By Guy Sterling, Newark, N.J. Star-Ledger
A Newark, N.J. police officer’s courtroom admission last week that he and five colleagues shook down drug dealers for hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for almost two years has left community activists and police brass concerned about the department’s image and ability to do its job.
But as troubling as the allegations Tyrone Dudley made in Superior Court in Trenton on Thursday may be, the case is only one of several legal headaches the Newark Police Department is experiencing.
In addition to the case involving Dudley:
# The state Division of Criminal Justice is investigating whether one or more Newark police officers is connected to the fatal shooting of a Nutley man near a club on Bloomfield Avenue two years ago.
# The division also is checking whether a female officer may have protected a drug dealer who was her boyfriend.
# On Friday, a federal judge in Newark castigated the department’s handling of a reputed drug dealer in jail on narcotics charges and set the man free, saying his constitutional rights were severely abused when he was arrested in 2002.
The cases have left Newark Police Director Anthony Ambrose, who took over the department’s top job in April, disappointed but vowing to clean up the mess.
“It’s a shame for the citizens and for the police officers who come to work every day to do an honest job, but we’re not going to sit back and tolerate it,” he said.
The department will analyze everything from the way it recruits officers to how complaints against police are handled, Ambrose promised. Just within the past couple of weeks, he said, he and Police Chief Irving Bradley have beefed up the internal affairs and professional standards units.
Ambrose said Newark police “need to pull together the rank- and-file and move forward. We need to look at how this occurred and come up with reforms.”
On Friday, Ambrose asked Essex County Prosecutor Paula Dow to investigate claims that accused drug dealer David Santos was mistreated by the department’s anti-theft task force when he was taken into custody two years ago.
Michael Wagers, director of the Police Institute at Rutgers University in Newark, said officials are wise to seek outside help in such instances because “it instills confidence that their investigations are aboveboard.”
Wagers said the current probes do not indicate any systemic problem with the department, and that all organizations have bad apples that need to be rooted out. In fact, he gave the department high marks for getting officers into visible crime- fighting positions, saying it has built up a reservoir of goodwill with the community.
When law enforcement agencies have troubles similar to the ones in Newark, they often come in bunches and are offset by long stretches with no major problems, Wagers added.
Jack McEntee, president of Lodge 12 of the Fraternal Order of Police, the union local that represents most Newark police officers, said it has been a quarter- century since the last major scandal involving a group of officers.
John Hagerty, a Criminal Justice spokesman, said the Newark police investigations have focused on fewer than a dozen cops operating individually. The division has welcomed the cooperation of Newark internal affairs officers, he said, though state investigators also developed information on their own.
McEntee also cautioned against allowing the actions of a few to tarnish the reputation of the 1,900-member department.
In pleading guilty to official misconduct, theft and other charges, Dudley, 37, implicated five other officers who have been reassigned and also are subjects of internal investigations.
Lawrence Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, an Essex County-based activist organization, called Dudley’s behavior unfortunate because it will “diminish the stature of the police in the eyes of the community.”
He said police departments can minimize misconduct by upgrading education and sensitivity training programs, and he had no doubt that the creation of civilian police review boards also would help keep abusive cops in check.
Illegal activity by police also can haunt law enforcement when criminal cases are tried, because potential jurors may develop a bias when they read about officers breaking the law, said Sebastian Bio, a defense attorney who regularly handles cases in Superior Court in Newark.
“As a result of these latest allegations, jurors may decide not to give an officer on the stand the benefit of the doubt if a discrepancy arises in the testimony,” he said. “You try to weed that out in jury selection, but it’s not always possible.”