Court lifts order, marking nine-year reform of the Newark Police Department

The word from the federal courthouse today was one of progress, of a job well done.

With the solemn stroke of a gavel, a nine-year consent decree overseeing the Newark Police Department was declared terminated, the burden of federal oversight lifted.

The official narrative, delivered in the sterile prose of a Justice Department press release, is one of successful reform, of a department chastened and corrected.

Under Mayor Ras Baraka, Newark’s crime rate has seen a significant decline, reaching a 60-year low. His administration implemented a strategy focused on community-based violence prevention and police reform, which includes treating violence as a public health issue, increasing police presence in targeted areas, and establishing an Office of Violence Prevention.

While official statistics show substantial drops in homicides and other crimes, some skepticism exists about the numbers, and challenges remain.

But to believe that tidy ending is to forget the bloody and brutal beginning, to ignore the savage prologue that necessitated this federal intervention in the first place.

The truth is that this decree was not born in a seminar on best policing practices. It was forged in the streets of Newark during the tenure of then-Mayor Cory Booker, a man who arrived on a promise of hope and unleashed a reign of terror.

His instrument was Garry McCarthy, a disciple of Giuliani’s broken windows theology, imported to wage a war of zero tolerance.

And the casualties were the people of Newark.

This was the era of the Pop Warner Three—a coach and two children, one just thirteen years old, dragged from their car at gunpoint by a narcotics squad for the crime of wanting a hamburger after football practice.

“Please don’t kill me,” the boy pleaded, a chilling testament to the climate of fear that had become official policy. This was not an isolated incident; it was a pattern, a systemic rot.

In a parallel case, McCarthy was later fired for covering up the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald. The 17-year-old was shot 16 times by Chicago Officer Jason Van Dyke, and the Superintendent concealed the truth for 400 days.

The Justice Department’s investigation of Newark would later confirm what the citizens already knew: a pattern of unconstitutional stops, of unjustified and excessive force, of theft by officers, of retaliation against those who dared to question their authority.

Baraka’s administration treats violence as a public health crisis, using a strategy that includes community engagement, trauma services, and addressing root causes. There has been a rise in internal affairs investigations, suggesting more internal scrutiny of police officers.

“I think that every major city in America is struggling to get crime under control,” said Baraka ten years ago, in an interview with NPR’s Rachel Martin. “We are not just targeting the one percent of folks that are doing the most violent crimes. What we want to do is attack the area, the place that helps become (an) incubator for crime.”

His approach has worked, but for most of Baraka’s tenure, the city carried the weight of his predecessor’s tough-on-crime but totally ineffective approach to law and order.

While Senator Booker now crisscrosses the country posing as an apostle of criminal justice reform, his legacy in Newark is written in the cold, hard statistics of violence and failure.

The number of murders during his watch was greater than in the eight years before and the eight years after his administration—a damning indictment of his “tough on crime” posturing.

His solution was not community building but paramilitary occupation, a strategy of confrontation that generated a mountain of grievances and a river of ACLU complaints, which he publicly scorned and attempted to undermine.

So let us not be fooled by the placid language of today’s proceedings. The termination of this decree is not an absolution; it is a recognition that Mayor Ras Baraka has turned the corner on Booker’s heavy-handed injustice.

It closes a chapter of state-sanctioned brutality that a rising political star unleashed upon his own constituents in a desperate gambit for national relevance.

The monitors and the mandates are leaving, but the memory of what was done under the color of law remains.

The question now hanging over the city like a pall is not if the police have learned their lesson, but if a political class that so readily traded its people’s constitutional rights for a headline has learned its own.

The gavel has sounded, but the echo of gunshots and the whispered prayers of children pulled over for a hamburger will linger for a generation.