How local lawyers helped the feds expose civil rights violations by two notorious Trenton police crime units

Twenty years ago, defense attorney Robin Lord spotted a trend among cases involving a certain Trenton police officer. 

“His M.O. was, if they ran, they got a beating,” she told The Jersey Vindicator. 

She brought her concerns to local prosecutors but left a meeting convinced that nothing would happen.

“I’m done,” she remembers thinking. “We’ll just make money off of them.” 

It would be 2023 before the U.S. Department of Justice took notice of the problems and launched an investigation.

Federal authorities turned to Lord and other members of Trenton’s legal community for help uncovering what a federal public defender had called a “disturbing pattern of unconstitutional conduct” by Trenton police officers.

The description appeared in a motion filed in federal court years before the U.S. Attorney launched an investigation. 

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The nearly 1,000 pages of records in the case were among the reams of documents obtained by federal officials that powered their investigation. The conclusion was a blistering 45-page report released Nov. 21 covering five years of police misconduct.

Federal authorities also reviewed police data and body-camera footage, and conducted dozens of interviews with people steered to them by city lawyers and advocacy groups.

“This is your ‘E! True Hollywood Story,'” Austin Edwards, president of Trenton’s NAACP, told the 20 people he escorted to interviews over the past year at the Clarkson S. Fisher courthouse in Trenton. “Tell your piece.”

They sang. Finally, New Jersey is listening. But it’s an all-too-familiar tune for those in the know in Trenton.

Since 2021, the city has paid out $7 million in legal settlements, a fraction of a long-running tab city taxpayers have footed for police misconduct. 

The federal review found that Trenton police engaged in a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional policing, including conducting illegal searches and using excessive force on residents who weren’t resisting arrests or didn’t pose a threat. 

Some residents were paralyzed, maimed, or killed during encounters with officers, including a woman at a soup kitchen bludgeoned with a police radio and a Pennsylvania man whose dying words echoed George Floyd’s in Minneapolis. Lord represents the family of a 64-year-old man, Joseph Ahr, who died weeks after being pepper-sprayed by police officer Nicholas Piotrowski. Ahr’s case is mentioned in the federal report but not by name.

Yet during the five-year period in question, 2018-2023, internal affairs investigators for the Trenton Police Department “did not sustain a single allegation” that officers used excessive force or conducted illegal stops and arrests. 

Federal authorities shined a light on many examples in their report. But left untold are countless other harrowing stories, shared by defense attorneys and activists, about people who were falsely accused of crimes, had their homes ransacked in overzealous drug raids, or were harassed on the streets for being Black.

“Historical disrespect,” is the way longtime activist Darren “Freedom” Green puts it. “I’m looking for the Trenton police department to acknowledge” their wrongs.

A vicious cycle

Prominent community members say the report changes little in New Jersey’s capital city. They are skeptical that reform will happen.

Once an industrious hub of steel and pottery manufacturing, Trenton, which has a population of just over 89,000 people, is now one of the most dangerous small cities in America. The violence in the city has contributed to the crippling of its economy. Trenton is one of New Jersey’s poorest cities. Its poverty rate is about double the poverty rate for the state. Nearly half of the City’s children live in poverty, and more than half of Trenton households are headed by one parent. 

The recent loss of Starbucks underscored Trenton’s perennial inability to attract and retain outside business. Flocks of state workers empty out of the downtown at quitting time, many driving across the river to Pennsylvania. The state’s sprawling footprint in Trenton deprives the city of nearly $70 million in much-needed tax revenue, about the amount the city spends on public safety.

Neighborhoods are dotted with boarded-up buildings, some serving as stash houses for gun and drug traffickers. Warring neighborhood cliques have replaced organized gangs, recruiting young teenagers into their ranks. 

Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora once compared the dynamics to “Lord of the Flies,” a harrowing tale of schoolboys surviving on a deserted island. 

Groups commit escalating acts of violence against rivals, looking to burnish their reputations on the streets. City officials are getting a better handle on crime after a 2022 spate of bloodshed that gave Trenton the dubious distinction of being the murder capital of New Jersey. 

But some law enforcement officials worry that gains could just be part of a vicious cycle: Those involved in the violence died or are imprisoned, paving the way for a fresh crop of criminals to emerge in their place. 

Some Trentonians are so apathetic about the cycle of violence and police brutality that “a report is just like reading the news,” said Michael Ranallo, a blogger who hosts a popular online civic forum, Trenton Orbit.

And the findings could soon become meaningless unless federal authorities negotiate a consent decree with Trenton before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Gusciora told The Jersey Vindicator a consent decree was not out of the “realm of possibilities.” 

Attorney General Merrick Garland opened more than a dozen pattern or practice investigations into police departments across the country. But Trump has pledged to end what he views as federal intrusion into local policing. 

Trenton officials say they plan to adopt federal authorities’ recommendations, including improving training and supervision. 

Few believe those changes can reform a police department accustomed to following what one former violent crimes unit supervisor described to investigators as a “paramilitary” style of policing.

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Alpha squad

Scattered throughout the federal report are dozens of references to two proactive policing units — violent crimes and street crimes, which Trenton officials disbanded last year after federal authorities announced their probe of the department. 

Both squads cycled through “different names over the years,” per the report. But their behavior cemented their reputation among Trentonians as heavy-handed. 

Some residents called the officers from the two units “the Denzels,” — as in the corrupt detective Denzel Washington played in “Training Day.” Other names include the “jump-out boys,” “mean green,” “cowboys” and “the alpha squad.” 

The squads operated with machismo and a sense of impunity that was embedded in the department’s culture. Their mandate: go after the “worst of the worst,” as a former supervisor told The Trentonian. 

Top brass favored aggressive officers, who would rise through the ranks by racking up gun seizures and arrests patrolling the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods — what officers called “hot spots” — looking for any reason to pull over motorists. 

“Let’s bring some stats in,” one Trenton police violent crimes officer told investigators about how colleagues viewed policing the city.

It was a view held by officers in the department’s highest echelons. Former police director Ernest Parrey was once caught on bodycam calling Trenton residents “hoodrats.” 

A former officer who had racked up dozens of disciplinary charges before being fired thought of himself as an “overseer” of the city. 

He called Trentonians lazy in a social media post, claiming they “rather sit on their asses and wait for the first of the month and max out that family first card by the fifth day of the month,” instead of working. 

In the report, federal authorities pointed to other examples of police officers making racist or dehumanizing comments to citizens.

During one encounter, a violent crimes detective repeatedly called a Black man a “boy” and said he and his family were “dirty as shit” and “living like animals.” One high-ranking officer told federal investigators he saw the entire city as a “high-crime area.” 

But among their peers, police in the violent crimes and street crimes units were regarded as elite officers. A former officer told NJ Advance Media that he lost his dream job when he was indicted — and later acquitted — in a federal excessive force case.

The members of the street crimes unit distinguished themselves from rank-and-file officers by donning green jumpsuits resembling military fatigues. 

They didn’t wear body cameras. A former police director tried changing that before being run out of town. 

In 2020, Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law that mandated every patrol officer in New Jersey must wear a bodycam. Gusciora said that all Trenton officers are now wearing the devices — a reform some police supervisors resisted for years, arguing proactive police units shouldn’t be required to wear them because they were handling cases involving informants who would then be caught on camera. 

Turning a blind eye

The police department’s violent and street crimes ranks were filled with cops with questionable backgrounds, including some officers who were involved in a scandal for illegally obtaining human growth hormone and steroids, who would later become supervisors. 

In 2022, the Mercer County Prosecutor ruled that street crimes detective Erik Mancheno was justified in shooting a city man for pointing a gun at him. The man, Joseph Reeves, was left permanently disfigured. 

Mancheno’s reputation wasn’t left unblemished. Evidence came to light showing he made inflammatory social media posts, wore a Punisher-style sweatshirt — an image co-opted by neo-Nazis — during the shooting, and tested positive for anastrozole, a cancer drug often used to mask steroid use. 

Attorneys say they directed federal agents to other “frequent flyers” from the street crimes crew. 

Trenton defense attorney Jack Furlong spent hours talking to federal investigators at his law firm. He told them about several of his clients who had bad experiences with the Trenton Police Department and mentioned a legal brief written by his spouse, Lisa Van Hoeck.

Van Hoeck and a colleague at the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Trenton compiled a list of at least 18 problematic cases involving two Trenton street crimes detectives, Matthew Hutchinson and Harrison Steimle, per legal records obtained by The Jersey Vindicator. 

The cases were unique in that they involved gun and drug charges where defendants faced “substantial prison terms, typically including mandatory minimum sentences.” Despite having “arguably irrefutable proofs,” prosecutors dismissed or resolved those cases “on terms remarkably favorable to defendants,” Van Hoeck wrote.

The common denominator: In many of those cases, Van Hoeck wrote, “objective evidence and independent witness statements contradicted” the police officers’ claims in their reports  — a theme that was consistent with issues that were highlighted in the federal findings.

One example of dishonesty federal authorities pointed to involved Trenton Sgt. David Ordille. A federal judge found that Ordille lied on a search warrant in a drug-trafficking case. 

Local prosecutors put Ordille on a list of witnesses they would no longer call at trial. He was fired but later reinstated after an arbitrator ruled in his favor. 

Many blame Trenton’s justice system for enabling police misconduct, including judges, prosecutors and city officials who lawyers say “turned a blind eye” to the department’s failings.

“They never punish the cops,” Furlong said. “They have looked at the equation and said, ‘Public safety trumps constitutional order.'”

In New Jersey, judges are appointed by the governor. They must serve seven years on the bench before they are up for tenure. Some judges fear the repercussions of tossing out cases where evidence was illegally obtained or police officers lied while testifying, attorneys say.

Federal authorities cited several examples of Trenton police officers not apprising people in custody of their rights while they questioned them in police cars or back at the station. 

Federal investigators blame many of the problems on a lack of training and lax protocols. Annual in-person training is “almost non-existent,” per the report. Almost all of the Trenton Police Department’s training sessions are conducted online.. A Trenton police lieutenant called it the “death of training.” 

“You get what you pay for,” Gusciora said. 

The lack of training has had huge consequences, leaving police officers without guidance on how to conduct traffic stops, protect citizens’ free speech rights and eliminate discriminatory policing. Federal officials say the lack of adequate training has “contributed to the pattern of constitutional violations.”

Internal affairs investigators for the police department misclassified 47% of nearly 1,200 citizen complaints between 2019 and 2023 as “other rule violations,” per the report. 

Some of Trenton’s reporting policies deterred residents from filing complaints. Complaint forms residents were required to fill out included a warning that the resident could be prosecuted for making false statements. The New Jersey Attorney General prohibits those types of warnings on complaints because they chill reporting.

Defense attorneys and advocates believe Trenton police’s tactics are intentional.

Lord said she’s had clients who were retaliated against after filing complaints, including a city man who was beaten up by street crime officers twice.

“They let them do their dirty work,” she said. “Everyone is self-motivated. If crime is down, they are the heroes.”

What’s next

Activists hope the report is a historical bookend for reforming Trenton police. With the Trump administration’s expected hands-off approach to local policing, Trenton stakeholders know they’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to making change happen.

Some are floating the idea of creating a police civilian oversight board. But a ruling from the New Jersey Supreme Court in 2020 defanged those agencies by stripping them of subpoena power. 

Trenton Council President Crystal Feliciano said the governing body is setting aside time at its Dec. 5 meeting to allow Trentonians a chance to discuss the results of the federal report and contemplate next steps. 

“People need to put their foot down,” Feliciano said. “The administration needs to stand on it and say, ‘No more.'”

For now, she said, it’s up to Gusciora and Police Director Steve Wilson to “knuckle down” and develop a plan to improve policing.

Police officers will “imminently” go through Fourth Amendment refresher courses to ensure they’re respecting people’s constitutional rights while doing their jobs, Gusciora said.

But some of the Department of Justice’s longer-range reforms will be costly to implement. Without raising taxes on residents, Gusciora estimates the city needs another $10 million to $25 million in state funding each year to achieve the recommendations. 

Hiring more police officers is also a priority. Trenton has about 260 rank-and-file officers, about 100 fewer than it had before enduring mass layoffs in 2011. 

That has required “stressed-out” cops to work overtime, making them more prone to mistakes, Gusciora said. 

Still, many fear the cycle of misconduct is doomed to repeat itself, as many officers in the disbanded units remain on the force. 

Activists and lawyers say it’s a longshot that local prosecutors will use information from the federal report to build cases against individual officers.

The problems elevate the need for a civilian oversight group or federal monitor, Green said. But healing starts with an act of contrition from the police. 

“Wrong has been normalized,” Green said. “To me, you can’t [move forward] if you’re not going to issue an apology.”

Activists know there’s a long road ahead. But they’re committed to a better future for Trenton — one honoring the iconic message on the “Trenton Makes, the World Takes” bridge.

“I’m really hoping that my 15-month-old grows up in a Trenton that is different from the one we know and the one that I grew up in,” Edwards said.