By Michael Hill
Correspondent
Camden County Police fired Officer Douglas Dickinson after a camera captured his violent encounter with Quinzelle Bethea last November. Dickinson is awaiting trial for assault and filing a false report that accused Bethea of resisting.
While Bethea spent 13 days in jail, the department began building a case against Dickinson and 18 of his cases have been dismissed.
Young Urban Leaders Director Sean Brown of Camden told this Department of Justice community policing forum at the Newark Public Library that some credit goes to other officers for stepping forward.
“And I hope that there’s a culture, and I see evidence of it, a culture that you’re not going to have bad actors because they know that they’re not going to be protected by their brothers and sisters in the department,” Brown said.
“In my view, this is the issue of the day. How we deal with the tensions in law enforcement and the communities that we serve,” said U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Among those listening, Lynch. She said tense police-community relationships have led to violent and deadly encounters. Lynch called this a time of opportunity — past a history of denials.
“And we all know those denials — ‘You must have misunderstood; it can’t be that bad; no one would actually do that.’ So we all know those. Now we’re at a point where we’re facing reality of the frayed trust between law enforcement and the community and so we’re able to move past that discussion and talk about what do we do about it,” Lynch said.
The Newark Police Department is among those ordered to reform and under a federal monitor. Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose said within two years, all Newark officers will have body cameras and all patrol cars will have dashboard cameras. The mayor says the department is reforming.
“I would say in the last two years we have in Newark accomplished a lot — not enough — but a lot more than we have accomplished in last 20 or 30 years around this issue,” said Mayor Ras Baraka.
The cameras are among the reforms advocates have insisted would improve policing.
“My past colleague at LDF Sherrilyn Ifill is fond of saying that there is not a golden era of trust in most communities of color to which we should seek to return, but what this moment requires of us is that we imagine a new relationship,” said New Jersey Institute for Social Justice President and CEO Ryan Haygood.
When it comes to improving police-community relations, we asked AG Lynch what needs to change more: how people respond to the police or how police respond to the communities they serve.
“And I think we have to take every opportunity to make sure that those interactions are well trained, that they’re informed by the best practices in how to manage situations,” she said.
Lynch said frank talk on the issue can be hard to do, but clearly needs to be had.