In a lawsuit that reads like an open wound, the State of New Jersey has formally accused one of its own municipalities, Clark Township, of operating a police department for years as a de facto border patrol with a singular, ugly mission: to keep Black and brown people out.
The civil complaint, filed by Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin and the Division on Civil Rights, alleges that this was not a matter of rogue officers but a systematic campaign directed from the very top of the town’s government.
The suit claims the directive came from the town’s longtime former mayor, Salvatore Bonaccorso, who resigned last year after pleading guilty to unrelated corruption charges.
According to the state’s investigation, Bonaccorso instructed police leadership to engage in discriminatory policing to, in his own alleged words, “keep chasing the spooks out of town”.
Bonaccorso told Clark Police Department leadership to “keep chasing the spooks out of town,” using a racial slur he’d been recorded using previously, the AG’s office said.
Police leadership, the state says, then engineered a traffic enforcement regime designed to turn that racist sentiment into municipal policy.
The New Jersey State Police Benevolent Association blasted the civil action, calling it “political grandstanding” and arguing that rank-and-file officers have been policing honorably for years under state oversight.
Statistical evidence tells a very different story.
Among other things, while Black and Hispanic residents make up less than 11% of Clark’s population, Clark police vehicle stop data from 2015 to 2020 indicate that, of the stops for which the driver’s race was recorded, over 37% of the drivers stopped were Black or Hispanic.
Over 53% of the drivers stopped by Clark police outside of the township’s boundaries were Black or Hispanic.
“This was not policing for public safety. This was policing for racial exclusion,” said Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, which applauded the lawsuit. “For decades, the Clark Police Department has been notorious for racism and discrimination”.
The state’s complaint outlines a cold, data-driven strategy to harass non-white motorists. Officers were allegedly told to focus patrols on roadways connecting Clark to the Garden State Parkway and to neighboring towns like Rahway and Linden, which have significantly larger Black and Hispanic populations.
They prioritized stopping cars for minor equipment violations—a broken taillight, a registration issue—over moving violations that actually threaten safety. Perhaps most cynically, the complaint alleges officers routinely used false claims of smelling marijuana as a pretext to search vehicles.
The numbers, the state argues, tell the story of intent. While Black and Hispanic residents make up less than 11% of Clark’s population, they accounted for more than 37% of all recorded traffic stops by Clark police from 2015 to 2020.
The disparity was even starker outside the town’s borders, where over half of all drivers stopped were Black or Hispanic. Once stopped, the scrutiny intensified: Black drivers were searched at 3.7 times the rate of white drivers, and Hispanic drivers at 2.2 times the rate.
The toxic environment was reportedly exposed in 2020 by a police whistleblower who secretly recorded Bonaccorso and police officials using racial slurs. The town later paid $400,000 to settle that matter.
Soon after, the Union County Prosecutor’s Office seized control of the police department, an oversight that lasted nearly five years and ended only in March 2025. State data indicates some racial disparities in policing decreased during that period of outside control.
The lawsuit has ignited a fierce political battle. Clark’s current mayor, Angel Albanese, who succeeded Bonaccorso, dismissed the suit as “frivolous” and accused Platkin, whose term is ending, of “playing politics”.
“New Jersey has some of the nation’s strongest civil rights laws, but for years, leadership in Clark brazenly violated the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination and violated individuals’ Constitutional rights,” said Division on Civil Rights Director Yolanda N. Melville. “We cannot and will not allow the repugnant behavior of public officials in Clark Township and the unlawful practices that the Clark Police Department engaged in for years.”
The state, however, is seeking a court order to permanently bar the town and its police from discriminatory practices, install a state monitor to watch over the department, and secure financial damages for the victims of this alleged years-long campaign.
In doing so, New Jersey positions itself in direct opposition to a federal government that, as the ACLU noted, is “abdicating its responsibility to hold police departments accountable”. Here, the state is not abdicating; it is prosecuting its own.