A mayor in New Jersey is being accused in a lawsuit of ordering police officers to remove a man from a municipal building she and her staff were in because the man was Black and they did not feel safe. Then, the lawsuit claims, she tried to cover it up.
The allegation is part of a complaint filed last week against Jackie Palmer, the mayor of Spotswood, by a senior police patrolman who accuses her of using her position to “assert convoluted and misplaced power” to, among other things, stymie his career. The officer, Richard Sasso Jr., alleges that Palmer refuses to promote him in retaliation for her husband’s “forced resignation” from the department.
The suit, filed in Superior Court of Middlesex County, also names the borough as a defendant.
Palmer’s attorney, Eric Martin Bernstein, said his client “is being targeted by a handful of members of the Spotswood Police Department, who are trying to describe her as a racist and an interferer of police operations.” Spotswood is a predominantly white borough with a population of less than 10,000.
“She is not interfering with nor has she interfered with, police operations nor is she a racist,” the attorney said in a statement.
He said that he could not comment further on ongoing litigation.
According to the suit, on April 25, 2022, a Spotswood resident, who is Black, went to police headquarters and spoke to a sergeant about “a racially-charged incident” involving Palmer that had occurred three days earlier. The sergeant who spoke to the resident, whose identity is not disclosed in the suit, assigned Sasso to investigate further, the suit states.
In a police interview, the resident told Sasso that on the day of the incident, April 22, 2022, he was the only Black person in the municipal building, the lawsuit states. The resident told Sasso that he “was approached multiple times by a clearly aggravated” Palmer and that he did not see Palmer approach anyone else, the suit alleges.
Sasso says in the…
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