A year ago, Hackensack's police director vowed to reform the troubled department. Did he?

HACKENSACK — When Ray Guidetti took over the city's Police Department as director a little more than a year ago, he pledged to reform a troubled agency that had been plagued with turmoil, infighting and controversy.

Guidetti was appointed director by the City Council in August 2022 and has since made sweeping changes to the department. He has introduced technology such as drones and mapping systems and is working to build public trust in the department through more community engagement.

However, his tenure has also sparked lawsuits against the city from several members of the department, most of them ranking officers, who have accused Guidetti of overstepping the bounds of his position and abusing his authority.

“This has not been my first time coming into an organization to implement change,” he said. “Regardless of the organization, there’s always going to be some resistance to change, there’s other folks who raise their hands up, and then you have the majority of people on the sidelines waiting to see if the change is good. Progress is being made, but things don’t happen overnight.”

A new Police Department director

Guidetti was given a three-year contract with an annual salary of $195,000 on the recommendation of a report by Robert Anzilotti, the retired Bergen County Prosecutor's Office chief of detectives, who was paid $60,000 in early 2022 to conduct a review of the department through his company, R3 Strategies and Solutions.

The scathing report revealed that some of the department's ranking officers were padding their pockets with hours of unscheduled overtime, compensatory time and extra-duty traffic details.

Arrests dropped by 85% in the last eight years, and city detectives had a clearance rate of just 11%. Morale within the department had cratered, the report said.

Anzilotti advised city officials to hire an outside police director to run the 107-officer force because it said those now in command "seem more focused on enhancing their own compensation."

The damning assessment was the latest blow for the department, which over the past 15 years had faced a slew of controversies, lawsuits, infighting, administrative complaints and officer arrests.

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Hackensack has not had a chief since Ken Zisa, who was forced out of the position after being charged with fraud and official misconduct in 2009. He was later reinstated to the post for a month in 2018 so he could collect his pension after his conviction was overturned on appeal. More than 20 officers filed suits against the chief and the city during Zisa’s tenure, eventually costing the city more than $8 million in settlements.

More recently, the city has been involved in a lengthy and costly legal battle to strip two city police officers of their jobs. The officers were among those accused in 2016 of illegally entering a Prospect Avenue apartment without a warrant, mishandling evidence and falsifying reports.

Who is Ray Guidetti?

Guidetti arrived in Hackensack with a long resume and a pledge to reform the beleaguered department.

The law enforcement veteran began his 25-year career with the state police in the 1990s. After 9/11, he was assigned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Joint Terrorism Task Force and worked with the prosecutorial team investigating the 9/11 hijacking of Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field, killing all 44 passengers and crew members on board.

In 2006, he testified in the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, who was ultimately sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Guidetti then became deputy director of the state Regional Operations & Intelligence Center, which works to share information and intelligence across law enforcement, counterterrorism and homeland security departments. He rejoined the state police in 2014, eventually rising to deputy superintendent of investigations.

Guidetti said he saw the R3 report as a “road map to follow” as he looked to make changes this past year.

Changes made to the Police Department

One of the first changes Guidetti made was to address the overtime concerns raised in the report. The department now uses an outside system called Jobs4Blue to manage extra-duty scheduling in a fair and transparent way, Guidetti said.

Technology is being used to collect data and measure the effectiveness of police response. Mapping systems are helping to pinpoint problem areas and determine where officers are most needed on patrol.

“If you want to be smart with resource allocation, you have to be able to visualize it,” Guidetti said. “And when you make changes, you want to know if they’re effective. Or did we move the problem somewhere else?”

Closed-circuit cameras are being used around the city to aid in investigations. The department has expanded its use of body cameras.

Drones are being dispatched as a first response to minor incidents, such as an illegally parked car, when officers are busy with other calls.

“In a perfect world, there are no other calls, and you are going to send an officer,” Guidetti said. “But what happens if all the officers are tied up? You can send a drone to see if there is still a problem.”

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The drones will be operated by trained officers, and drones will assist in search-and-rescue missions, accident and crime scene documentation, searches for suspects and other police calls.

Guidetti implemented an emergency services unit to respond quickly to threats, including active shooters. Officers are also walking the beat up and down Main Street to engage with the community, as development downtown continues to grow and has brought thousands of new residents to the city.

Is the Hackensack Police Department improving?

City Manager Vincent Caruso said under Guidetti’s leadership the department has made significant strides in instituting the reforms recommended in the R3 report and has “raised our standards of law enforcement.”

“Our officers are more effective, responsive and community-oriented than ever, and we look forward to continuing to build toward a stronger and safer Hackensack for all,” he said.

Lt. Al DeLeon, a 22-year veteran of the department, said Guidetti is helping to rebuild trust between the police and the city administration, a relationship that had grown strained after years of turmoil and turnover at the top.

“The city has been reluctant to appoint a chief because they have been looking for the leadership,” DeLeon said. “I am for having a chief; I believe the director is also. He’s not going to be here forever. He’s bringing us to a place where the department is ready and the City Council is ready to appoint a chief.”

Officer Robert Carucci said that for most of his two-decade career, the department was in a state of flux.

“Every time we got a new director or new boss, it would be destroy, rebuild. It was constant,” he said. “You have to be able to grow and not just keep rebuilding from the ashes. Now you can see there’s thought and reasoning behind the changes.”

Most officers have been receptive to the changes and are eager to remake the department as a model for other agencies across the state, Guidetti said.

But not everyone has been happy under the new leadership.

Lawsuits against the department

The first lawsuit brought against the city by an officer after Guidetti’s hire came in November. Lt. Anthony DiPersia accused the police director of retaliation and hostility after he protested his appointment. In the suit, DiPersia said his complaints about Guidetti overstepping his civilian role in violation of state law were ignored.

Four more lawsuits filed by veteran police officers making similar allegations of retaliation have followed.

Over the past year and change, officers who have spoken out against the police director have repeatedly been disciplined, the subject of internal affairs investigations, reassignments and diminution of authority within the department, said Robert Tandy, an attorney who is representing all of the officers who have filed suit.

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“These highly decorated officers, who have been forced to file suit, are in many cases second-generation officers who have dedicated their lives to the citizens of the city,” he said “Now, all of a sudden, since August 2022, all of these highly decorated officers have become persona non grata in the department. Highly decorated officers with little or no prior disciplinary action throughout their decades of employment in the city.”

DiPersia, who is the head of the Hackensack police supervisors' union, called the R3 report “one-sided” and said the review’s findings failed to account for the challenges of a decline in manpower, the pandemic and the decriminalization and eventual legalization of cannabis, instead attributing low morale and declining arrests to supervisors’ overtime and extra-duty details.

He suggested that a lot of problems could have been avoided if instead of hiring an outside agency to review the department there was more communication between the city administration and police.

“When I hear comments that morale is high and productivity is much more efficient from this director, I’m reminded of the old phrase ‘people will defend a false narrative to the death when their very existence is so invested in the lie,'” DiPersia said. “Simply a cursory polling of our department’s membership will reveal a far less rose-colored evaluation of his performance.”

Prosecutor's Office, attorney general will weigh in

City officials said a recent independent audit of the department’s overtime, compensatory time, extra-duty details and record-keeping practices backs the earlier report’s findings of overtime abuse by senior officers and affirms the need for police reform.

The audit, compiled by Presage Integrated Solutions, a team of former law enforcement and fraud investigators, looked at 17 of the department’s highest-ranking officers and found that between January 2020 and July 2022, the officers “engaged in behaviors that appeared to reflect a concerted effort by many of these individuals to generate extra income for themselves notwithstanding the public safety needs” of the city.

During that period, the officers worked nearly 1,800 extra-duty traffic details and earned an estimated extra $1 million, the audit said. Among the “troubling practices” the report noted were splitting shifts, changing schedules to maximize the number of extra-duty details worked and “double dipping” by overlapping shifts where officers were paid for working both extra-duty details and their regular assignments at the same time.

Officials said the city will hand the report to the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office and the state Attorney General's Office for them to independently investigate the findings.

“The data in this report confirms what we already knew about the major lack of accountability and oversight within some at the upper ranks of our Police Department that contributed to an atmosphere of disregard for its core mission,” Mayor John Labrosse said in a statement. “We have the utmost confidence in our new Police Director Raymond Guidetti’s ability to spearhead the ongoing reform effort within the department to ensure the people of Hackensack are provided with the public safety they deserve, and the progress that has already been made is helping restore trust in the community.”

DiPersia, who is one of the officers named in the audit, said the report was misleading, cherry-picked the people it targeted and is more evidence of retaliation by department leaders against those who have spoken out.

“The city spent $60,000 dollars on this assessment, which reviewed the overtime of 17 supervisors, leaving out some supervisors within the current administration’s inner circle,” he said.

That selectivity and the city’s earlier decision to refer only five supervisors to the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office for official investigation, which ended in their exoneration of the allegations, shows “further retaliation to those who complain about the director acting outside his scope,” DiPersia said.

Guidetti said he sees his role as building the department back up and creating opportunities so eventually it will have a police chief as its leader again.

“There’s always going to be resistance to change. My job and my challenge is to bring folks on board,” Guidetti said. “This department has had a troubled history for many years, and we need to move past that. We have a long-term vision here. I know we’re not going to get there right away, but we’ll get there.”

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Hackensack NJ police director Ray Guidetti talks first year