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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 The language the officer used according to the report is considered outdated and a slur toward people with mental disabilities.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.

A cool, damp day is in store for New Jersey with rain during the day and northwestern areas of the state getting a dusting of snow at night, forecasters say.

Rain totals have been dialed back but Thursday’s moisture is “still a generous and much needed precipitation event,” especially for North Jersey, the National Weather Service said in its morning forecast discussion.

“The signal remains clear that the heaviest rain will fall across our northern zones with considerably less to the south, but overall, forecast precipitation has diminished slightly.”

By the time the last of the moisture pushes away from the state on Friday night, precipitation amounts will range from 1.5-2 inches in northwestern regions to a tenth to quarter inch in southern New Jersey. Central portions of the state should wind up with a half-inch to an inch of rain.

Overall, the rain will help New Jersey’s drought, but won’t come close to alleviating it.

“The drought is much too extensive and too significant to be resolved by one storm,” AccuWeather.com said.

The other story Thursday will be gusty winds that could reach as high as 25 mph inland and 40 mph along the Jersey Shore.

Rain will be mainly light, though heavier showers are possible at times, according to the weather service’s New York office, which covers Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Passaic and Union counties.

High temperatures will top out in the low 50s around mid-afternoon.

Rain will change to light snow tonight in northern New Jersey with less than an inch expected in general. Hilly areas in Sussex and parts of Passaic counties could see slightly higher totals. Lows will be in the 30s.

Some scattered light rain is expected Friday before it tapers off at night from west to east, according to forecasters. It’ll be a chilly, breezy day with highs only in the 40s before temps dip into the 30s overnight.

Dry weather returns for the weekend with mostly sunny conditions and highs in the low 50s both days. The forecast is the almost the same for Monday and Tuesday, though temps will be slightly warmer.

Current weather radar

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Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com.