From Camden and Cherry Hill to Trenton and the Jersey Shore, what about life in New Jersey do you want WHYY News to cover? Let us know.

The Justice Department said Trenton’s police department have made arrests without legal basis, officers have escalated situations with aggression and used pepper spray unnecessarily.

The results of the yearlong investigation were contained in a 45-page report released Thursday morning during a virtual press conference with U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Philip Sellinger and Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“The people of Trenton deserve nothing less than fair and constitutional policing,” Sellinger said. “When police stop someone in Trenton, our investigation found that all too often they violated the constitutional rights of those they stopped, sometimes with tragic consequences.”

Maati Sekmet Ra, co-founder of the Trenton Anti-Violence Coalition, said she is not surprised about the Justice Department’s findings.

“You cannot talk about violence that happens and occurs in a place like Trenton without talking about police violence,” she said. “Police have historically brutalized, harassed and now it’s proven that they’re violating the civil rights of folks who live in Trenton.”

Officers violate the 4th Amendment in 2 areas

The two main findings of the report are that Trenton officers use excessive force and conduct warrantless traffic stops, searches and arrests. Both violate the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

According to the report, officers reported using force in 815 incidents between March 2020 and December 2023. The majority of them involved physical force; pepper spray was used by officers 120 times. A firearm was used once.

In one incident mentioned during the press conference, a 64-year-old man died from respiratory failure after he was sprayed in the face with pepper spray. Officers went to the man’s house to arrest his son who was involved in an earlier domestic incident.

The man, who was not involved in the incident, met with officers outside his front door informing them they would not be allowed in his house without a warrant. As they waited for a supervisor to come to the scene, one of the officers escalated the conversation, taunting the father and son, according to the federal report.

The officer said the son was “talking like he was ‘retarded’ and asking if the father was ‘crazy,’” according to the report. The language the officer used according to the report is considered outdated and a slur toward people with mental disabilities.

As the father was about to re-enter his house, an officer threw him across the porch, against the railing and slammed him face down on the porch steps. As officers were arresting the father, another officer sprayed him in the face.

“The officer who escalated the encounter inaccurately reported that the father physically presented a ‘threat/attack’ to the officer,” the report stated. “He also claimed that he grabbed the father because he feared that a dog inside would come out—a factor that no other officer mentioned and that video footage discredited.”

The father died 18 days after the incident.