Police chief on trial for hate crime said Trump was ‘last hope for white people'
A former police chief accused of slamming a black teenager’s head into a door frame reportedly called Donald Trump “the last hope for white people” before the 2016 presidential election.
Frank Nucera, who has been charged with a hate crime, also complained that Hillary Clinton “will give it to all the minorities” if she entered the White House.
The comments were secretly recorded by a colleague at the Bordentown Township Police Department in New Jersey and played at his trial.
Mr Nucera resigned as head of the department in February 2017 after learning the FBI was investigating his alleged “significant history” of racist behaviour.
The 62-year-old is charged with a federal hate crime, deprivation of a suspect’s rights and making false statements to the bureau in connection with the September 2016 arrest of an 18-year-old black man who had been wrongly accused of not paying for a hotel room.
Two officers were escorting the handcuffed teenager from the hotel into a police car when Mr Nucera allegedly approached from behind and slammed the suspect’s head into a metal door frame.
Prosecutors said the incident was motivated by the police chief’s “intense racial animus” and have documented a string of racist comments in court.
He is said to have repeatedly used the N-world to colleagues and told one officer that African-Americans should be lined up and killed.
According to a transcript of another recording reported by local news website NJ.com, during the arrest of another black suspect in 2016, Mr Nucera said: “I’m telling you, you know what, Donald Trump is the last hope for white people, because Hillary will give it to all the minorities to get a vote. That’s the truth. I’m telling you."
A criminal complaint filed in New Jersey’s federal district cour also alleged that Mr Nucera told a colleague in 2015 that African-Americans were “like Isis, they have no value”.
“They should line them all up and mow them down,” he said, according to the complaint, seen and reported in The New York Times.
Mr Nucera’s lawyer, Rocco Cipparone, acknowledged to the newspaper that his client had made the Trump remark and used “inappropriate language, including derogatory racial terms”.
But he insisted the former police chief had not committed a hate crime.
“These are embarrassing, ugly words, but if Frank Nucera did not strike this man, then the words are equally irrelevant,” Mr Cipparone said. “It is not a crime, even for a police officer, to use that language. It’s not socially acceptable, it’s not appropriate, but it’s not criminal.”
Mr Nucera faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
