Tag: Clinton Hill

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. “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. “I don’t know how much more hands-on you could get a mayor at that point,” he said. “Five police cars, six officers, surround my car, guns ready,” he wrote. They supported being aggressive with the guys on the corners and moving them away.” But for many people in Newark, four decades after the riots, the tactics were akin to throwing gas on a smoldering fire. “I mean, this was a very frustrating time.” “At times I felt like I was caught between trying to push really fast and having a police union that pushes back on you,” he added. The petition, Mr. Booker wrote in his book, “felt like a stab in the back.” In the interview with The Times, he said his public criticism of the A.C.L.U. was born of a frustration that the organization took its complaint to Washington, rather than working with him behind the scenes to address the problems. The reform process, it wrote, is still a work in progress: While community meetings and trainings are improving, the department’s data systems “continue to contain critical deficiencies.”