Mercer County paid out more than $4M for bad cops since 2012
TRENTON » In the secretive world of police abuse, Mercer County municipalities and insurance carriers have paid millions to settle excessive force and police misconduct lawsuits over the last eight years — money officials conceded could have gone toward critical services in cashstrapped cities like Trenton.
In 2018, the Asbury Park Press found New Jersey governments paid out more than $42 million over the last decade to cover for cops who break bad.
The figure was likely an undercount since the newspaper noted it found during its two-year investigation that “some of the state’s largest cities and insurance carriers refused to release government documents that are at the core of the rogue cop problem.”
As of 2018, the Press identified $610,000 paid out by Mercer County governments to settle eight police-abuse suits. An analysis by The Trentonian shows the figure is much higher, boosted partly by cases settled since the APP’s investigation.
Over the last eight years, municipalities have collectively doled out north of $4 million to resolve bad-cop matters in Mercer County, including a $25,000 racial profiling settlement in Princeton, according to a Trentonian review of records and news stories.
Most recently, Hamilton Township settled a police brutality lawsuit for $1.2 million, in the case of Thomas Sakoutis. That’s on top of a nearly $1 million payout in a false-arrest lawsuit that Hamilton settled in April.
That’s not it: Since April 2012, the City of Trenton has approved nearly $2 million in payouts in policecase lawsuits, according to data obtained by The Trentonian.
Cases are still pending, including several lawsuits filed last month accusing Trenton Police of endangering festival-goers who were shot, maimed or trampled during the June 2018 Art All Night melee, meaning that figure will likely grow.
It’s important to point out that these settlements do not take into account the millions of dollars spent by municipalities on attorneys to litigate the matters before they settled. In Trenton
alone, that figure was $1.2 million since 2012, record show.
“Police abuse and racial discrimination has been systemic in this county for decades,” said Robin Lord, the attorney who represented Sakoutis.
For decades, before it was a hot-button topic, Lord brought civil litigation to try to stamp out rogue cops in the county.
“In the beginning, I used to bring countless cases of police abuse across the street to the prosecutor’s office for their review and prosecution,” she said. “For years they turned me away one by one claiming those type of cases were too hard to prove, who would believe the Black guy accused of a crime.”
Now the blue tide seems to be turning.
The focus on police misconduct has become a national talking point as Americans tire of repeated deaths at the hands of cops — 1,017 people and counting have been shot and killed by the police this year, according to the Washington Post police shootings database, a disproportionate number of them Black.
That’s not even counting deaths like the homicide of George Floyd, the Black man who died in Minneapolis Police custody May 25 after repeatedly saying he could not breathe. His killing has inspired protests throughout Mercer County, New Jersey and the U.S. to rally against racism and abusive cops.
Lord says the payouts don’t seem to deter bad-apple cops.
Many of the lawsuits are settled without admission of wrongdoing, and officers rarely suffer consequences, as municipalities are on the hook for huge lump sums.
“I figured that if I could hit them in their pocketbook, then maybe they would do something about it,” Lord said. “Boy was I wrong. The bigger the settlements, the bigger the