In the three months since Police Director Ralph Rivera Jr. disbanded the department’s two TAC units, overall arrests have plummeted and apprehensions for drug crimes have markedly decreased, police records show.
A file photo of Trenton Police Director Ralph Rivera Jr., gesturing while speaking at a press conference held in front of Trenton Police headquarters.
TRENTON — The police department has fallen far behind its typical pace in locking up street-level offenders since the disbanding of the city’s specialized Tactical Anti-Crime units, a review of public arrest dockets indicates.
In the three months since Police Director Ralph Rivera Jr. disbanded the department’s two TAC units, overall arrests have plummeted and apprehensions for drug crimes have markedly decreased, police records show.
Weapons arrests are slightly on the decline as well, but the downturn is not as stark.
The crime-fighting units worked to forestall serious criminal activity, but Rivera reassigned their officers to street patrols to bolster an understaffed police department and to create a more visible police presence in Trenton.
However, the TAC units had been responsible for the majority of drug arrests, and so far no unit has been designated to take over their work. In a city with persistent violent crime, citizens, elected officials, and the police union have all questioned the logic of Rivera’s decision to make the switch. They will have an opportunity to hear from the director tonight during a scheduled appearance at a city council meeting.
“I think the people who are most entrenched in the community do not know what the director’s plan is to fight violent crime,” said Carlos Avila, a South Ward resident and community activist. “I’ve talked to other people who are in the trenches … and we just don’t know.”
Rivera has said his goal is to engage in intelligence-led policing by sending patrols to “hot spots” throughout the city identified by data and street sources. Councilman George Muschal, a retired policeman, said that by decommissioning the TAC units, Rivera robbed his department of the ability to stamp out crime in troubled areas before it grows.
“The Trenton Police Department is on life support,” he said. “There’s nothing proactive … we’re barely functioning.”
Through a spokesman, Rivera declined comment for this article. His appearance before council tonight for a “public safety plan update” was arranged only after council members demanded that Rivera brief them in person during a public session.
THE NUMBERS
In October and November, before the units were disbanded, the arrest numbers were higher. In October, the department’s officers made a total of 320 arrests, 74 of them by TAC detectives. In November, police arrested 272 people, 83 of them taken into custody by TAC.
The actual reassignment of TAC officers to regular patrol and other duties happened in mid-December, but even during their abbreviated existence that month, operating as barely 10 percent of the department’s total manpower, TAC made 43 of the 221 arrests that month.
The downswing in arrests for December continued into the first two months of this year and grew sharply more pronounced: 208 total arrests in January and 135 in February, according to the arrest dockets. The dockets even show a two-day stretch last month where only one arrest was made.
Based on a comparison with last year’s numbers, the arrival of winter and cold weather does not seem to be responsible for the decline in arrests.
In January of last year, city police made 299 arrests, and the following month they made 341. By comparison, January 2013 saw 30 percent fewer arrests overall. This February’s arrests were down a whopping 60 percent from the year before, the records show.
That’s partially because patrol officers, even with the staffing changes, we’re still too busy to do the kind of crime prevention work that TAC was doing, said George Dzurkoc, the head of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association local.
“There’s no time to do any interdiction for guys who are in patrol,” Dzurkoc said. “They answer the radio.”
The statistics do not count arrests in Trenton made by the U.S. Marshals or Mercer County Sheriff’s Office, or the New Jersey State Police, all of which have deployed units to the city to help maintain an effective police presence. The State Police patrols started one day before TAC was disbanded.
Dzurkoc said taking away the TAC units robbed the city department of its best weapon for counteracting the layoff of 105 police officers in 2011: the ability to be proactive.
Now, the department is entirely reactive, unable to stanch problems before they grow, he said. There is no unit dedicated to taking gang members with weapons off the street before they shoot someone, for example, Dzurkoc said.
“We lost 105 bodies but we still had some proactive policing going on,” Dzurkoc said. “That didn’t come true because of layoffs. It came true because of Ralph Rivera.”
Cities throughout the state have street-level anti-crime units. Newark has a dedicated gang unit, and even Hoboken debuted a street crime unit in December. New Brunswick, which has 30,000 fewer people than Trenton and much less violence, has an Anti-Crime Unit (ACU) which functions as the police narcotics squad. It conducts surveillance, arrests drug dealers, and responds when citizens complain of narcotics activity in their neighborhoods.
In Mercer County, Hamilton has an anti-crime unit dedicated to proactive policing, and even Ewing has its Gang Enforcement Unit.
Avila says he supports Rivera, but still questions why the director decided to disband TAC.
“I think that the tactical unit is an integral part of any crime-fighting plan,” Avila said yesterday.
“I have full faith in the director, I think he has been responsive,” Avila added. “But where the rubber meets the road, we just want to have a less violent city.”
THE PRECINCTS
On Dec. 14, Rivera, Mayor Tony Mack and the county’s state and federal legislators reopened two police precinct buildings that had been shuttered for more than a year.
Strategically located in the East and West Wards, the stations would be used as focal points to reorient the department’s patrol section and reduce response time to crimes, Rivera said at the time. The traffic of police cars in and out of the stations would also reassure residents in the neighborhoods nearby that police were on patrol.
Hours later, Rivera sent out a short memorandum to announce the second part of his realignment plan: The TAC units were to be disbanded as of 6 a.m. Dec. 16. All of the 19 detectives and two sergeants were to be sent back into patrol, riding the street in marked units.
The outcry was immediate. Residents were stunned that a force known for early intervention in drug and weapons activity would be taken off the streets. The state PBA president wrote a letter to the state attorney general calling the move a “public relations ploy” and demanded that he remove Rivera.
Days later, Rivera defended his moves, saying he was going to put in place “whatever works” but without saying the TAC units had ceased to be effective.
Assaults with a gun decreased in the city that month to 15 from 20 the year before. But Trenton greeted 2013 with a rash of shootings, as the first 14 hours of New Year’s Day saw one man murdered and five others wounded in citywide gunfire. A total of 22 assaults with a handgun were reported that month.
February of this year saw 11 shootings, up nearly 38 percent from eight in February 2012, according to numbers submitted by the department and released by the State Police.
Amid those changes came the drop in arrests.
The assistance of the State Police in city policing has not been a complete substitute for the loss of the TAC crews, Avila said.
“I don’t think it measures up to the work the TAC unit was doing,” Avila said.
It is unclear how much involvement the State Police have with Trenton currently.
“Deployments are unpredictable and are based on the real-time intelligence picture,” said Lt. Steve Jones, a State Police spokesman. “We work closely with Trenton PD to share intelligence .... The usual cadre of investigative and security units continues to work in the city on a regular basis.”
Avila has had Rivera speak at two community forums and believes the director has what it takes to turn the city around. But Avila is increasingly concerned about robberies and thefts of homes and businesses in the native South Ward.
State Police statistics show a 41 percent jump in city robberies committed with a firearm in the first two months of 2013 compared to the same period last year.
“There’s just the feeling out here that the police aren’t going to do much,” Avila said. “We’re just tired of seeing so much injustice.”
Contact Alex Zdan at azdan@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5705.