BY BRETT POUSER
The Atlantic City Police
Department was ordered by a U.S. District judge in December to hand over all
internal affairs reports regarding a 2010 excessive force lawsuit in order to
determine if the city has been “deliberately indifferent to the violent
propensities of its officers,” said Judge Joel Schneider in a
mycentraljersey.com article.
This investigation is
indicative of a larger trend in New Jersey; complaints of brutality are
routinely ignored or the offending officers are almost always exonerated. In
fact, just one percent of all excessive force complaints made in central New
Jersey are actually acted upon, even when many of the officers involved have
previous complaints made against them numbering in the dozens, reported
thinkprogress.org.
The number of police misconduct
complaints sustained in New Jersey is seven percent lower than the national
average.
Here are three potential
reasons:
1. FLAWS IN INTERNAL AFFAIRS
PROCEDURES
Internal affairs units serve as
a buffer between officers and lawsuits, insulating them from accountability.
Recently, this has become a hot button issue with several high-profile police
brutality cases making their way to federal court.
The concern is that internal
affairs, responsible for investigating excessive force and misconduct
complaints, has a bias towards protecting the actions of abusive officers. This
is what led the ACLU to draft a petition against the city of Newark in 2010,
accusing it of widespread misconduct in its handling of internal affairs,
according to nj.com. A year after the ACLU’s petition, the city’s police
department was placed under a federal watchdog monitor, a first in the state’s
history.
2. CULTURE OF BRUTALITY AND
CORRUPTION
The ACLU has accused the Newark
Police Department of fostering a culture of brutality among its officers so
“widespread and grave that they warrant outside Federal intervention,” said
ACLU Executive Director Udi Ofer in an nj.com article. The ineffectiveness of
internal affairs units to sustain brutality complaints could be the result of
this violent streak present in police departments across the state.
And this violent propensity is
seen at all levels. Corruption charges have been levied at leading police
officials across the state, according to a northjersey.com article. In March
Anthony Ferraioli, former Hackensack PBA president, along with another officer
plead guilty to charges of aggravated assault of a Hackensack resident during questioning
in 2011.
3. ILLEGITIMATE CLAIMS
Complaints revolving around the
poor performance of internal affairs units have been met with opposition by
police officials. Newark Police Director Garry McCarthy in 2010 insisted that
the numbers don’t prove anything, arguing in an nj.com article that “drug
dealers make allegations against police officers everyday to stop them from
doing their job.” But although it is theoretically possible that the low
numbers are due illegitimate complaints, executive-director of the ACLU New
Jersey at the time, Deborah Jacobs, fired back at McCarthy saying “you’re going
to tell me 200 people made internal affairs complaints and the majority made it
up? That doesn’t make sense.”
The discrepancy between
national and state figures indicates a real problem with how New Jersey Police
deal with complaints of excessive force. Whether this is due to illegitimate
claims of police brutality or because of problems with internal affairs
procedures and a culture of brutality and corruption has yet to be determined.