When police kill, NJ lawmakers want state, not county, to investigate

When a Bridgeton, N.J., police officer fatally shot a man during a traffic stop in December 2014 — in an encounter that garnered national attention when the dashcam video became public — the Cumberland County Prosecutor's Office investigated whether the officer used justified force, as is standard procedure in New Jersey.

But there was a problem.

Officer Braheme Days, who fired the shots that killed 36-year-old Jerame Reid, had been a basketball coach for the son of Jennifer Webb-McRae, the county's prosecutor.

Webb-McRae recused herself and had a deputy handle the case. But that did not satisfy activists and Reid's family. They demanded that the state take over the investigation, though it did not.

Now, New Jersey lawmakers are introducing legislation that would mandate such a move, so potential conflicts of interest, such as that seen in Reid's case, can be avoided.

Days and another officer, Roger Worley, were ultimately cleared in Reid's death. Days told investigators he believed Reid was reaching for a gun. In the dashcam video, Days yelled, "You reach for something, you're going to be [expletive] dead," before he opened fire.

Senate President Stephen Sweeney, who recalled the investigation into Reid's death at a Trenton news conference Friday, said, "There was just a lack of trust that the outcome was a fair outcome."

Webb-McRae declined to comment Friday.

When an individual dies at the hands of police in New Jersey, the prosecutor's office in the county where it happened investigates. The office can then bring the case to a grand jury, or decline to press charges.

Sweeney's bill would give the state Attorney General's Office those powers, and require that the findings be presented to a grand jury outside the county where the death happened.

"This is an effort to restore trust, because there's a severe lack of trust going on in this country," Sweeney (D., Gloucester) said Friday.

He was flanked by Sens. Sandra Cunningham (D., Hudson) and Shirley Turner (D., Mercer), New Jersey NAACP president Richard T. Smith, and Ari Rosmarin, public policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's New Jersey branch. All expressed support for the bill.

Smith said that particularly in counties with smaller populations, officials in prosecutor's offices and police departments often work with or know each other personally.

"Sometimes those waters are going to be murky," he said, adding, "It's hard not to have that conflict."

In Cumberland County, which has nearly 156,000 residents, the prosecutor, Webb-McRae, also recused herself from the investigation into a man's death last year because she attended the same church as the man's mother.

That man, Phillip White, 32, died in Vineland after officers arrested and released a dog onto him in March 2015. This year, the Prosecutor's Office concluded that White had died of PCP intoxication, and that the officers used justified force.

Walter Hudson, a civil rights activist who has criticized the investigations into White's death and other police-involved fatalities in Cumberland County, said Friday he hoped lawmakers move quickly on Sweeney's bill.

"That's all we've been asking for is accountability," Hudson said.

Sweeney's announcement came as protesters across the country demand more accountability from police, pointing to the fatal shootings by officers last week of Philando Castile, a motorist stopped in Falcon Heights, Minn., and Alton Sterling, a street vendor in Baton Rouge, La. The deaths of both men were recorded on video and garnered thousands of views on social media.

Some states have advocated strengthening existing protections for police officers, since an apparently racially motivated former soldier fatally shot five officers during a peaceful Black Lives Matter march last week in Dallas.

A Republican New Jersey senator, Joe Kyrillos of Monmouth County, had planned to introduce a bill Thursday that would extend hate-crime protections to police, firefighters, and emergency responders.

On Friday, a day after the Inquirer reported that getting into a verbal dispute with a police officer could lead to hate-crime charges were the bill to pass, Kyrillos' staff said the senator had delayed the bill's introduction to ensure it does not apply to every person who argues with an officer.

"It needed a little bit more work and some language clarification," Tony Perry, Kyrillos' director of legislative affairs, said of the bill. It will now be introduced Thursday, he said.

Nationally, the number of law enforcement officers killed by criminals has dropped in the last decade, from a peak of 72 in 2011 to 41 last year. This year, 30 officers have been killed, including the five in Dallas, according to FBI data.

So far this year, 522 people have been fatally shot by police in the United States, according to the Washington Post, which tracks the deaths in a database. It is generally considered more reliable than federal statistics, which government officials have acknowledged are incomplete. Last year, 984 people were shot and killed by police in the U.S., according to the Post's database.

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