The state takeover comes after calls for the Justice Department to investigate this month’s fatal police shooting of Najee Seabrooks, 31.
Three weeks after a deadly police shooting in Paterson, N.J., the state’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, announced on Monday that his office would take over day-to-day operations of the city’s troubled police department.
The new state oversight in New Jersey’s third-largest city comes after civil rights activists sent a letter to the U.S. Justice Department, asking federal officials to begin an investigation into “unlawful and unconstitutional conduct” within the Paterson Police Department.
The takeover is effective immediately. Beginning in May, Isa M. Abbassi, a chief with the New York Police Department who held leadership positions in the aftermath of the police killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island, will take control of the department, Mr. Platkin said.
“There is a crisis of confidence in law enforcement in this city,” Mr. Platkin said during a news conference in Paterson. “Under these circumstances, I cannot deliver on my duty to protect the people of Paterson and to keep officers safe who are sworn to protect them.”
As the takeover was announced, residents in attendance clapped and shouted in approval.
On March 3, Najee Seabrooks, 31, was shot and killed as he moved toward the police while holding knives after an hourslong interaction with law enforcement officers, who had been trying to coax him to leave a locked bathroom in his brother’s apartment. Mr. Seabrooks, who worked as an anti-violence counselor with the Paterson Healing Collective, repeatedly said he intended to kill himself and suggested to the police that he would not be the only person to die, according to footage from officers’ body-worn cameras.
Mr. Seabrooks also sent text messages to colleagues at the collective, asking them to come and help him navigate an emotional crisis, but the police did not permit them to intervene. Mental health counselors from a nearby hospital, St. Joseph’s University Medical Center, also were not called during the nearly five-hour standoff — a decision the hospital’s president criticized in a strongly worded statement.
Mr. Seabrooks’s death touched off several large community protests as residents demanded answers, and accountability.
Last month, a Paterson police officer was charged with aggravated assault and official misconduct after shooting a man in the back while responding to sounds of gunfire. The shooting left the man, Khalif Cooper, paralyzed. In 2021, Thelonious McKnight Jr. was shot and killed by a police officer; a gun was found near Mr. McKnight, according to the attorney general’s office, but activists have questioned whether he was armed when he was shot.
In the past several years, six Paterson officers have also been convicted of stealing cash and other items from residents who were searched illegally, in violation of federal civil rights laws.
The New Jersey Violence Intervention and Prevention Coalition, which includes the Healing Collective, said the state’s action was a crucial “first step toward justice.” But the group stressed the need for a criminal justice approach that included trained community members and that de-emphasized armed officers in full tactical gear.
“It’s an acknowledgment that there are deep-seated issues in Paterson,” said Yannick Wood, director of criminal justice reform at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. “But we have to see what’s going to come of this. There’s issues of trust in the community.”
Mr. Wood said the institute would continue to press for a Justice Department inquiry.
Major Frederick P. Fife of the New Jersey State Police, a former special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, assumed operational control of the Paterson Police Department on Monday morning.
Mr. Platkin said that the state’s use of force policy would also be updated to provide guidance on how law enforcement officials should handle crises involving people barricaded alone behind locked doors. Arrive Together, a program that sends mental health professionals with officers when they respond to calls from people in emotional distress, will also be expanded to Paterson, he said.
“We’re here for the long haul,” Mr. Platkin said about the city of Paterson. “I don’t care how long it takes.”
Paterson’s mayor, André Sayegh, has said that Justice Department intervention is unnecessary, citing steps he has taken to report rogue officers to the F.B.I. and increase training. Mr. Sayegh had also recently appointed a new police chief, Engelbert Ribeiro, who was sworn in the day that Mr. Seabrooks was shot.
Chief Ribeiro will remain on the force, Mr. Platkin said, but will no longer lead the department.
Mr. Sayegh noted that Mr. Platkin had made assurances that the state takeover would lead to additional resources for the department, a promise he said he welcomed.
“We are eager to review the attorney general’s plan and timeline, as well as to share and build upon the reforms that we have already implemented,” Mr. Sayegh said Monday in a statement. “We will do everything we can to continue to improve our Police Department for the residents of Paterson.”
This is not the first time the attorney general’s office in New Jersey has seized control of a police department.
In 1998, the state took over Camden’s police department after concluding that the force was understaffed and inefficient and had ignored recommendations to improve.
Then, 14 years later, the department was disbanded altogether, largely in an effort to break the police officers’ union, and rebuilt with an emphasis on using a less confrontational approach. The number of excessive-force complaints against Camden police offices has since declined.
Zellie Thomas, the lead organizer of Black Lives Matter Paterson, said he was cautiously optimistic that Monday’s announcement would eventually usher in similar change.
“I’m hopeful that by listening to community members,” said Mr. Thomas, who lives in the city of 158,000 where a majority of residents are recent immigrants, Black or Latino, “they will be willing to reimagine what public safety looks like.”
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