey
streets following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis
police officers. The calls for police accountability have never been louder.
State senators gathered for a hearing on police problems that
was billed as the first in a series. The attorney general attended, noting the
demonstrations were part of the largest protest movement in the nation’s
history.
The attorney general’s office has instituted policing reforms in
recent years, and the Legislature has passed some changes, like requiring body
cameras and diversity in hiring. But even as these changes advance, New
Jersey’s lawmakers are close to undoing the mandatory minimum jail time for
official misconduct.
In recent weeks, the Assembly passed a criminal justice reform
bill that focused on sentencing disparities. When the state Senate took on the
bill, it quietly added an amendment that removed the mandatory minimum
sentences for police officers and other public officials convicted of official
misconduct. It passed the bill 22-15.
The amendment doesn’t have a senator’s name on it. The two
primary Senate sponsors of the bill — Sandra B. Cunningham, D-Hudson, and
Nellie Pou, D-Passaic — didn’t respond to calls about the amendment. Richard
McGrath, spokesman for the Senate Democrats responsible for the bill, wouldn’t
say who filed it. Records related to the amendment are not accessible to the
public because lawmakers previously exempted them from the state’s public
records law.
The Assembly has a session scheduled for Thursday in which
lawmakers could vote on the changes made by the Senate. Beyond problem cops,
the bill would also protect lawmakers themselves if they happened to be charged
with misconduct related to their office.
One senator who voted yes said the quiet change to reduce
accountability for public officials accused of criminally abusing their
positions snuck past him.
“Frankly I missed the amended version of the bill,” said Sen.
Joseph Cryan, D-Union, a former county sheriff. Now he hopes the governor would
veto the very bill he voted to approve.
The bill expected to be considered Thursday most notably
includes sentencing reforms recommended by a state commission to correct racial
inequalities. One commission member told a reporter he wasn’t aware the
measures now include reduced penalties for criminal misconduct by public
officials.
“The commission was actually to come up with ways that we could
reduce the disparity in sentencing for people, quite frankly African Americans
and people of color,” said Jiles Ship, president of the New Jersey chapter of
the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.
“So if it’s going in another direction,” he said, “that’s not
good.”
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
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