TRENTON – City cops are caught on tape cavalierly joking about employing excessive force during arrests and making fun of a gunshot victim who was in the hospital clinging to life after being blasted in the head.
All of it was captured by a body camera worn by supervising Trenton Police Sgt. Charles Lamin, who at one point tried to hush a diarrhea-mouth colleague by telling him, “I’m on camera.”
City police officer Tim Miller was undeterred, offering up advice to a less-experienced cop about how to successfully effectuate arrests.
“Major muscles groups,” the loud-mouthed officer bragged.
Showing police in their “natural habitat,” experts said, the cops’ gallows humor veered dangerously off course, and potentially revealed criminal conduct, when it was suggested the best way to get suspects to comply was to beat them into submission with flashlights.
Community activists, police accountability experts and lawyers were shocked by the casualness of the officers admitting how they potentially committed criminal assault on the job. Taken together with racist quips made by the police director, they said, it shows how Trenton officers view residents as “subhuman trash” and “property.”
“That’s the way police officers talk,” said Philip Stinson, a criminology professor at Bowling Green State University. “It pulls back the curtain on the police subculture. It’s raw, ugly, violent.”
The Trentonian left a detailed voicemail on police director Ernest Parrey Jr.’s cell phone, relaying what was captured by the body camera, but he didn’t respond.
He hasn’t returned phone calls from The Trentonian, reportedly bothered when the newspaper obtained and published body cam footage of him calling residents “hood rats” and making an illegal traffic stop.
The city police director was summoned to appear before City Council over the public blunders and previously found himself in hot water for speaking disrespectfully to council members.
As it related to the footage, some of the cops’ comments, Stinson said, could be “very shockingly literal. They mean exactly what they’re saying.”
The emergence of Lamin’s body cam footage is yet another black eye for a department that has been knocked to the canvas by a number of embarrassing public disclosures. The latest included a veteran city cop getting charged for allegedly possessing child porn.
Police were also accused of using excessive force in a lawsuit filed by attorneys for the family of a city man who was put into coma and later died after police bludgeoned him with batons and used pepper-sprayed to subdue him.
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