Sixty miles south of my home is a small municipality in New Jersey called Bordentown Township. The population is 11,367, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Two very important things happened there in 2016. One alarmed me; the other gave me hope. The first was the arrest of the town’s former police chief, Frank Nucera Jr., who had just stepped down after years on the force. Nucera was charged by the FBI with committing a federal hate crime and violating a person’s civil rights while he was chief. Nucera, I would learn, is a confirmed racist. Once, when discussing a situation where he believed an African American had slashed the tires on a patrol cruiser, he told a fellow officer, “I wish that nigger would come back from Trenton and give me a reason to put my hands on him. I’m tired of ’em. These niggers are like ISIS. They have no value. They should line them all up and mow ’em down. I’d like to be on the firing squad. I could do it.”
According to taped conversations, Nucera routinely made such statements to his officers, referring to African Americans as “niggers,” “nigs,” and “moulinyans,” an Italian slang for nigger. He liked to intimidate local African Americans by positioning police dogs at the gymnasium entrance during high school basketball games or by having his officers walk the dogs through predominantly Black apartment units. If his officers weren’t tough enough, he’d lead by example. When a Black 18-year-old and his 16-year-old girlfriend were being arrested for allegedly failing to pay a hotel bill even as they swam in the hotel’s pool, Nucera approached the male teenager from behind, grabbed his head, and slammed it into a metal doorjamb. “I’m fucking tired of them, man,” he said after the incident. “I’ll tell you what, it’s gonna get to the point where I could shoot one of these motherfuckers. And that nigger bitch lady [the 16-year-old’s aunt], she almost got it.”
I have known lots of New Jersey police chiefs. I was a member of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police. I knew incompetent chiefs, corrupt chiefs in New Jersey and other states, as well. Still, I was stunned that someone as morally and intellectually bankrupt as Nucera could have headed a police department in New Jersey, or any state for that matter, in these times. It would be easy to say Nucera was a bad cop, an aberration that fortunately has been excised from the law enforcement body, but who he is and what he was speaks to the explicit or tacit approval of racism and bias by mayors, city officials, and other police officers who have worked with officers like him. Nucera had been a member of the Bordentown Police Department for years. He was promoted through the ranks to become chief. Consequently, in all those years, his racism was no secret to those who worked with him day to day. In the end, it was even rewarded. His rise to the position of chief is disheartening.
[For more on this story by Matthew HoraceRon Harris, go to https://www.yesmagazine.org/wh...ave-me-hope-20180815]
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