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.
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.
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.
—Pledging Safer Streets
After a campaign built on twin promises of safer streets and downtown renewal, Booker inherited 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.
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.
But for many people in Newark, 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.
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.
— ‘Win-Win’ Situation
Ofer, the ACLU official, 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.”
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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.