NAACP renews call for clean sweep of top brass at state police over racism claims • New Jersey Monitor

The NAACP, clergy, attorneys, and other advocates stepped up their push Friday for new leadership at the New Jersey State Police, saying reforms intended to reduce racism in the state’s largest law enforcement agency won’t stick unless Gov. Phil Murphy replaces the top brass there.

Col. Patrick Callahan and Lt. Col. Sean Kilcomons, the 3,300-officer agency’s superintendent and deputy superintendent, must go because they have failed to meaningfully address well-documented discrimination that stretches back decades and persists today, advocates said at a morning news conference in Plainsboro.

“Governor, we call upon you. You are the only one, not the attorney general, that has the power to remove those who sit at the top of the heap in the New Jersey State Police,” said Bishop Jethro C. James Jr., senior pastor at Paradise Baptist Church in Newark.

“If a dog bites you once, it’s the dog’s fault. But if the dog bites you twice, it’s your fault. Because you know this dog bites. For 101 years, sir, this dog has been biting our people,” James said. “Governor Murphy, I call upon you: What will your legacy be? What will you do if you have a dog that bites, sir? Put a muzzle on it!”

The demand came two weeks after state Attorney General Matt Platkin issued two reports that documented racial discrimination and other problems in the agency’s internal affairs unit and regarding promotions practices.

But those reports were just the latest to expose “the nefarious, biased underbelly” of the state police, said Richard T. Smith, president of the NAACP’s New Jersey State Conference and a member of the NAACP’s national board.

For a decade, the agency operated under federal oversight after it agreed to a 1999 consent decree to settle racial profiling claims. More recently, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a probe last year into gender and race bias claims, and the state comptroller last spring declared the agency’s efforts to prevent discriminatory policing “largely performative.”

Smith and other advocates said they don’t trust Callahan and Kilcomons to fix the agency.

“Folks say, ‘Well, why don’t you give the colonel an opportunity to implement some of the recommendations?’ Ladies and gentlemen, the colonel has been living in a dirty house for a long time … If you know your house is dirty, you know it needs to be clean, I should not have to come to your house and give you recommendations on how to clean up the filth that you got in your house,” Smith said. “Governor, we need him and his underling removed. It’s simple as that.”

Smith noted Murphy’s brief stint on the NAACP’s national board, where he served from June 2015 to March 2017.

“Many times, the governor says that he sees things through the lens of social justice,” Smith said. “Well, my dear friend governor, we want to make sure that your lenses are clear and clean, because this needs your oversight and your immediate action.”

Natalie Hamilton, a Murphy spokeswoman, declined to respond specifically to Friday’s calls for Callahan’s and Kilcomons’ ouster and referred the New Jersey Monitor to a statement Murphy issued two weeks ago.

“I am committed to working with Attorney General Platkin and Colonel Callahan to ensure that all of the recommendations contained in the reports are enacted without delay,” Murphy said then.

State police spokespeople didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Callahan, who joined the state police as a trooper in 1995, became superintendent in 2017 and named Kilcomons his second in command about three years ago, a promotion that prompted a discrimination lawsuit.

Advocates urged state officials to settle the dozens of pending lawsuits female troopers and troopers of color have filed against the agency for discrimination, and revoke the monthly $8,893 pension of retired Lt. Joseph Nitti, the former internal affairs supervisor whose actions investigators found problematic and “indefensible” in a memo Platkin released last month.

They also demanded officials include citizen input in reform plans and exhorted legislators to support long-stalled legislation that would create civilian-led police review boards with subpoena power to investigate police misconduct.

“The deconstruction and reconstruction of racist police forces is the strong medicine that is required to deal with a seemingly intractable problem,” said Larry Hamm, who heads the People’s Organization for Progress.