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DOJ Charges Trenton Police With Misconduct, Seeks Consent Decree

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The Justice Department said a 13-month civil rights investigation found that the police force in Trenton, N.J., engaged in systemic misconduct, and authorities sought to offer reassurance that federal efforts to bring greater law enforcement accountability in that city and others would persist. Investigators said that officers in the Trenton Police Department have regularly made arrests without a legal basis and escalated encounters through aggressive tactics, including using pepper spray on people not posing a threat. The department failed to hold officers accountable for violating department protocols, DOJ said. Trenton has paid $7 million since 2021 to resolve lawsuits, and the police department disbanded two specialized units accused of some of the misconduct, but federal officials said the unlawful tactics have continued, reports the Washington Post.


Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke described one encounter in which Trenton officers slammed a 64-year-old man face-first onto his own front porch and pepper-sprayed him after he refused to let them search his house without a warrant. Police searched the residence anyway and did not find any illicit drugs or weapons, Clarke said, and the man died at a hospital 18 days later of respiratory failure caused by the confrontation. “This conduct is egregious, unacceptable and unlawful,” Clarke said. Clarke and U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger said negotiations for an agreement between federal officials and Trenton leaders, who cooperated with the probe, to take remedial measures aimed at ending the misconduct would begin immediately. Typically, such agreements take the form of a legally binding consent decree that would require the police to pursue sweeping changes under supervision of a federal monitor. President-elect Trump has pledged to abandon President Biden’s broad intervention into local policing, calling it federal overreach.

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