Why has Spotswood's mayor gone to court to have police bodycam footage destroyed?
Spotswood Mayor Jackie Palmer and the borough have gone to court to prevent the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office from releasing police body camera footage of an April 2022 incident in which she alleges officers abused their authority "by secretly" using the cameras to record "political opponents."
The lawsuit was filed Jan. 26 after the Prosecutor's Office notified Borough Attorney Victoria Flynn that it would be releasing the camera footage on Monday absent a court order prohibiting it, court papers say.
According to a lawsuit filed in January by Officer Richard Sasso against the borough and Palmer alleging she "personally sought to stymie his career," two police officers used their bodycams to record a meeting with Palmer on April 28, 2022 in which she allegedly "went on a tirade" because the officers did not eject a man from the municipal building on April 22 and then returned six days later.
Sasso's lawsuit alleges the mayor "repeatedly made inappropriate comments" to the officers, including "we don't need some (expletive) crazy person who's constantly around here and the elephant in the room is that he is (expletive) Black and this is not a diverse town, let's be honest."
The lawsuit says Palmer continued by saying "I don't want BLM and the KKK fighting on our front steps over this."
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Shortly after that, the Sasso suit alleges, Palmer had her administration initiate an Internal Affairs investigation into the two officers because their bodycams had recorded the incident. That strategy was undertaken to block any Open Public Records Act (OPRA) requests for the footage because it would not have to be released while the investigation was open, according to Sasso's lawsuit.
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In July 2022, the borough received an OPRA request "from an anonymous source who clearly was in receipt of non-public information" that requested all records associated with the Internal Affairs investigation of the incident, according to court papers.
The Prosecutor's Office was notified of the OPRA request because of concerns that an anonymous individual had requested the information by a case number and whether the recording violated state guidelines on bodycam use, court papers say.
After the Prosecutor's Office decided the Spotswood Police Department should handle the case, two months later Police Chief Phil Corbisiero told Flynn, the borough attorney. the investigation was sustained, meaning the footage was taken without Palmer's consent, a violation of the state guidelines, according to the suit filed by the borough and the mayor.
At that point, because the recording was made in violation of the guidelines, "it should have been immediately destroyed," according to the borough's and Palmer's lawsuit.
The lawsuit argues that release of the recording "will result in irreparable harm which cannot be undone" and that Palmer has "privacy rights to have a non-governmental record, illegally taken of her, from becoming a government record and subject to disclosure."
That "outweighs any public interest, however minimal, in the release of this two-year-old video," the lawsuit contends.
On Wednesday Superior Court Judge Michael Toto granted a show cause order on the lawsuit and scheduled a hearing for March 1.
Email: mdeak@mycentraljersey.com
Mike Deak is a reporter for mycentraljersey.com. To get unlimited access to his articles on Somerset and Hunterdon counties, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Spotswood NJ mayor sues to have police bodycam footage destroyed
