Killing prompts call for federal investigation of Paterson, New Jersey, police department
A social justice organization has called for the US Department of Justice to investigate the police department of Paterson, New Jersey, citing the latter’s “widespread unlawful and unconstitutional conduct.” The demand follows the fatal shooting by two Paterson police officers of an anti-violence advocate who was experiencing a mental health crisis. Residents also have demanded criminal charges against the officers involved and the establishment of a civilian complaint review board.
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin is investigating the killing, which has sparked protests that have become increasingly tense. Residents flooded into a city council meeting last week to vent their anger and demand change. Two city officials nearly came to blows during the session.
The victim of the latest police shooting was Najee Seabrooks, who was 31 years old. For two years, Seabrooks had worked as a counselor with the Paterson Healing Collective, a group that supports survivors of violence. He had sought to reduce gun violence in Paterson, acted as a mediator and mentored young people. Days before he was killed, he had counseled the classmates of a 14-year-old boy who was stabbed to death outside Paterson’s Eastside High School.
The fatal shooting of Seabrooks has provoked grief and outrage. “Here’s a young man that dedicated his life to changing his community, and when he needed a mental health response in a crisis intervention response, instead he’s met with force,” Liza Chowdhury, the executive director of the Paterson Healing Collective, told NJ Advance Media.
At 7:43 a.m. on March 3, Seabrooks called 911 to report that he was in distress. He was alone at his brother’s apartment and had locked himself in a bathroom. He also texted his friends at the Paterson Healing Collective for support. “I want to hear one of y’all’s voice,” he wrote. “Before they try to kill me. I have a few minutes left.” Family members said that Seabrooks was “hallucinating and behaving erratically” but had no history of mental illness.
Members of the police department’s Emergency Response Team soon arrived. When members of the Paterson Healing Collective reached the apartment building, the officers prevented them from responding to Seabrooks. Instead, they were forced to wait in the lobby during a standoff that lasted for more than four hours. Nor did the police ever contact the crisis intervention team at nearby Saint Joseph’s University Medical Center during the incident.
Seabrooks began cutting himself with knives. The officers first tried firing sponge-tipped projectiles at him to subdue him. Body camera video reportedly shows that at 12:35 p.m., Seabrooks leapt from the bathroom with a knife. Officers Anzore Tsay and Jose Hernandez fired their guns, striking Seabrooks, who later died at a nearby hospital. Seabrooks is survived by a daughter.
In response to the outpouring of anger about the killing, Mayor André Sayegh, who took office in 2018, touted his own efforts to mandate body cameras for the police force, “because of the need for accountability, transparency and the truth.” But the mayor only took this step after coming under intense public pressure following the fatal police shooting of Jameek Lowery in 2019. Neither the provision of body cameras nor the police audit that Sayegh ordered after Lowery’s killing has prevented the Paterson police from engaging in further violence.
Sayegh has opposed calls for a Justice Department inquiry into the Paterson Police Department as unnecessary. He cited reforms that he has implemented since 2018, including an early warning system to detect questionable behavior on the part of officers. In addition, Sayegh appointed a new police director last month, increased the length of officer training from four to eight weeks and claims to have referred officers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
As public anger and mistrust of the Paterson police have steadily intensified, Sayegh has steadfastly backed the cops. He has minimized the force’s pervasive criminality, characterized residents’ fears as exaggerated and blamed egregious acts on “a very few number of officers [sic].” As recently as December 2022, Sayegh and Public Safety Director Jerry Speziale went on a public relations offensive to salvage the department’s image. The campaign has had little effect.
The Paterson Police Department has become notorious for its violence. Since 2019, there have been eight deaths in Paterson that involved the police. This number is higher than in any other municipality in New Jersey. Six of the deaths involved officers firing their weapons, and two deaths occurred in police custody. At least 12 officers in Paterson have been criminally charged in the past four years. The city paid $2 million to settle 16 lawsuits against its officers in the previous three years.
In January, former officer Spencer Finch was charged with aggravated assault, official misconduct and tampering with public records. The charges are related to his assault of a robbery suspect in 2018. Finch beat the suspect with a flashlight, breaking his nose and causing the avulsion of two teeth. In July 2022, Finch was charged with the same offenses for having beaten a man during a domestic dispute and falsifying his police report about the incident.
In June 2022, Officer Jerry Moravek, who was responding to the sound of gunfire, saw a young man run past him. After repeatedly ordering the man, Khalif Cooper, to drop a gun, Moravek shot him in the back as he was running away. Cooper, who was unarmed, sustained a disabling spinal injury and can no longer walk. In February, the state attorney general charged Moravek with second-degree aggravated assault. With the approval of the police department leadership and the law enforcement unions, Moravek’s fellow officers took up a collection for him while he was on unpaid suspension.
n February 2022, Paterson officers Jacob Feliciano and Dodi Zorrilla found Felix DeJesus walking around drunk one night, handcuffed him and put him in a patrol car. They later dropped him off in a park in near-freezing temperatures, and no one has seen him since. When his family asked the police for answers, they initially denied having had any contact with DeJesus. They also refused to take information to file a missing person report, insisting that the family file it in Haledon, where DeJesus lived. Feliciano and Zorrilla were later suspended without pay for 90 days for neglect of duty and breaking the rules for body cameras, patrol procedures, transporting citizens and preparing and filing reports.
In December 2021, a plainclothes police officer investigating a reported incident shot and killed Thelonious “RaRa” McKnight Jr. in a dark alley. A 9mm handgun was found near McKnight’s body. The police have not explained the reason for the shooting or released the officer’s name.
In December 2020, Officers Kevin Patino and Kendry Tineo-Restituyo were sent in an unmarked car to respond to a “suspicious person” report. They physically attacked 19-year-old Osamah Alsaidi, who was walking to his job at Amazon, without any provocation. After punching the teenager and throwing him to the ground, they charged him with aggravated assault of a police officer. Alsaidi sustained a concussion, was temporarily blinded, began to have migraine headaches and needed treatment at a hospital. Federal authorities charged Patino and Tineo-Restituyo with violating Alsaidi’s Fourth Amendment rights and with obstruction of justice.
This unrelenting savagery must be understood within the context of the city’s history and economic conditions. Paterson is the third-largest city in New Jersey. Nearly two-thirds of residents are Hispanic or Latino, and about a quarter are black. About 44 percent of people living in Paterson were born abroad. By the late 19th century, Paterson had become a major center of textile manufacturing. It earned the nickname “Silk City” and attracted a large amount of immigrant labor. The mills and factories closed during the deindustrialization that began in the 1980s, and Paterson had already become the fifth-poorest city in the country by 1983. The city’s employment rate today is about 54 percent, and its poverty rate is just over 25 percent.
The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, which has asked US Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the Paterson Police Department, describes the violence in racial terms, emphasizing officers’ attacks on “black and brown residents.” But the role of the police, in Paterson and elsewhere, is to suppress working class opposition to poverty and capitalist exploitation, regardless of workers’ race or ethnicity. The appalling police violence in Paterson reflects its residents’ poverty, as well as the pressures of the global economic crisis, the ongoing pandemic and NATO’s proxy war with Russia.
It is telling that the New Jersey Legislative Black Caucus has not commented on the killing of Seabrooks, especially since its chair, Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter, represents Paterson in the state legislature. This silence underscores the fact that race- and gender-based political groupings serve the interests of their respective layers of the upper middle class. In the current environment of widespread strikes and worker unrest, such groups appreciate the need for police terror.
Neither a Justice Department investigation of the Paterson Police Department nor the establishment of a civilian complaint review board would produce anything more than cosmetic changes. These measures would not alter the nature of the police as the enforcers of inequality and protectors of wealth. The police will play this role, with all the barbarity they deem necessary, as long as the state remains in the hands of the capitalist class.
Los Angeles County report confirms that deputy gangs are rampant in Sheriff’s Department
On March 3, a special counsel charged with oversight of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) issued a report that documents deputy gangs engaging in “egregious conduct such as violations of law, the excessive use of force [and] threats to the public or Department members.”
According to the special counsel, deputy gangs operating over the last 50 years in patrol stations located in predominantly working class and minority neighborhoods, including the Banditos, Executioners, Regulators, Spartans, Grim Reapers, Rattlesnakes and Vikings, recruit male deputy sheriffs based on their ethnicity and willingness to engage in violence and coverups.
The report states that among the 80 or so people interviewed, “several witnesses would only testify anonymously and some did so remotely, using a voice distortion device out of fear of physical or professional retaliation. Several witnesses who had agreed to testify withdrew, often the night before the proposed testimony, out of similar fears.”
The report accuses prior Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who lost reelection last November, of “appointing known tattooed members of Deputy Gangs and Deputy Cliques to leadership positions in the Department” and “permitting the revival of emblems signifying membership in such groups.”
“The claim that Deputy Gangs no longer exist in the Department is flatly and inarguably false,” according to the report.
The Rand Corporation reports that 15 to 20 percent of LASD deputies join gangs. Membership is usually confirmed by a leg tattoo, frequently bearing a sequential roman numeral. “Inking parties” are held to initiate new members at the gang’s chosen tattoo parlor after a deputy-involved shooting or other act of brutality. Deputies have been observed using language, gestures and even graffiti associated with the street gangs they are supposedly policing, while aggressively targeting co-workers they deem “rats.”
Deputy gangs were originally dominated by white men, but, like the LASD itself, are now increasingly Latino. African American and female deputies are generally excluded.
The population of Los Angeles County is almost 10 million, one out of every 35 people who live in the United States today. The county alone is more populous than 40 of the 50 states. Riven by extreme social inequality, with 30 billionaires and almost 70,000 people unhoused, Los Angeles County consists of pockets of ostentatious wealth, mostly concentrated in Westside communities such as Malibu, Beverly Hills and Bel Air, alongside massive working class communities that include large populations of recent immigrants crammed into neighborhoods circling downtown, and fanning south to the San Pedro harbor and east to borders with San Bernardino and Orange Counties.
The LASD employs 15,000 people, about half of whom are sworn deputies, and runs the country’s largest jail system, with an average daily inmate population also numbering about 15,000. Typically, after several years in the jails, deputies are assigned to patrol at one of the 23 substations that cover unincorporated county communities and the 42 cities that contract with the LASD rather than operate their own police department. With an annual budget of $3.6 billion, the LASD is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States.
Deputy gangs arise out of the need for force to maintain social inequality. They epitomize the thuggery rampant in such “special bodies of armed men”—the apt description Engels and Lenin used for law enforcement agencies under bourgeois rule, which captures their essential role as defenders of capitalist exploitation.
LASD deputy gangs date back at least to the “Little Red Devils” formed in the early 1970s by white deputies assigned to the East Los Angeles substation, nicknamed “Fort Apache” after the John Wayne movie that glamorized a cavalry outpost in the genocidal wars waged against Native Americans.
As spearheads in the suppression of mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War during the “Chicano Moratorium,” the Little Red Devils’ most prominent casualty was Los Angeles Times commentator Ruben Salazar, who died after being struck in the head by a teargas canister fired into a bar where he sought refuge from rampaging deputies. A subsequently 1973 report on these events identified 38 deputies from the East Los Angeles substation with sequentially numbered tattoos of a devil, the first official acknowledgment that deputy gangs were “inking.”
In the early 1990s media reports and litigation exposed the Vikings, a particularly violent deputy gang at the Lynwood substation, the existence of which was confirmed in the 1992 report of an earlier special counsel, James G. Kolts. In a federal civil rights lawsuit, District Judge Terry J. Hatter accurately labeled the Vikings “a neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang,” and the county subsequently paid $9 million to settle injury claims asserted by dozens of the Vikings’ victims.
Although never proved in court, Vikings were suspected to have perpetrated the still unsolved drive-by shooting of Lloyd Polk, after he brokered a peace meeting among rival Lynwood street gangs.
As detailed in the recent special counsel report, deputy gangs have metastasized throughout the LASD. A tattooed founding member of the Vikings, Paul Tanaka, rose to the rank of undersheriff, second in command, and was noted to have actively promoted several Vikings and Regulators into higher management positions. Tanaka and former Sheriff Lee Baca were convicted of conspiring to block the FBI from investigating jail abuses. Tanaka was sentenced to five years federal imprisonment and Baca three.
Baca’s successor, Jim McDonnell, took down the “Fort Apache” logo at the East Los Angeles substation, but Villanueva restored it after defeating McDonnell in 2018 with the backing of prominent Democrats, who openly campaigned for a sheriff “of color.” (Villanueva is half Polish and half Puerto Rican. He speaks Spanish fluently.) Villanueva also rehired and elevated to his inner circle Carl Mandoyan, a tattooed member of the Grim Reapers, the deputy gang formed at the South Los Angeles substation, whose emblem is a faceless, black-robed figure carrying a scythe, the symbol of death.
At the East Los Angeles substation, the Banditos grew to replace the Cavemen, a deputy gang that had replaced the Little Red Devils. The tattoo is a skull with a thick mustache, wearing a bandolier and sombrero, and brandishing a gun. According to one witness, “Banditos had to be Mexican American, Central Americans could not become Banditos.” As is the practice in other deputy gangs, a shooting allowed the member to embellish the barrel of his tattooed firearm with smoke.
One deputy gang, the “Jump Out Boys,” actually formed within the LASD’s own anti-gang detail, “Operation Safe Streets” (OSS). The tattoo depicts a red-eyed skull wearing a bandana adorned with the letters “OSS” and holding a revolver next to an ace and eight of spades, symbolizing the “dead man’s hand” in poker.
Even helicopter deputies formed a racist group, the “Ghetto Birds,” founded by a deputy with a Viking tattoo. The report suggests that the gang has been successful over the years in excluding African American deputies from the Aero Bureau.
According to the report, there are at least a half dozen deputy gangs currently active at LASD patrol stations in working class areas. The official tattoo of one, the Compton-based Executioners, is a skeleton with a German World War II helmet holding an automatic rifle.
These gangs, or “cliques” as the report sometimes soft-pedals them, “run the stations or units where they exist ... often decide assignments and shifts, training, and overtime; exclude deputies from the Deputy Cliques, often based on race, ethnicity or gender; intimidate deputies that are not part of the Deputy Cliques; give orders not to provide backup to disfavored deputies who are not members of the Deputy Cliques,” and “order work slowdowns if management of a station attempts to rein them in.”
“Most troubling,” the report explains, “they create rituals that valorize violence, such as recording all deputy involved shootings in an official book, celebrating with ‘shooting parties,’ and authorizing deputies who have shot a community member to add embellishments to their common gang tattoos.”
The deputy gangs “operate in secrecy; lie in reports to protect each other; and threaten the public with use of excessive force without justification and belittle deputies unwilling to engage in such acts,” the report concludes.
Like their more overtly neo-fascist counterparts, such as the “Oath Keepers” who spearheaded the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, deputy gangs cannot be eliminated by reforms because they are organically tied to the class struggle the deputies are employed to suppress. That is why deputy gangs can only be eliminated through the overthrow of capitalist property by the international working class.
SF Dems Campaigned Against Gun Violence With Gang Member Who Killed 15-Year-Old
Three weeks later, Madrigal railed against gun violence at a rally at San Francisco City Hall.
This story isn’t unusual. What’s unusual is that it was exposed in the San Francisco Chronicle. Gang members are a regular feature of urban politics and the assorted protests against the criminal justice system.
Consider this a perfect embodiment of a pro-crime party that loves criminals and hates victims.
It was a chilly, cloudy midnight in 2019 when 21-year-old Fernando Madrigal drove through the Mission District with fellow Norteños gang members hunting for rivals.
They had a tip that a teenager walking through the neighborhood was affiliated with the Army Street Gang, a chief antagonist of the Norteños. They found him at 24th and Capp streets. Fifteen-year-old Day’Von Hann wasn’t in the Army Street Gang – or any gang. It didn’t matter.
The Norteños believed their tipster. So Madrigal shot the teenager to death with an AR-15 assault rifle, according to court documents.
Three weeks later, Madrigal stood at a rally on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, railing against gun violence and calling for reforms at juvenile hall.
Despite his involvement with the Norteños, Madrigal also lent his time and his voice to multiple nonprofit groups, calling for reforms to the juvenile justice system even as he was in a violent gang.
At one point during the demonstration, he embraced a woman named Sha’ray Johnson. She was there because she’d lost her 15-year-old son to gun violence just a few weeks earlier.
Johnson had no inkling at the time that the man she was hugging was her son Day’Von’s killer.
The real question is did the pro-crime Dems know what Madrigal was?
Madrigal joined community calls to shut down the juvenile justice center in favor of other approaches that emphasize counseling, and started attending youth empowerment conferences and speaking out for justice reform.
That sounds like ‘prison abolition’ and ‘restorative justice’ talk.
City Supervisor Hillary Ronen helped Johnson and her family with housing outside the city after the murder. And nearly two months after Day’Von’s killing, she also wrote a letter to a judge on behalf of Madrigal in his petition to get off probation early for a carjacking conviction.
Of course, she did.
Hillary Ronen was a strong backer or pro-crime Soros DA Chesa Boudin.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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