NEWARK N.J. — After football practice one summer evening in 2008, a Pop Warner league coach and two of his players were driving through the Clinton Hill section of Newark when a car swerved and blocked their path. Suddenly six police officers emerged from unmarked vehicles and forced them out of their car at gunpoint.
“I felt like this: Don’t kill me, just send me to jail. Please don’t kill me,” one of the boys, Tony Ivey Jr., then 13, would later say in a videotaped interview.
The officers, members of a narcotics squad, searched the car and found nothing but football equipment. The coach had been taking the boys to get hamburgers.
The episode became known as the case of the Pop Warner Three, and it was one of more than 400 misconduct allegations cited two years later when the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey asked the Justice Department to investigate the Newark police.
Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, had swept into office in 2006 pledging a safer city through zero tolerance on crime. And while killings actually rose in his first year, over the next three they fell to historic lows. Yet grievances against the police were piling up in the city’s black wards, with allegations of racial profiling, unlawful stops and excessive force. The ACLU and local activists pressed for reforms, complaining about pushback from Booker, whose administration was promoting the plunging homicide rate.
And when the ACLU finally went public with its plea to the Justice Department, the mayor went on WNYC radio, telling an interviewer that the petition was “one of the worst ways” to bring about meaningful change. “We don’t need people who are going to frustrate, undermine and mischaracterize our agency,” he added.
Today, the mayor turned U.S. senator is running for president, building his candidacy, in no small part, on a platform of criminal justice reform that places him at the forefront of shifting national thought on questions of crime and punishment. On the campaign trail, he has made passionate pleas for expunging minor drug convictions, ending private prisons and expanding re-entry programs for the formerly incarcerated. He recently introduced legislation to remove marijuana from the federal list of controlled substances and to expunge past convictions, noting the disparate arrest rates of black and white users.
In Newark a decade ago, he was a rising-star mayor with a problem. The way he handled it may offer insights into what kind of president he would be.
Suburban-raised, Stanford-educated, Booker, 49, had begun his political career in Newark by moving into decrepit public housing to earn his inner-city bona fides, a story replayed on documentary film even before his election. When he took over City Hall with his zero-tolerance vow, he was walking a tightrope: Citizens were crying out for tougher policing, yet the crime-fighting tools he employed, including stop-and-frisk searches for drugs or weapons, ran the risk of alienating the very people he was seeking to help, especially given Newark’s searing history of police brutality.
As Booker now tells it, he was both enforcer and reformer from the first, seeking to drive down crime while transforming a department crippled by scarce resources and antique equipment, and shot through with a culture of brutality protected by an intransigent police union.
But an examination of Booker’s stewardship of the police department — based on dozens of interviews with officials and activists, Booker allies and Booker critics — suggests a mayor slow to make changes, fixated on the top-line measures of crime-fighting success while at times ceding too much authority to his police director and other aides.
“He wasn’t as hands-on as I would have been, if you will, with the department,” said Ronald L. Rice, a state senator and former Newark police officer who lost to Booker in the 2006 mayoral election.
As a new mayor navigating a city with time-hardened political powers, Booker often sought to play mediator rather than impose some of the confrontational reforms — such as an independent police monitor — that would have alienated the police union.
“The police are a political force as well as a paramilitary force. And any politician that takes on the police to stop police brutality or violations of constitutional rights — they’re going to incur the wrath of the police,” said Lawrence Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, a progressive group that protested against the police during Booker’s mayoralty.
In a recent interview, Booker described himself as intimately involved with policing, though he framed that involvement in the sort of communal, we’re-all-in-this-together terms that suffuse his campaign arguments for himself — his omnipresence at community meetings, his contact with block leaders into the wee hours of the morning, the civilian caravans he dispatched into dangerous precincts of the city.
“I don’t know how much more hands-on you could get a mayor at that point,” he said. “This was a very big priority for me in my early days. I was just pushing like you wouldn’t believe. So I was on the streets.”
Even so, he acknowledged that he should have more quickly reined in police abuses. He attributed that failure, in large part, to a reliance on “imperfect data, imperfect measures,” that erroneously showed complaints going down.
“Even as I had strived my entire life to be a force for equity, fairness, justice and opportunity, it was obvious that some of our police practices, on my watch, were undermining not only my own values but my life’s mission,” he wrote in his 2016 book, “United.”
Ultimately, the Justice Department intervened at the ACLU’s request and Booker came around, calling the investigation a “win-win” for the city. That inquiry would document a pattern of unconstitutional behavior by the Newark police: Three-quarters of pedestrian stops failed to meet the legal criteria, and blacks were at least 2.5 times more likely than whites to be stopped or arrested. The police department remains under a Justice Department consent decree.
Today, in the era of Black Lives Matter, these tactics and their outsize impact on minority communities have helped drive a broad reassessment of criminal justice policies. That has left many politicians with tough-on-crime histories, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, in a potentially awkward place. For Booker, there is an extra layer.
In the interview, he recalled how, as a young black man, he had been a police target himself. He described the episode in a column written at Stanford in 1992, after Los Angeles had erupted in fire and rage over the acquittal of three police officers in the beating of Rodney King.
Booker’s trial by police stop had come near the George Washington Bridge.
“Five police cars, six officers, surround my car, guns ready,” he wrote. “I sat shaking.” The officers told him he had fit the description of a car thief.
—Pledging Safer Streets
Newark’s policing problems date at least to the 1950s, when relations grew tense between the mostly white force and the city’s growing black population.
The combustible mix exploded in July 1967, after two officers arrested and beat a black cabdriver who had passed their double-parked patrol car. Four days of rioting and looting killed 26 people, injured more than 700 and left Newark a smoldering national symbol of urban violence and blight.
“I call police brutality in the city of Newark ‘Newark’s original sin,'” said Ronald C. Rice, a former councilman and the son of Booker’s opponent in the 2006 mayoral race.
After a campaign built on twin promises of safer streets and downtown renewal, Booker inherited that traumatic legacy, along with a high rate of violent crime — three times the state average — that made Newark among the most dangerous cities in America.
Cutting crime, and being seen cutting crime, became his obsession. He set up a BlackBerry alert for every shooting. He left a staff meeting to be with a 14-year-old struck by a stray bullet. He chased down a scissor-wielding bank thief in broad daylight.
He was already famous, a nationally recognized face from the Oscar-nominated documentary of his failed 2002 mayoral campaign, run during his tenancy at the notoriously troubled Brick Towers. His first year in office was chronicled in a Sundance documentary series, “Brick City,” and he became a regular presence in living rooms around the country: talking Newark reforms on Oprah’s couch, trading late-night jokes with Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, making frequent appearances on “The Colbert Report” and “Real Time with Bill Maher.” One blogger nicknamed him “Hollywood.” Everywhere he pointed to changes in Newark as evidence that his unique brand of positive, uplifting politics could work in this hardscrabble city.
The changes were real. During his first term, homicides fell nearly 40 percent, and reports of rape, arson and auto theft saw similar declines. It was enough for Booker to grow boastful during his 2010 state-of-the-city address.
“In Newark we are driving down crime in historic proportions,” he said, turning to the police officers in attendance. “Thank you for this tremendous, unprecedented work for public safety in our city.”
At the heart of the effort was the zero-tolerance strategy brought across the river from New York by Booker’s new police director, Garry McCarthy.
Under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York’s police department, and McCarthy with it, had embraced what is known as “broken windows” policing. The idea was that eliminating outward signs of crime, like public drunkenness and urination, loitering, graffiti and, indeed, broken windows, would reduce more serious crimes. McCarthy was also an exponent of stop-and-frisk, which would be fiercely debated in New York.
“I will enforce all laws, from traffic laws, with people speeding down our streets, to littering laws,” Booker had proclaimed in his inaugural address.
In an interview, McCarthy said he had pitched Booker on bringing this style of policing to Newark. He told of a stop two weeks into his tenure when officers frisked a man drinking on a corner and found two guns.
“So what’s the moral of the story?” McCarthy said. “If they had forgone the opportunity to intercede in the low-level event of drinking an alcoholic beverage in public, they would not have prevented a murder likely that night, because that guy was there to take his corner back.”
Both McCarthy and Booker have said that, even as their officers stopped people on the street, their approach was meant to be constructive. They said it was a way to improve community relations, much as McCarthy had sought to do as a commander in the drug-ridden Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. In the interview, Booker also pointed out that the Newark police had long used stop-and-frisk.
Rice, the former councilman, said that while he personally opposed broken-windows and stop-and-frisk policing, he understood why many of his constituents had welcomed it.
“My ward was a residential ward, and the quality-of-life issue was the most important thing,” Rice said. “People wanted to come back home and be able to live their lives in peace. They supported stop-and-frisk. They supported being aggressive with the guys on the corners and moving them away.”
But for many people in Newark, four decades after the riots, the tactics were akin to throwing gas on a smoldering fire.
“There was an exponential spike in stop-and-frisk, racial profiling, excessive force,” said Udi Ofer, the former executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey. “That’s what happened in Newark.”
— Zero-Tolerance Tactics
Travis Rattray was 15 when he got caught in the dragnet in 2010. He was waiting for a friend on the friend’s porch when four officers drove up. One got out of the car and confronted him.
“I was explaining to him what I was doing, why I was out there waiting,” Rattray recalled. “I wasn’t out here selling drugs or anything.”
The officer accused him of belligerence and smashed his head into the door, shattering the glass, then pulled him down the stairs, according to Rattray’s account. At some point, he was joined by the other officers.
“I was probably all of 110 pounds at the time, and I had two grown men trampling me with their knees while I was on the ground,” he said.
Rattray screamed for his mother, who came running from down the street to find her son handcuffed, his braces pushed through his lip.
“She had to pull braces off my lip. It was actually like stuck together,” he said. The officer faced criminal charges, but was acquitted despite a video of the beating.
“It was overzealous,” said Bishop Jethro C. James Jr., senior pastor of Paradise Baptist Church, who went on to describe “an incident I will never forget.”
It was Mother’s Day, and the police had blocked the street near his church to investigate a shooting. “The folks couldn’t get into the parking lot of my church,” he said.
The pastor started to move the barricade. “All of a sudden, this young lady in a squad car, lights on, 10:30 in the morning, says, ‘Sir, don’t touch that barricade.’ I told her the barricade could not block my entrance, and she put her hands on her weapon. She had been trained under this zero tolerance. She didn’t look like me, but she was going to shoot a pastor in front of his church.”
Booker, he said, later called him to apologize.
The lawyer for the Pop Warner Three, Avidan Y. Cover, now a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said that traffic stop was a case study of the police department’s practice of stopping vehicles, despite insufficient legal justification, in neighborhoods where drug dealing was considered common. The coach and his players eventually settled a lawsuit against the city.
“They were paying their way out of these problems, but not changing police tactics,” Cover said.
— A Barely Passing Grade
As complaints mounted, the ACLU began pushing for change.
It called for dashboard cameras in police cars, but complained that the city would commit to placing them in only 12 percent of vehicles. Misconduct complaints seemed to disappear in the police bureaucracy, but when the ACLU paid to print brochures so citizens would understand the complaint process, “testers” sent to station houses couldn’t find them, although posters describing the process were visible. In a city where the police force still skewed whiter than the population, demands for an independent police monitor were ignored.
In 2009, the ACLU issued a report card, grading Booker’s police practices as a “D.”
“Both Mayor Booker and his appointed police director, Garry McCarthy, promised the ACLU-N.J. that they would reform the city’s police practices. However, we have not seen significant improvement,” the organization said in a statement.
Booker said his efforts to stem police abuses while also fighting crime required “a massive turnaround effort on every imaginable level.”
“This was like taking over a police department that was just devastated by lack of resources, lack of investment, with a lack of professionalism in terms of the way politics ruled in the department,” he said in the interview.
Officers were still using typewriters instead of computers and filing forms in triplicate. “You have to understand. We didn’t have cars. I used to joke that they were like Flintstone cars, the ones we had, with holes in the floors,” Booker said.
He also had to contend with the police union.
“You fire a police officer for bad conduct, and then they force you to rehire them and you lose the court case,” Booker said. “I mean, this was a very frustrating time.”
“At times I felt like I was caught between trying to push really fast and having a police union that pushes back on you,” he added.
In the fall of 2010, after four years of sluggish progress, the ACLU turned to the Justice Department. Its petition cited 407 allegations that it said were indicative of police misconduct, most from Booker’s time as mayor.
Since the beginning of 2008, the petition said, 51 lawsuits had been filed against the Newark police, many claiming beatings, theft, illegal searches and threats. An additional 50 people had filed notices that they planned to sue. Of 261 complaints filed with the department’s internal affairs unit, only one had been upheld.
The petition, Booker wrote in his book, “felt like a stab in the back.” In the interview with The Times, he said his public criticism of the ACLU was born of a frustration that the organization took its complaint to Washington, rather than working with him behind the scenes to address the problems.
“I felt we were working together, and that’s why I was sort of caught off guard by the actual complaint,” Booker said. “We share the same goals, ultimately.”
He pointed to the many public safety reforms he was instituting that went beyond just the police department: “senior citizen groups working with police, a police-clergy alliance, the changes we were making in our court systems.”
“It was very much this idea that the way we deal with these problems is build community,” he said.
But to some officials in Newark, such initiatives — and the mayor’s media-grabbing derring-do — had taken precedence over the practical details.
“His management style was in contrast with his public image that he was creating by going into a fire, by going into a shooting, or being followed by a camera,” said Augusto Amador, a member of Newark’s city council.
Booker, he said, had erred by taking the word of subordinates that things in the police department were fine. “I think that, in a sense, contrasted with the fact that the city was not being run properly, and the problems we had in the police department reflected that.”
— ‘Win-Win’ Situation
Ofer, the ACLU official, said he was not sure that Booker fully understood the implications of his broken-windows policy at the outset, and he credited Booker with coming around.
“It’s definitely fair to say that after the filing of the ACLU petition but before the Justice Department concluded its investigation, something clicked,” said Ofer, who is now the ACLU’s deputy national political director. “I don’t know if he was just persuaded by the petition.”
As Booker tells it in his book, there was another factor: his chief of staff, Modia Butler, who sat him down in the mayor’s office and told him that he had grown blind to some of his constituents’ complaints.
“If I stepped out of my crime-fighting bubble and was once again just another young black guy, I would not only embrace a comprehensive investigation, I’d be demanding it,” Booker recalled Butler telling him. The message was punctuated with a blunt assessment: “I had my head up my large black posterior region.”
Butler also sold the potential Justice Department intervention as a blessing — “millions of dollars’ worth of free consulting” — for an underfunded department that had just laid off 13 percent of its force.
As he digested the ACLU complaint, Booker realized that he was missing ground-level data on the community impact of broken-windows policing in Newark.
“I had established no reliable analytics on these types of issues,” he wrote. “At a time when I was fond of using that old saying, ‘In God we trust, but everyone else bring me data,’ I was making the critical mistake of not looking at good data on police-community relations and misconduct. I was confusing activity with progress.”
So when the Justice Department announced that it would be investigating allegations that police brutality, baseless searches, intimidation and false arrests had become commonplace in Newark, the mayor held a news conference and changed his tune.
“Please come in,” he said. “We encourage you, we’re asking you, we’re welcoming you.”
— A Work in Progress
As crime rose in his second term after controversial cuts to the police department to shore up a sagging budget, Booker endorsed a civilian review panel. In what would be his final state-of-the-city address in 2013, he conceded that he had fought with council members on creating the board, but had been won over.
“It is my vision that this citizen-led police oversight panel will help us to make Newark a model for police-community trust, respect, cooperation and, ultimately, safety,” he said.
Booker was elected to the Senate seven months later. In 2015, his successor, Ras J. Baraka, issued an executive order creating the Civilian Complaint Review Board, though the police union recently won a lawsuit stripping it of subpoena power.
In January, the Justice Department’s independent monitor issued a status report on the police department. The reform process, it wrote, is still a work in progress: While community meetings and trainings are improving, the department’s data systems “continue to contain critical deficiencies.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.