By David Cruz
Correspondent
Mayor Ras Baraka is attempting to walk a fine line between establishing public confidence in a police department burdened with a history of civil rights abuses and getting that police department to help fight a crime problem that is keeping the city from realizing its full potential.
“Unfortunately we have seen some serious issues within the department that have resulted in a Department of Justice investigation and the appointment of a federal monitor to ensure that needed reforms are carried out,” Baraka said.
A DOJ report in July laid bare a pattern of harassment and racial profiling that many long-time Newarkers began to accept as a regular course of business, but, in establishing a Civilian Complaint Review Board by executive order, Baraka said he really hopes to change the way the department does business.
“There’s a lot of talk about individual misconduct but what we really wanna stress is that we’re going to be focusing a lot on patterns and practices and systems that are in place, or not in place, in the department that allow for patterns and practices that are egregious to take place,” he said.
Five members of the nine-person board will come from the city’s largest community organizations — the ACLU, NAACP, La Casa De Don Pedro, Ironbound Community Corporation and the People’s Organization for Progress.
The city council will appoint three members and the mayor’s inspector general will serve as chairperson of the board. Long-time community activist Larry Hamm, who heads the People’s Organization for Progress, says the CCRB is overdue.
“It’s a long time coming. I think the executive order is moving in the right direction. What we need and one important piece was that this review board would have subpoena power but the other important piece is to make discipline stick, to be actually able to discipline officers,” Hamm said.
A lot of this executive order is still evolving. The mayor said he’ll sign officially in 30 days. But as it stands now, final discipline will be the decision of the police director based on recommendations from the CCRB, which will use a matrix that the city is developing that will determine appropriate discipline. The mayor said he had spoken to the Justice Department about the board and got their clearance to go forward. Absent from today’s announcement was the police union, which has had a troubled relationship with the Baraka administration. The union did not return our calls for comment today. The consensus among the community groups represented here was that the mayor is on the right track but not at the finish line.
“The CCRB should have the finding of the facts. They should have final say on what the facts of a particular case are and the mayor said that there’s still room to talk about the threshold the police director can use to shoot down cases, so we’re looking for more clarity on what that threshold should be,” said ACLU-NJ Community Organizer Rashawn Davis.
This executive order will take effect in 30 days after a period of public input, but the mayor says today he’d like to see the city council pass an ordinance giving it the force of law.