In July of 2020, a 64-year-old man refused to let Trenton Police Department officers into his home without a warrant.
Officers, including Nicholas Piotrowski, threw the man, Joseph Ahr, Sr., across the house’s front porch. Piotrowski and other officers, who were responding to a call about a domestic incident, slammed the elderly man face-down and pepper sprayed him at close range.
Ahr, who had just one working lung, died of respiratory failure 18 days later. (A grand jury indicted Piotrowski for misconduct last year.)
Piotrowski’s actions, which federal law enforcement officials called “egregious, unacceptable, and unlawful,” were a main example of what federal investigators described as a pattern of excessive, unconstitutional policing by officers of the Trenton Police Department.
A 45-page federal report released Thursday detailed years of excessive force and unlawful stops, searches, and arrests in Trenton. The report stems from a yearlong investigation by the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, which opened an inquiry last October after determining there could be a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional conduct at the department.
TPD’s constitutional violations, according to the report, are pervasive.
Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kristen Clarke pointed to two “proactive enforcement” units within TPD: the Violent Crimes Unit and the Street Crimes Unit.
In 2022, officers of the Street Crimes Unit approached a man and woman they suspected of buying and selling drugs. Two officers chased the man, while one officer stayed behind. The officer handcuffed the woman, threatened to pepper spray her while pulling her by the handcuffs, and searched her and her car for drugs.
The officer found nothing.
Despite that, the woman was still handcuffed in a police cruiser when the two other officers returned. When they asked the arresting officer why he detained the woman, he said, “I don’t know.”
Clarke said the proactive units committed repeated unconstitutional stops. Soon after the investigation opened, the TPD disbanded the units, a decision Clarke applauded.
But even with two aggressive units disbanded, excessive policing persisted.
Many of the same officers continued to patrol the streets of Trenton. In fact, several officers from the disbanded units staffed a newly formed “Crime Suppression Unit,” which the report said was the same kind of “proactive” unit that violated the Constitution so often.
“Additionally, the violations we observed were not confined to the disbanded units, and stem from the underlying failures in accountability, policies, training, and supervision that we identify in this report,” the report read.
According to the report, Trenton has paid more than $7 million since 2021 to resolve lawsuits against officer misconduct.
The investigation found officers used pepper spray at least 120 times from March 2020 through 2023. The report said officers regularly “spray people who pose no threat but merely challenge officers’ authority.” Such instances, the report says, clearly violate the civil rights of Trentonians.
Trenton officers regularly escalate what should be calm encounters, per the report. In one case, an officer tackled and pepper-sprayed a man who had complied with the officer’s orders up to that point.
TPD officers often pepper-sprayed people because of insults against the police, even though the First Amendment protects such remarks.
“In one case, a TPD officer in the Violent Crimes Unit got out of a police car, walked up to a man on the sidewalk, and doused him with pepper spray because the man had made provocative remarks and hand gestures toward the officer,” read the report. “After spraying the man five times, which was captured by other officers’ body-worn cameras, the officer activated his body-worn camera and yelled, ‘You want to make a threat at me? I’m locking you the f*ck up.’”
The investigators found the department’s “weak oversight reinforces TPD’s pattern of excessive force.” The report found TPD supervisors approve of nearly all uses of force and don’t effectively track the use of force by its officers.
“One officer told us that he never had a supervisor talk to him about how he might have handled a situation better,” the report said.
The investigators also found that officers repeatedly failed to follow the body-worn camera policy properly. Officers who failed to activate their cameras during the use of force (or deactivated them too early) faced little to no discipline.
The report also found don’t take public complaints about police behavior seriously. Federal officials found internal affairs investigators at TPD often didn’t attempt to reach out to members of the public who filed a complaint.
One Hispanic man who was illegally frisked filed a complaint with TPD. He heard back only once, when he received a letter telling him the incident was reviewed and the officers were cleared of wrongdoing.
“[I]t told me that they never really investigated,” he said to a Justice Department investigator. “How are you going to say you investigated, but you didn’t speak to the victim?”
Clarke and U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Philip Sellinger praised the cooperation of Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora and Police Director Steve Wilson.
“The mayor and the police director were very cooperative throughout the investigation, and we appreciated it,” Sellinger said at a press conference.
In a statement, Gusciora emphasized his support for cooperation and police accountability.
“All residents of the City of Trenton, and the thousands of people who come here to work and visit on a daily basis, want and deserve a police department which keeps them safe while upholding the rights afforded by the U.S. Constitution,” Gusciora said in a release. “Trust within the community is absolutely critical to the mission of the TPD, and the members of the TPD must work at building and rebuilding that trust every day.”
The report listed more than two dozen recommendations to eliminate unconstitutional behavior at TPD.
Recommendations include: reforms to TPD’s use of force policies and training; improved training and data collection on stops, searches, and arrests; improved accountability efforts, like body camera policy reforms and public access to complaints; and comprehensive training for supervisors.
It’s not yet clear what recommendations could be implemented. Sellinger said federal officials have begun negotiating with Trenton officials to find a “remedy” to the violations the report identified.
Perhaps the most aggressive option could be a consent decree that allows a federal monitor to oversee the police department. A similar decree took effect in 2016 in Newark, where a 2014 DOJ investigation found a city rife with civil rights violations by police. It’s too early to know where negotiations could lead, though.
Gusciora said he will work to implement the report’s recommendations as soon as possible.
“Even prior to the USDOJ review, the City and the TPD had already begun to change policies and practices that prioritize community safety, accountability, and respect for civil liberties,” the mayor said.
You can read the full report here.