The grainy video was played multiple times before a jury in a Middlesex County courtroom last year.
In the glow of a police car’s red and blue strobe lights, a white Carteret cop punched a black teenager over and over again.
A brief car chase in 2017 led to the confrontation, caught on the police car’s dashcam. It resulted in officer Joseph Reiman facing charges of aggravated assault and official misconduct.
But after a weeks-long trial in May 2019 in which experts testified that the level of force used by the officer was appropriate, a jury found him not guilty. The case unsettled the community, and earlier this week, a protest took place at the house of Carteret Mayor Daniel Reinman, the brother of the accused officer.
The case is emblematic of why — even with video evidence — it’s difficult for juries to convict police officers in cases involving excessive use-of-force charges. Experts say the bar is set higher for the police, and there’s a general perception of trust in law enforcement. And once jurors learn that using force is part of the job, the line of what’s excessive becomes difficult to define.
However, experts interviewed by NJ Advance Media agree that what normally plays out in a courtroom will not be the case if the four Minneapolis cops charged in connection with the death of George Floyd head to trial.
“I would be surprised if they didn’t get some sort of conviction in this case,” said Jessica S. Henry, an associate professor at Montclair State University’s Department of Justice Studies. “They capture the entire thing. You can hear bystanders say, ‘Please get up.’ You can hear people say, ‘What are you doing?’ And (the officers) don’t stop. The audio adds that compelling piece to it as well.”
Like other states, New Jersey cops are “granted the extraordinary authority to use force when necessary to accomplish lawful ends,” according to the state attorney general’s use of force policy. “Officers should exhaust all other reasonable means before resorting to the use of force,” the policy states.
The average person in the street witnessing a police officer use force isn’t necessarily aware that cops are trained to use these tactics, explained Maria Haberfeld, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. When a jury learns that force by police in certain cases is permissible, what looks excessive is actually proper technique.
“The jurors come to realize this is how they were trained,” Haberfeld said.
Even putting a cop on trial is atypical. According to data reported by the Washington Post, among 10,000 police-caused deaths nationwide from 2005 to 2014, 153 officers were charged. Of those 153 cases, 55% resulted in convictions, mostly through guilty pleas.
“It’s rare that officers get prosecuted for on-duty deaths,” Philip Matthew Stinson, the Bowling Green University professor who maintained those statistics, told the Post. “Especially ones that are not shootings.”
Bob Bianchi, the former Morris County prosecutor, said the public gives police officers a level of credibility a normal citizen might not get.
“They are allowed to use force, whereas usually citizens are not allowed to use force against people,” he said. “Since the police are allowed to use force, it becomes a little bit complicated factually.”
Bianchi believes that as time goes on and more videos of egregious force are surfacing, it may “change the hearts and minds of people.”
“You are seeing more charges being brought and more convictions being brought on officers around the country,” he said.
John Molinelli, who served as Bergen County prosecutor from 2002 to 2016, said he was not “overly successful” in trials involving cops as defendants. He said most people sympathize with law enforcement — a hurdle prosecutors have to overcome.
“You have a general perception amongst most people that these are people that protect me, these are people that are faced with violent confrontations every day and that is the general mindset,” he said.
These cases, Molinelli said, are the rare occasion where damning evidence against the victim is allowed to be presented to the jury.
“You are generally not permitted to use it,” he said. “It becomes a central theme of the case. That defense attorney will try to put the jury in the shoes of the police officer when confronted with that type of conduct — what was in the eyes of the officer perceiving it.”
In most criminal cases, video evidence would be key for the prosecution. But in cases of alleged excessive force by police, videos provide only a snippet of an encounter between a civilian and a cop, experts say. They say it doesn’t take into consideration the environment surrounding the encounter or the information the officer received from dispatch — for instance, if the suspect is believed to be armed.
Henry, the Montclair State professor, says the Floyd case is different.
“Dashcam video only captures from a particular angle because it’s in a car,” she explained. “This is a civilian witness standing on the sideline and you capture all of it. You see he’s restrained. You hear people in the crowd say, ‘Get off of him.’ It adds a really compelling element that you may not get from a dashboard camera. The immediacy in this video is, I think, what sets it apart.”
Bianchi agrees.
“The video is compelling,” he said. “And the commentary that’s occurring is compelling. What happened beforehand is irrelevant to what’s happening at that point in time. Not only is he not resisting arrest, the cop has his hands in his pocket.
"It puts the person in an incredibly vulnerable position for a significant amount of time, and the citizens see it for what it is. That video is going to be damning.”
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Alex Napoliello may be reached at anapoliello@njadvancemedia.com.
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