An Unusual Effort to Fix a Notoriously Troubled Police Department
When police officers in Paterson, N.J., responded to a 911 call in March from a man in the midst of a mental health crisis, they found someone they knew well.
The man, Najee Seabrooks, had worked for years to reverse a spike in shootings in Paterson, the state’s third largest city, by building friendships with gunshot victims and persuading them not to retaliate against their attackers.
But now, Mr. Seabrooks, 31, had barricaded himself in a bathroom. The police arrived in riot gear and trained their guns on the bathroom door. After a four-hour standoff, Mr. Seabrooks emerged with a knife. The police shot and killed him. Soon the city erupted — not for the first time — in bitter protests.
Police officers in Paterson have robbed, beaten, shot and killed scores of Black men, earning the department a reputation as one of the most troubled in New Jersey. Between 2018 and 2020, the city’s Black residents, who make up about a quarter of the population, were the subject of 57 percent of the police department’s 600-plus uses of force, according to an investigation last year by the Police Executive Research Forum, a national association of police leaders.
A police officer in Paterson was found guilty of dealing drugs from a police cruiser while in uniform. Other officers created a “robbery squad” to beat and rob people. The police have shot five people since 2019, killing four, and two more residents have died in police custody, according to state records, giving Paterson the highest number of police-involved deaths of any department in New Jersey, the news organization NJ Spotlight found in March.
Stories of police abuse in Paterson have become familiar to some New Jersey residents. But the state’s response to Mr. Seabrooks’s death was unique: Three weeks later, Matthew J. Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general, took direct control of the police department.
The takeover, Mr. Platkin said in an interview, was a result of “high-profile misconduct by the Paterson Police Department, including a number of criminal offenses” committed by police officers. “I couldn’t go to sleep every night wondering what the next shoe to drop was going to be,” he said.
No other state gives its attorney general the power to take control of a local police department, said James E. Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine who works with the National Association of Attorneys General to train lawyers new to the position. It is only the second time that a New Jersey attorney general has exercised that power, and it is the first takeover precipitated by accusations of civil rights abuses.
“It’s a very dramatic thing to do,” Mr. Tierney said.
The takeover represents a bold attempt to answer a quandary that has long confounded cities and states across the country and boiled over in 2014, when police officers in Ferguson, Mo., shot and killed Michael Brown: how to fix deep-rooted cultural problems and repair trust in a police department with a history of abuse, particularly in Black and Latino communities.
Mr. Platkin’s move will test whether progressive ideas about law enforcement, many of which have been adopted in other cities wrestling with the same issues, can both restore faith in the police department and tamp down crime.
“We’re taking an enlightened approach to law enforcement in ways that are evidence-based. And it’s working,” Mr. Platkin said. “There isn’t much evidence for the alternative.”
Federal civil rights investigators and officials in other states are watching Mr. Platkin’s actions in Paterson closely, said Alex del Carmen, the court-appointed special master overseeing the Puerto Rico Police Department, which has operated under a federal consent decree since an investigation in 2011 found officers used excessive force and discriminated against racial minorities.
If the takeover succeeds, it could become a national model, Mr. del Carmen said. More attorneys general may seek similar powers from their state legislatures, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division might find new allies in overhauling troubled police departments.
But if it fails, it could provide ammunition to critics who favor a tough-on-crime approach to policing.
Traditionally, decisions about local police matters were left to mayors and police chiefs. But the takeover in Paterson comes as officials at all levels of government move to assert control over local public safety issues that increasingly shape state and national elections.
“Public safety has become so important in the minds of average citizens that state officials don’t trust local officials to govern on this issue effectively,” said Andrew Sidman, a political scientist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Many Democrats, like Mr. Platkin, have focused on police abuses and discriminatory enforcement, while state and federal Republican interventions in local police matters focus on empowering police officers at a time when crime rates have decreased only moderately since a sharp uptick during the pandemic.
In Jackson, Miss., the Republican supermajority in the state House of Representatives passed a bill, signed into law in April, giving the state-controlled Capitol Police jurisdiction over the city, where the local government is controlled by Democrats. Every Republican in the Mississippi House is white, and Jackson is 83 percent Black, which led some critics to describe the move as racist. Republicans countered that the goal is to make the city safer.
In Missouri, Republicans in the State Legislature attempted to place the St. Louis Police Department under state control, citing an increase in crime in the city. They also moved to replace the city’s prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, a Democrat whom Republicans viewed as soft on crime. The police takeover failed. But Ms. Gardner resigned, and Gov. Mike Parson chose a replacement.
And in Washington, D.C., Congress passed two bills this year overturning progressive changes to the district’s criminal justice system. In March President Biden signed one of the bills, overriding revisions to the city’s criminal code that reduced maximum penalties for some crimes.
New Jersey has attempted to overhaul problematic police departments in the past. When the attorney general’s office took command of the police department in Camden, in 1998, during a crime wave, it was accompanied by curfews, increased surveillance and more officers on the street, said Jason Williams, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University. In 2013, the then governor, Chris Christie, disbanded the Camden Police Department, breaking the police union’s contract and replacing the force with nonunionized officers.
County prosecutors in New Jersey occasionally have responded to complaints about police departments by taking over the local agency’s internal affairs unit, said Brian Higgins, formerly the chief of police in Bergen County, which borders Paterson.
“But in this case they jumped that first step and went right to the attorney general,” said Mr. Higgins, an adjunct professor of public safety at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Intractable problems
Founded 16 miles from Manhattan near one of the tallest waterfalls in the Northeast, Paterson became a wealthy industrial powerhouse before most of America had electricity. Many mills closed after World War II, and today Paterson is a diverse city of 156,000 where 62 percent of the residents are Hispanic, and 40 percent of children live in poverty.
Problems in Paterson can seem particularly intractable. The state board of education controlled the school district for 30 years. When the state relinquished its power, in 2021, board members apologized to the city’s residents, calling the takeover a failure.
Many residents in Paterson hope Mr. Platkin can do better. They fear he cannot.
“The attorney general is law enforcement. Law enforcement killed our brother,” said Quan Hargrove, 41, a friend of Mr. Seabrooks. “How do you repair that trust? That’s a tall order.”
For others, the attorney general did not go far enough: A month after Mr. Platkin’s takeover, advocacy groups in New Jersey sent a letter to the Justice Department requesting a federal investigation into the police department.
The Justice Department oversees 28 investigations and court-approved agreements with law enforcement agencies around the country, according to a spokesman for the agency. These agreements include Newark, where the police department has operated under federal oversight since 2016.
“Now we need an independent monitor who is not aligned with anyone in New Jersey to have an independent view,” said Zellie Thomas, lead organizer of Black Lives Matter Paterson.
Two armed standoffs
Almost two decades before Najee Seabrooks’s death, another man found himself in an armed standoff with the Paterson police. The man shot four people in July 2006, before taking his wife and two children hostage.
The man was Willie Seabrooks Jr. — Najee Seabrooks’s father. The woman was Najee Seabrooks’s stepmother; the boys were his younger stepbrothers.
After a four-hour standoff, the elder Mr. Seabrooks surrendered. He was eventually sentenced to 45 years in state prison.
To the Seabrooks family’s neighbors and friends, these different outcomes tell the story of a police department falling apart.
“His father shot people. He had a gun. He was holding people hostage. And yet he still got to keep his life,” said Hafeeza Freeman, a friend of Najee Seabrooks. “There was no excuse for the police to shoot their guns when all Najee had was a knife.”
The death of Najee Seabrooks is the latest in a string of episodes cited whenever Paterson residents discuss police misconduct. There was Ruben McAusland, a Paterson officer who pleaded guilty to selling heroin and cocaine from his police cruiser while in uniform. There was Jameek Lowery, who died in police custody in 2019; Khalif Cooper, shot in the back while running from police in 2022; and Felix DeJesus, who was handcuffed in the back of a police vehicle on the evening of Feb. 2, 2022, and never seen again.
“We don’t even have a problem with these two individual cops” who arrested Felix DeJesus, said Eric DeJesus, his brother. “The problem is leadership.”
Police work anywhere can be difficult, but conditions in Paterson make it especially challenging. A fiscal crisis in 2011 forced the city to lay off a quarter of its officers, and the department never recovered, said Mayor Andre Sayegh. Today it employs 439 officers. The average officer in Paterson earns $76,300 a year, $24,500 less than the average statewide, according to NJ.com.
On the beat, many Paterson officers experience police work as an onslaught of dysfunction and violence. In a city of not quite 160,000 people, last year 101 people were shot, and 27 were murdered. Paterson’s murder rate last year was higher than in Los Angeles or Compton, Calif., and more than three times higher than in New York City, according to a report by the Rochester Institute of Technology Public Safety Institute.
Jerry Speziale, director of the Paterson Police Department, and the presidents of Paterson’s two police unions did not respond to calls and emails for comment.
Mr. Platkin’s choice to lead the Paterson police is Isa Abbassi, a 26-year member of the New York Police Department who was assigned to improve police relations with minority communities on Staten Island after officers there killed Eric Garner in 2014. Mr. Abbassi, who was most recently the Police Department’s chief of strategic initiatives in New York, took charge in Paterson on May 9.
So far, Mr. Platkin’s decisions in Paterson have been more modest than revolutionary. He retrained officers on the use of force, replaced the department’s leadership and held public meetings where people shared stories of police misconduct. This feedback will form the basis of a “community-led approach” to policing, Mr. Platkin said.
The attorney general’s office also is doubling down on programs that supplement or replace police officers with trained civilians on some calls.
In August, Mr. Platkin and Gov. Philip D. Murphy dedicated $10 million in federal Covid relief funds to hospital-based violence intervention programs statewide, including Paterson Healing Collective, the same nonprofit where Najee Seabrooks worked. Mr. Platkin also plans to bring to Paterson a program called ARRIVE Together, in which mental health experts respond to calls about people in emotional distress, with or without police officers.
“We in this country have asked law enforcement to do way too much, and every cop knows it,” said Mr. Platkin. “I do think New Jersey can be a model. And if we can show it can happen in Paterson, then it can happen anywhere.”
Perhaps to help his argument that he can bring change, Mr. Platkin’s office issued a news release describing a standoff between police officers and a suicidal, knife-wielding man on April 8, near the apartment where Najee Seabrooks was killed a month before. Officers negotiated with the man for six and a half hours, with help from a team of crisis intervention experts.
The man, whose name was not released, surrendered at 11:26 p.m. He was transported peacefully to a nearby hospital, unharmed.