Police in New Jersey’s Capital Violate Residents’ Rights, U.S. Finds

Police officers in Trenton, N.J., systematically violate the constitutional rights of the city’s residents, conduct illegal searches and needlessly escalate peaceful interactions into violence, the U.S. Department of Justice found in a report published Thursday.

Even as former prosecutors and experts in civil rights law question whether President-elect Donald J. Trump will suspend federal efforts to reform police departments around the country, a yearlong investigation by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and Philip R. Sellinger, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, documented several cases in which the police in Trenton had caused the deaths of innocent people.

In one event described in the 45-page report, police officers encountered an unarmed man as he ran shirtless around a hospital parking lot. The officers pepper-sprayed him, tackled and handcuffed him and then took turns pressing their knees into his back as they pushed his face into a patch of mulch.

The man cried, “I can’t breathe,” and, “I’m going to die.” After more than four minutes, he grew still, the report said. Doctors later pronounced him dead. The man was not identified, but the details match the case of Stephen Dolceamore, 29, of Springfield, Pa., which was reported by NJ Advance Media. He died on April 3, 2020, seven weeks before George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis.

“As I read through the report, it broke my heart,” said the Rev. Charles Boyer, a pastor with the Greater Mount Zion A.M.E. Church in Trenton. “It also made me angry. But it was no surprise.”

Police officers in Trenton regularly commit illegal stops, searches and arrests of pedestrians and drivers, the report found, and use physical force and pepper spray indiscriminately. Those practices are exacerbated by the department’s leadership, which actively discourages residents from filing complaints about police abuses and “ignores officer misconduct in plain sight,” the report found.