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Police brutality in New Jersey can be stopped. Here's how.

The police oversight system that is supposed to keep citizens and police officers safe from rogue cops has glaring gaps.

Kala Kachmar and

Andrew Ford, Asbury Park Press

Published 4:00 a.m. ET Jan. 22, 2018 | Updated 10:56 a.m. ET Jan. 31, 2018


This is a part of “Protecting The Shield” – a two-year Asbury Park Press investigation that probes gaps in police accountability, which can harm citizens and cost New Jersey taxpayers millions of dollars.

Since 2010, more than $42 million in taxpayer money has been paid quietly to settle allegations of police abuse ranging from deaths to harassment.

PROTECTING THE SHIELD: Read our investigative series

The police oversight system that is supposed to keep citizens and police officers safe from rogue cops has glaring gaps. Without change, millions more taxpayer dollars will be spent to keep under wraps claims of excessive force and abuse of police powers.

In its two-year investigation of New Jersey's system for police accountability, the Asbury Park Press identified five critical areas that police leaders and state lawmakers can address immediately to protect the public from bad cops, build public confidence in police work, curb the public cost of litigation and ensure the safety of the men and women in law enforcement who risk their lives every day. Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver speaks during the inauguration ceremony in Trenton, N.J., Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
(Photo: Seth Wenig, AP)

More: Meet the reporters behind 'Protecting the Shield' live Feb. 12

Change has happened recently on a small scale. Consider:

Lt. Governor Sheila Oliver has called on the Attorney General's office to investigate all police-involved shootings. In most cases, county officials investigate such deaths.

"I think that the public is deserving of transparency," Oliver said.

"I think there is great interest in doing social justice reform and criminal justice reform in this state," she told the Press shortly before the November election.

Here are five ways New Jersey's police accountability system can be fixed:

1. End secret settlements and ban 'no talk' clauses

THE PROBLEM: Millions of tax dollars are spent each year to settle allegations of police abuses. These settlements are generally made behind closed doors with insurance carriers. In other cases, rogue officers are quietly pushed off the police force with secret separation agreements that offer incentives for a quiet departure and assurances that the town will not give a bad reference for future policing jobs. In nearly all cases, once a settlement is made, the victims of police abuse are banned from telling their stories due to confidentiality agreements towns require in each settlement. This impedes reform if the problem cannot be discussed openly.

THE SOLUTION: Make it a law that all settlements and separation agreements with public bodies are openly announced at public meetings and advertised in legal notices, as if the town passed a new ordinance. Once the public can see the allegations, the cost of the settlement and the names of the defendants, reform will follow.

Change happened in Tinton Falls because a secret settlement became public.

When 93-year-old WWII veteran Vito Perillo learned from a Press story last year about the $1.1 million police payout in the township, he got involved in politics.

"That's what ticked me off, actually," he said of the lawsuits. Tinton Falls Mayor Elect and World War II Veteran Vito Perillo, 93, in his home in Tinton Falls on Nov. 8, 2017.
(Photo: Dan Radel/Staff Photo)

He ran for mayor, channeling frustration about the whistleblower settlements as part of his platform. He defeated Gerald Turning Sr., a powerhouse incumbent and former police chief who headed the department at the time of the internal police allegations. The town made no admission of wrongdoing in the settlement.

Modest police reforms will be part of Perillo's administration, he said. He's interviewed
borough administrator candidates who have experience with law enforcement and salary negotiations.

Members of two close families, including the Turning family, occupy several positions of power in town, and Perillo said he might put rules on the books to limit nepotism.

The defeat of an entrenched politician by a plucky idealist shows how change in New Jersey towns is possible when the public is aware of what their government is doing. Perillo rode a wave of taxpayer outrage into office.

The taxpayers have every right to know how their tax money is being spent, said open records advocate John Paff, who writes a blog and occasionally sues towns for public documents. "I think it's against public policy for the town to insist: ‘We'll pay you some money, but you've got to keep quiet about how much money you got.'"

Andover Township has an ordinance requiring an announcement when lawsuits against the township are settled, a standard Paff considered a strong model for the state.

"I think litigation is really important," Paff said. "It's not just the money, it illustrates or it brings to the public attention allegations of wrongdoing by a municipal official."

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED: Ask your town leaders to adopt an Andover-like sunshine ordinance. Use the Open Public Records Act to force your local officials to reveal all lawsuit settlements for the last five years if they won't tell you. And ask the governor and your local lawmakers if they will support a bill to make all agreements publicly known.

2. Beef up internal affairs oversight

THE PROBLEM: Who oversees the overseers? More than 64,000 complaints from residents and other officers were filed with police internal affairs departments across the state since 2010. Most complaints were dismissed, the Press found. Any detail on the outcomes is not available to the public unless the officers were charged with crimes.

Record keeping was also shoddy, with summary reports sent to prosecutors that sometimes don't add up. Prosecutors seldom look at internal affairs unless an officer commits a crime or some other legal issue calls for a higher level of oversight.

New Jersey boasts some of the strongest internal affairs guidelines in the country, experts say, but the policies are meaningless without enforcement and oversight by an outside agency. There are 466 municipal police departments in the state, most with 23 or fewer officers. 

Because the internal affairs process is secret, where officers investigate fellow officers, an investigation can be abused as a weapon to taint or fire political rivals within a department, said Edison Police Chief Thomas Bryan, who said he was once on the political end of an internal affairs investigation that led to a suspension.

THE SOLUTION: Citizens and officers alike would be kept safer if prosecutors' offices conducted audits of investigations, improved training resources and standardized internal affairs training, procedures and punishment.

"In reality, the attorney general puts out this model policy, but it's almost like for show if they don't conduct some kind of audit," said Lou Reiter, who retired as deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1981 and trains police departments all over the country on internal affairs best practices. "The attorney general (in New Jersey) leaves a lot of the power to the county prosecutors."

Internal affairs failures can lead to abused citizens, create public distrust in police officers, waste taxpayer dollars and ruin careers with bad results, like falsified records and malicious prosecution, said Robert Bianchi, the former Morris County Prosecutor and a practicing civil rights and police practices attorney.

"If you don't do an investigation with integrity, in anything you do, you can skew results. I've seen the IA function used by some larger departments as a political tool," Bianchi said. "If you're on the ‘A' team, you can do whatever you want and IA will protect you. If you're on the ‘B' team, you could have a slight violation and they will find a way to get you out of the department."

Leaders in the Bloomfield Police Department, which since 2015 has undergone top-to-bottom reform and changed its culture of misconduct, have taken a proactive approach to accountability, Public Safety Director Samuel DeMaio said.

DeMaio created internal review boards that, on a monthly basis, assess all use of force reports, accidents and police pursuits.

“Those review boards are invaluable – and not just because it gives us a snapshot of what the officers are doing," DeMaio said. "Having that board forces the commanders of the department to watch the body camera video, watch the dash cam video, read the reports, review the reports and look for problems – for every police pursuit, every motor vehicle accident, every police assault."

Since 2015, demeanor complaints against officers have been reduced by 39 percent, he said.

New Jersey needs a strong attorney general to set the vision and the tone for police accountability, Bianchi said. That includes making sure prosecutors' offices staff individuals who understand criminal law, civil rights law and police practices.

"To me, it's not that the rules have to change that much; it's just that you have to have the right people in place," Bianchi said.

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED: Call the attorney general's office, the governor's office, your lawmakers and your local town leaders to ask if:

"Why does it have to take a citizen being killed, or a cop that goes to jail because of official misconduct?" Bianchi said. "That's the thing that confounds me from a policy level. This should be coming from the top-down."

3. Mandatory random drug testing

THE PROBLEM: More than one million citizens are at risk of having an encounter with an impaired police officer because more than 100 municipal police departments have no random drug testing policy in place.

THE SOLUTION: With a one-word change in policy, the state attorney general could require random substance abuse testing of all police officers, a minimal safety standard many other professions take for granted.

Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato requires 20 percent of the police officers in the county to be randomly tested each year. He said at the very least the state should have a minimum standard for drug testing. Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato
(Photo: Staff photo by Andrew Ford)

"It goes back to the integrity of the police officer, the integrity of the system," Coronato said.

Monmouth County has no policy, but a Monmouth County Prosecutor Office spokesman said the office would formulate one after the Press raised the issue in September. No policy has been announced so far.

On average, one of 10 working adults are affected by drug or alcohol addiction, according to Dr. Lawrence J. Guzzardi, of Wilmington, Delaware, who testifies in court as a medical expert.

Guzzardi said an officer's risks of substance abuse can be triggered by high stress, rotating work shifts that affect sleep patterns, greater access to narcotics and impunity from the consequences of their actions, like getting a pass from fellow officers when caught driving while intoxicated.

Illegal drug use by officers isn't the only problem, said Matthew Guller, a veteran police psychologist with the Institute for Forensic Psychology, a company that hundreds of police departments in New Jersey use for pre-employment screening and mid-career fitness for duty evaluations.

With no uniform requirement to report prescription drug use to departments, officers in New Jersey are regularly being prescribed opioids, sedatives, anti-anxiety medications, testosterone and other controlled substances, Guller said.

One officer Guller said he recently evaluated fell off a ladder, hurt his back and became hooked on oxycodone. The injury wasn't work-related, so the opioid use was never reported to his department, Guller said.

A few months later, the officer told his doctor the pills weren't cutting it, so he was prescribed a skin patch that constantly feeds opioids into the body.

"He was on the midnight shift, driving around night after night stoned out of his mind on opioids," Guller said.

The chief eventually caught wind that the officer had called in sick and was slurring his words. The officer was sent to Guller for an evaluation, but there was no mechanism in place to require that any officer notify the department about taking potentially dangerous medications.

"Random drug testing with punitive measures is effective at weeding out problematic individuals," Guzzardi said. "But random drug testing with therapeutic intervention is a very effective way of dealing with people who have drug and alcohol problems."

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED: Call the Attorney General's Office at 609-292-4925 and raise this issue about mandating random drug testing in all departments. Talk to your municipality's governing body and police chief about its policy for random drug testing for police officers. Use this interactive map to see if your town randomly tests officers.

4. Implement a statewide early warning system

THE PROBLEM: Domestic and discipline issues involving cops can turn deadly.

The fatal 2015 shooting of Tamara Wilson Seidle by her enraged ex-husband, former Neptune Police Sgt. Philip Seidle, exposed a critical flaw in police oversight statewide when it came to domestic issues, according to a special report issued by Monmouth County Prosecutor Chris Gramiccioni in 2016. Freehold Attorney Thomas J. Mallon has represented scores of excessive force plaintiffs. He says police brutality becomes part of the culture in certain police departments, a tactic passed down from one generation to the next. Andrew Ford | Ryan Ross

Gramiccioni has implemented an early warning system that flags officers for review by the prosecutor's office if they are: involved in a domestic violence incident; are sent for a fitness for duty evaluation; disarmed by the chief; subject to three citizen complaints within six months; or similar incidents.

Since the implementation of the policy in June 2016, the office has received 29 notifications, Gramiccioni said in September. Flagged officers are reviewed by the prosecutor's staff, First Assistant Prosecutor Lori Linskey said. There are roughly 1,900 police officers in Monmouth County, according to pension data.

There may be an independent investigation by the prosecutor's office, or they may make recommendations based on discussions with the officer's department. In one example, Linskey said an officer who had numerous citizen complaints was sent for additional training.

Outside Monmouth County, much of New Jersey remains a patchwork of varying standards that largely depend on the individual vigilance of the leaders of the hundreds of municipal police agencies in the state.

A good early warning system, which can be a "powerful accountability tool," should track more than just complaints against officers, according to Samuel Walker, a professor who studies police early intervention at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Flagging use of force incidents and resisting arrest or obstruction charges can be indicators that an officer has violent tendencies. Excessive use of sick leave can be an indicator of substance abuse, he said.

The data has to be accurate and timely to be effective, Walker said, but most importantly, leaders need to have an accountability mindset.

"You have to understand what the system can do and why it's important," he said.

The president of the County Prosecutors Association of New Jersey, Warren County Prosecutor Richard Burke, said most New Jersey prosecutors have implemented an early warning system policy like Monmouth County's, though he couldn't be specific as to how many or what those policies entailed.

"I think that's a good idea to have them," Burke said of early warning policies. "Have some early warning types of criteria you can take a look at for these people and help them before there's any issues that arise."

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED: Report any possible police abuse or domestic violence you may know about to the local police department or county prosecutor's office. The law allows you to remain anonymous. If the police department will not take your anonymous complaint, file with the county or the state Attorney General's office.

5. Ban problem officers

THE PROBLEM: Bad cops, unless they are convicted in court, can move from department to department. There is no method for decertifying a rogue cop.

Nearly all other states have a process to ban problem cops. Florida even makes its list of bad cops public.

THE SOLUTION: The state already bans officers from policing who fail drug tests. A similar list could be made for officers determined to be unfit to serve.

Burke, president of the County Prosecutors Association, approved of such a list and supports a national registry of banned cops. After two Bloomfield Police officers went to prison for official misconduct, tampering with public records, falsifying records and false swearing, new leaders have made major reforms to the department. Kala Kachmar | Andrew Ford

"If there was a central registry somewhere, once it was determined by the normal course of events here in New Jersey that someone should not be a police officer anymore and there's a central place that somebody could go throughout the state, throughout the country to look, that would be great," Burke said.

The executive director of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police approved of a system of greater scrutiny to ban problem cops.

"We have long sought some sort of agreement to come up with a rational system, going back probably 18 years," Mitchell C. Sklar said. "We obviously want a fair, equitable robust system. But there should be a way for those few bad apples to be weeded out as long as their due process rights are complied with."

States like Delaware and Florida have statewide systems for scrutinizing problem cops.

"If you can't cut it as a cop we want you decertified," said Jeffrey Horvath, executive director of the Delaware Police Chief's Council. "If you're unethical or immoral, we don't want you in this line of work."

The threat that a powerful state agency could revoke a cop's certificate, sometimes called a "ticket," can improve officer behavior.

"Because you know that there's this set of eyes that control your ticket and if your ticket's pulled, you cannot earn a living anywhere in the state of Florida as a law enforcement officer," said Michael D'Angelo, a retired police captain who served 23 years in South Miami and now testifies as an expert in court.

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED: Contact the governor and local lawmakers to let them know your feelings about a police decertification process.

Contacts for this series

Gov. Phil Murphy: 609-292-6000, or email through http://nj.gov/governor/contact/
Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver: 609-292-6000, or email through http://nj.gov/governor/contact/
Attorney General Gurbir Grewal: 609-292-4925 or email through http://www.state.nj.us/lps/email.htm


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