Hank Kalet

Walter Hudson, of the National Action Network. Photo Credit, Maxwell Barma, New Brunswick Patch.

I wasn’t on Throop Avenue the night that Barry Deloatch was shot by New Brunswick police. Few people were, which has left huge questions to answer in the wake of the death of the 46-year-old New Brunswick resident.

In the nearly two weeks since the shooting, city residents have protested and a number of community meetings — including one tonight — have been held in an effort to bridge what is becoming a growing divide between the police and city government on one side and its mostly minority citizens on the other.

A tort claim — essentially a civil suit — is in the offing and a Latino group has asked that a grand jury be convened to get answers, both about the shooting and the conduct of New Brunswick police more generally. The Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey

issued a five-page release naming New Brunswick Police Officer Brad Berdel as the shooter, as well as naming Officer Dan Mazan as his partner involved in the foot chase toward the alley at 105 Throop Ave., where Deloatch was shot.

The press release also detailed findings of “use of force” reports the group said it reviewed on Berdel and Mazan for 2010, noting: “the two primary officers in Barry Deloatch’s death were involved in 10 separate reported force incidents, and that 80 percent of these incidents “involved using force against Black and Latino men.”

Berdel and Mazan, however, were not among what the report called the “Top 10” city police officers, representing less than 7 percent of the entire department, who “were responsible for 34 percent of the force incidents during 2010.”

Police officers and their supporters may not like the request. They may view it as an attack. But the relationship between the police and the prosecutor’s office is too close, while the city’s residents have apparently lost faith in law enforcement.

The only way to repair the relationship — one that must be fixed if the city is to become safer — is for police to open their books and open their doors to the public in the form of an independent grand jury, to do so voluntarily and to make every effort to show that the department is cooperating.

Fighting the request for an investigation and keeping the public at arm’s length will only guarantee that the situation will get worse.
 

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.