DIRECTOR OUT
Sources say acting Trenton Police Director is stepping down, mayor will need to pick fourth director >>
TRENTON >> In a stunning move expected to be made official later this week, Carol Russell reportedly resigned as acting city police director following a meeting Monday at City Hall, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.
News of the acting police director’s impending departure, coming fewer than two months after she was announced as Mayor Reed Gusciora’s historic choice to become the city’s first black woman to lead the department, broke Monday afternoon.
But City Hall wouldn’t confirm or deny whether Russell, who has faces serious questions about her qualifications for the job, was on her way out.
City spokesman Tim Carroll would only say officials planned to hold a meeting at 4 p.m. to discuss “police business.”
He refused to say whether Russell, a 20-year retired TPD cop who retired with the rank of sergeant, planned to tender her resignation at the meeting.
As day dragged into night, Mayor Gusciora, perhaps still reeling that his pick didn’t have the support she needed to survive a confirmation vote, hadn’t returned multiple phone calls seeking confirmation of what one high-level city official called a “done” deal.
Sources in the department also indicated Russell, who had only been on the job a little over a month, was being replaced.
The city official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russell met with the administration to turn in her access keys to city police headquarters.
Russell replaced Lt. Chris Doyle, who served for days in place of ousted acting police director Pedro Medina.
It’s unclear who may replace Russell when the administration announces she is stepping down, prompting a search for Gusciora’s fourth police director in the last five months.
John Day, a former State Police trooper who had previously emerged as a potential finalist in the last goaround, said he was flooded by calls from Trenton cops congratulating him on becoming Russell’s successor.
But he said he still hadn’t heard anything official from the administration.
“They [officers] were calling me and saying, ‘Congratulations.’ I was like, ‘Congratulations for what?’” Day told The Trentonian this afternoon. “They’re hoping and praying I get it.”
City police union president Michael Schiaretti said the mayor’s next pick should be to be someone “who is looking to be [in the position] long-term, with a clear plan to move the department and the city forward and achieve the city’s law enforcement objective.”
The union boss said the acting police director wasn’t in place long enough for the rank-and-file to “really form an opinion on her performance.”
At the same time, he acknowledged “we didn’t see any changes instituted” in the little time that she led the force.
At-large councilman Santiago Rodriguez hoped the mayor would consider a “qualified” Latino for the opening, mentioning retired Lt. Rolando Ramos as a possibility.
Ramos, who supported Paul Perez in the mayor’s race, informally met with Gusciora to express his interest in the position, but he said he never heard back from the administration.
He said Monday night he hadn’t heard from the administration about the nowvacated position, which first came open when Gusciora abruptly cut ties with Medina after he had been on loan for free from the county for three months.
City leaders said the mayor made a huge political miscalculation when he decided to yank Medina’s re-up resolution off the table and replace him with Doyle.
About a week later, the mayor announced Russell as his pick during the Oct. 25 State of the City address.
Since then, Russell has been dogged by allegations that she lacked the qualification to lead the 285-member police department.
The administration’s move came after what many city officials said was an underwhelming performance from Russell during last week’s City Council meeting and amid questions about her recent demand to have access to officers’ secretly guarded internal affairs records, a request that sent the department into a fit over fears those records may fall into the hands of known nemeses.
Rodriguez said the acting police director’s responses to fellow councilman Jerell Blakeley’s questions about her plan to reduce crime and her qualifications were “very bad.”
His criticism was tame compared to some of the other barbs that have been thrown at Russell and the mayor.
South Ward councilman George Muschal previously said he felt the mayor picked Russell to lead the department for “political gain,” a charge the mayor dismissed as a “grassy knoll.”
But Gusciora’s historic nomination of Russell, meant to help break through a “glass ceiling” that had systematically prevented minorities from receiving promotions in TPD, quickly became a sideshow.
Muschal skipped the mayor’s State of the City address in protest of Russell’s hiring. And her critics quickly pointed to the city ordinance requiring the police director to have five years of experience in a “responsible capacity in public administration and policing.”
Critics have also slammed the acting police director over her time on the force, alleging, without proof, everything from sick time abuse to that she helped her son evade capture when he was wanted for murder.
Not helping her case, Russell admitted last week under questioning from one member of the legislative body that she doesn’t have a college degree.
She put down on her resume that she has been enrolled at Mercer County Community College for the last 12 years.
Russell told Blakeley, who when contacted for comment refused to talk about “unconfirmed rumors,” that she had taken “classes” but never finished her degree because life got in the way.
Old foes in the department also took Russell to task over her son’s troubled past.
In the few interviews she has sat for, Russell, who is credited with being one of the first officers to sound the alarms in Trenton about a growing gang problem, acknowledged her son, Joseph Welch, got mixed up in the gang life.
It led to him doing a prison bid after admitting to aggravated manslaughter for being the getaway driver in a gang slay in the capital city.
Russell stressed that her son turned his life around after getting out the slammer, graduating from culinary arts school on the way to become a sous chef.
Russell, who was heavily involved in a fraternal organization, the Brother Officer Law Enforcement Society, while she was on the force, already faced significant pushback before The Trentonian exposed last month that she was at the center of an alleged racebaiting scheme in fall 1999.
The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office conducted an undercover operation centering around Russell and other Trenton cops’ alleged involvement in a plot to catch white officers on tape making illegal arrests of minorities in the capital city and sell the videos to PBS and Good Morning America.
Diop Kamau, a retired cop turned Florida-based cop-catching crusader who was present at the meeting, told The Trentonian the operation never got off the ground after it was blown up by paranoid cops who feared having the apparent rampant corruption exposed.
For her part, Russell has declined multiple interview requests to answer questions about the investigation – which never yielded charges against her or anyone else – or her alleged lack of qualifications to head the department.
But that race-baiting investigation – even if it was meant to uproot corruption – didn’t gain her any points with many officers in the department who just felt they couldn’t trust her to have their backs.
That much appeared to be confirmed last week, when sources said the acting police director, who is a civilian, directed the head of TPD’s internal affairs, Chris Doyle, to make available to her officers’ internal affairs records.
Doyle refused and went to the administration, believing the acting director overstepped her authority.
The city asked the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office to weigh in on the request.
And after further deliberations, city law director John Morelli said in an email it was determined the police director cannot access internal affairs records without a court order or permission from Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri.
Onofri didn’t return a phone call requesting comment about the IA controversy.
But Morelli said he spoke last week with First Assistant Doris Galuchie – she also didn’t return a phone call requesting comment – who confirmed his “interpretation” of the state Attorney General guidelines.
The AG’s guidelines deem IA records confidential, with access limited to “unit personnel and the law enforcement executive,” unless there’s a justifiable reason for their release.
In some cases, a deputy chief acting on behalf of the law enforcement executive can access the records if a “specific need” is met, according to the guidelines.
Those circumstances include when a hearing officer – usually the police director – needs them to oversee a disciplinary hearing of an officer who has been administratively charged.
The records can also be released to attorneys of litigants who have sued officers over misconduct allegations investigated by IA, according to the guidelines.
Russell apparently didn’t do herself any favors when, for the first time last week, she faced stiff questioning at a council meeting from Blakeley.
Blakeley asked the acting police director about city crime statistics, her qualifications to lead the department, a proposal to bring back deputy chief and her plan to address a recent uptick in violence, highlighted by last month’s midday execution of a Crip gang member outside a city deli.
Despite facing pushback from Russell’s supporters over how he interrogated her, Blakeley defended his questions as professional and relevant for the city to assess whether she had the chops to lead.
Russell struggled to recite the number of murders and shootings the city has experienced this year without looking down at her notes.
She admitted her figures may be inaccurate telling council the city has had 12 murders and 71 shootings in 2018.
The Trentonian’s Homicide Watch count shows the city has had 20 homicides so far this year – 15 by shooting, stabbing or beating – and another five deaths that included three vehicular homicides, an infant who was abandoned by her mother and the police shooting of Tahaij Wells at the Art All Night shootout this summer.
Russell also stumbled when Blakeley asked her about a proposal to bring back a deputy police chief.
Gusciora had said the move came up in a “brainstorming session” with his acting police director, though she denied ever discussing the proposal with the mayor.
While admitting she doesn’t “read the newspaper,” she suggested The Trentonian “misinterpreted” the mayor, who talked extensively about the benefits of resurrecting the deputy police chief position.
He said the position – which some believe was floated to entice members of the force to back Russell – would require “almost copolice directing.”
But he said whoever occupied that position would still have to answer to the police director.
The mayor felt bringing back a deputy police chief could free up Russell from administrative tasks so she could devote her attention to implementing her vision of community policing.
City officials immediately blasted the idea, which the mayor called a “workable hybrid,” as an end-around the current civilian police director setup, which was enacted following a 1999 referendum under thenMayor Doug Palmer.
Blakeley, who in recent weeks has walked back his initial support of the acting police director, suggested the mayor’s proposal was akin to putting “training wheels” on Russell.
Such a move, the at-large councilman said, would make Russell’s historic appointment “really hollow and simply an affirmativeaction hire.”