Retired corrections officer wins discrimination lawsuit against Passaic County

A retired New Jersey corrections officer has been awarded $375,000 after a jury found he endured years of racism and retaliation inside the Passaic County Sheriff’s Office.

Richard Camel, a 55-year-old father and grandfather from Paterson, sued the sheriff’s office four years ago over claims the agency hounded him with internal affairs investigations after he complained to his bosses about discrimination, according to court documents.

What followed, according to the lawsuit, was a hellish revenge tour in which the department opened one administrative case after another against Camel to rid themselves of the troublesome officer who had allegedly taken too many days off to care for his ailing, elderly mother, according to the lawsuit.

The legal battle finally ended after a weeklong civil trial in Superior Court culminated in an Oct. 7 verdict in Camel’s favor, said Leonard Schiro, Camel’s Woodbridge attorney.

The jury awarded the 25-year veteran a total of $375,000 — $100,000 for emotional distress, $60,000 in back pay, $177,000 in front pay to compensate for lost future wages, and another $38,000 in punitive damages, the attorney said.

“I praise the jury for what they saw and what they were able to do,” Schiro told The Jersey Vindicator. “They were sharp.”

Camel, who spent his career at the Passaic County Jail and retired as a corporal in July 2023, said he’s happy to finally walk away from the ordeal.

“I’m just glad the whole nightmare is over with,” Camel said. “It was definitely something that me and my family truly did not deserve to go through … I didn’t want this. But they would not stop.”

The Passaic County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on the trial or the verdict.

Discrimination, retaliation, and suspensions

The discrimination against Camel, who is Black, allegedly started back in 2012, according to the October 2021 lawsuit.

His bosses always gave him solid performance reviews, he said, and he was widely regarded as a good employee.

“Job performance and work ethic were never questioned about me,” Camel said, adding that his superiors uniformly said during the trial that he was an “outstanding officer.”

But he silently endured the alleged racism for nearly five years because he feared retaliation.

By December 2016, however, the corporal finally had enough.

He reported his supervisor, Sgt. Robert Piciocchio, to then-Undersheriff Mario Recinos for harassment because, according to the lawsuit, Piciocchio treated him differently than other officers and “singled him out on numerous occasions.”

“Piciocchio’s harassment of plaintiff was due to racial animus,” reads the suit. “Plaintiff is Black and Piciocchio dislikes Blacks.”

But allegedly neither Recinos nor then-jail Warden Michael Tolerico — both of whom were named as defendants in Camel’s lawsuit, along with the sheriff’s office — addressed the situation.

Instead, according to the suit, they moved Camel to a “less favorable” work shift after an informal inquiry.

This kicked off a tumultuous period in which the brass investigated Camel for a litany of alleged policy violations and even tracked his comings and goings from physical therapy to later declare that he took too long getting back to the jail.

“A similar investigation was not, and would never have been, conducted regarding white officers,” according to the lawsuit. “White officers had never been subjected to similar treatment, and this investigation was conducted … because plaintiff is Black and because he had complained of race discrimination in the past.”

Other investigations dissected how Camel used accrued sick days and bereavement leave. He was forced to prove his relationship to people who had died.

This was “very intrusive into [Camel’s] family life and history, and was humiliating, disrespectful and demeaning,” according to the lawsuit.

In late 2018, Camel went on family leave to care for his sick mother.

When he returned in January 2019, the sheriff’s office immediately sent him for a fitness-for-duty exam, allegedly at the direct order of the late Sheriff Richard Berdnik.

Camel passed. But he never knew why he had to take the test in the first place.

“It is unclear why absences to care for an individual’s mother or bereavement leave might indicate that an officer is psychologically unfit for duty,” according to the lawsuit.

The sheriff’s office allegedly continued its assault on Camel, filing six different preliminary notices of disciplinary action against him between November 2018 and February 2019, according to court documents.

The agency based the complaints on Camel’s alleged attendance issues.

Four notices recommended firing the corporal, while the other two sought lengthy suspensions. But in the end, a hearing officer only recommended a 30-day suspension for Camel’s alleged misdeeds.

In October 2020, Camel again had to care for his mother, who contracted COVID-19 during a hospital visit after she had a bad fall.

He quarantined afterward and got both a doctor’s note and a letter from the county health board excusing him from work.

But internal affairs investigated him for that, too.

Officers staked out his house and spoke to his wife, then visited his mother’s home and questioned the building manager about when she went to the hospital, and asked to see camera footage, according to the lawsuit.

The department never paid Camel for his 14 days of self-quarantine and later filed another disciplinary action that sought to suspend him for 90 days because he went to the hospital to see his mother on one of the quarantine days.

He eventually served a 35-day suspension. The Civil Service Commission reversed the decision in 2024, ruling that the suspension was not justified. Passaic County had to pay Camel for the 35 days, and was also ordered to pay his legal fees.

‘These are very, very bad people’

Camel told The Jersey Vindicator he has no regrets and called the agency’s actions “malicious and disgusting.”

“I did everything I was supposed to do,” he said. “I reached out to every person I was supposed to in order to find out [how] I could be afforded the time needed for me to take care of her. But they would never accept [it].”

The sheriff’s office filed yet another notice of disciplinary action over Camel’s sick day use in September 2021, and held it over his head until he retired two years later, at which point they promptly dropped the matter, Camel said.

But he’s still shocked at how badly he was treated during his long tenure and said the sheriff’s office needs a total overhaul to get away from what he called the “dated antics” of politics, retaliation, and retribution.

“That’s the truth of the department,” Camel said. “It was a disgusting career. But I stood my ground and never participated in that. But because I stood my ground, it was a tough ride and I went through a lot of bad things.”

“The public should know — they’re electing these men, and they’re clueless as to what they’re electing,” he said. “These are very, very bad people that need to be removed from top to bottom in order to give the Passaic County Sheriff’s Office the chance to start over.”

“I went into the department as a very young man with a very bright future ahead of me,” he said. “But I never expected to walk into that type of department and experience what I had to go through.”