Travis Dove for The New York Times
NEWARK — After football practice one summer evening in 2008, a Pop Warner league coach and two of his players were driving through the Clinton Hill section of Newark when a car swerved and blocked their path. Suddenly six police officers emerged from unmarked vehicles and forced them out of their car at gunpoint.
“I felt like this: Don’t kill me, just send me to jail. Please don’t kill me,” one of the boys, Tony Ivey Jr., then 13, would later say in a videotaped interview.
The officers, members of a narcotics squad, searched the car and found nothing but football equipment. The coach had been taking the boys to get hamburgers.
The episode became known as the case of the Pop Warner Three, and it was one of more than 400 misconduct allegations cited two years later when the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey asked the Justice Department to investigate the Newark police.
Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, had swept into office in 2006 pledging a safer city through zero tolerance on crime. And while killings actually rose in his first year, over the next three they fell to historic lows. Yet grievances against the police were piling up in the city’s black wards, with allegations of racial profiling, unlawful stops and excessive force. The A.C.L.U. and local activists pressed for reforms, complaining about pushback from Mr. Booker, whose administration was promoting the plunging homicide rate.
And when the A.C.L.U. finally went public with its plea to the Justice Department, the mayor went on WNYC radio, telling an interviewer that the petition was “one of the worst ways” to bring about meaningful change. “We don’t need people who are going to frustrate, undermine and mischaracterize our agency,” he added.
Today, the mayor turned United States senator is running for president, building his candidacy, in no small part, on a platform of criminal justice reform that places him at the forefront of shifting national thought on questions of crime and punishment. On the campaign trail, he has made passionate pleas for expunging minor drug convictions, ending private prisons and expanding re-entry programs for the formerly incarcerated. He recently introduced legislation to remove marijuana from the federal list of controlled substances and to expunge past convictions, noting the disparate arrest rates of black and white users.
In Newark a decade ago, he was a rising-star mayor with a problem. The way he handled it may offer insights into what kind of president he would be.
Suburban-raised, Stanford-educated, Mr. Booker, 49, had begun his political career in Newark by moving into decrepit public housing to earn his inner-city bona fides, a story replayed on documentary film even before his election. When he took over City Hall with his zero-tolerance vow, he was walking a tightrope: Citizens were crying out for tougher policing, yet the crime-fighting tools he employed, including stop-and-frisk searches for drugs or weapons, ran the risk of alienating the very people he was seeking to help, especially given Newark’s searing history of police brutality.
As Mr. Booker now tells it, he was both enforcer and reformer from the first, seeking to drive down crime while transforming a department crippled by scarce resources and antique equipment, and shot through with a culture of brutality protected by an intransigent police union.
But an examination of Mr. Booker’s stewardship of the police department — based on dozens of interviews with officials and activists, Booker allies and Booker critics — suggests a mayor slow to make changes, fixated on the top-line measures of crime-fighting success while at times ceding too much authority to his police director and other aides.
“He wasn’t as hands-on as I would have been, if you will, with the department,” said Ronald L. Rice, a state senator and former Newark police officer who lost to Mr. Booker in the 2006 mayoral election.
As a new mayor navigating a city with time-hardened political powers, Mr. Booker often sought to play mediator rather than impose some of the confrontational reforms — such as an independent police monitor — that would have alienated the police union.
“The police are a political force as well as a paramilitary force. And any politician that takes on the police to stop police brutality or violations of constitutional rights — they’re going to incur the wrath of the police,” said Lawrence Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, a progressive group that protested against the police during Mr. Booker’s mayoralty.
In a recent interview, Mr. Booker described himself as intimately involved with policing, though he framed that involvement in the sort of communal, we’re-all-in-this-together terms that suffuse his campaign arguments for himself — his omnipresence at community meetings, his contact with block leaders into the wee hours of the morning, the civilian caravans he dispatched into dangerous precincts of the city.
“I don’t know how much more hands-on you could get a mayor at that point,” he said. “This was a very big priority for me in my early days. I was just pushing like you wouldn’t believe. So I was on the streets.”
Even so, he acknowledged that he should have more quickly reined in police abuses. He attributed that failure, in large part, to a reliance on “imperfect data, imperfect measures,” that erroneously showed complaints going down.
“Even as I had strived my entire life to be a force for equity, fairness, justice and opportunity, it was obvious that some of our police practices, on my watch, were undermining not only my own values but my life’s mission,” he wrote in his 2016 book, “United.”
Ultimately, the Justice Department intervened at the A.C.L.U.’s request and Mr. Booker came around, calling the investigation a “win-win” for the city. That inquiry would document a pattern of unconstitutional behavior by the Newark police: Three-quarters of pedestrian stops failed to meet the legal criteria, and blacks were at least 2.5 times more likely than whites to be stopped or arrested. The police department remains under a Justice Department consent decree.
Today, in the era of Black Lives Matter, these tactics and their outsize impact on minority communities have helped drive a broad reassessment of criminal justice policies. That has left many politicians with tough-on-crime histories, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, in a potentially awkward place. For Mr. Booker, there is an extra layer.
In the interview, he recalled how, as a young black man, he had been a police target himself. He described the episode in a column written at Stanford in 1992, after Los Angeles had erupted in fire and rage over the acquittal of three police officers in the beating of Rodney King.
Mr. Booker’s trial by police stop had come near the George Washington Bridge.
“Five police cars, six officers, surround my car, guns ready,” he wrote. “I sat shaking.” The officers told him he had fit the description of a car thief.
Pledging Safer Streets
Newark’s policing problems date at least to the 1950s, when relations grew tense between the mostly white force and the city’s growing black population.
The combustible mix exploded in July 1967, after two officers arrested and beat a black cabdriver who had passed their double-parked patrol car. Four days of rioting and looting killed 26 people, injured more than 700 and left Newark a smoldering national symbol of urban violence and blight.
“I call police brutality in the city of Newark ‘Newark’s original sin,’” said Ronald C. Rice, a former councilman and the son of Mr. Booker’s opponent in the 2006 mayoral race.
After a campaign built on twin promises of safer streets and downtown renewal, Mr. Booker inherited that traumatic legacy, along with a high rate of violent crime — three times the state average — that made Newark among the most dangerous cities in America.
Cutting crime, and being seen cutting crime, became his obsession. He set up a BlackBerry alert for every shooting. He left a staff meeting to be with a 14-year-old struck by a stray bullet. He chased down a scissor-wielding bank thief in broad daylight.
He was already famous, a nationally recognized face from the Oscar-nominated documentary of his failed 2002 mayoral campaign, run during his tenancy at the notoriously troubled Brick Towers. His first year…
