Clark Mayor and Police Sued Over Targeted Stops, Data Shows Pattern Near Parkway

Allegations of racially motivated policing in suburban New Jersey echo across the region, raising thorny questions about trust, oversight and the slow grind of reform in America’s most densely populated corridor.

The suburb of Clark, New Jersey, hardly fits the image of a battleground for civil rights. Yet, this month, it found itself in the legal and moral crosshairs: the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office filed a sharp-edged lawsuit accusing Clark’s leadership—most notably its former mayor, Sal Bonaccorso, and unflatteringly featured police brass—of orchestrating a campaign to keep Black people out of the township by any means short of actual walls. For those who like their racism subtle, the complaint is a rude awakening.

The state’s Division of Civil Rights alleges that, between 2015 and 2020, Clark’s government systematically instructed the police to target minorities, particularly those passing through on their way to and from neighbouring Rahway or Linden, which are less monochrome. Court papers cite not just whispers in smoky back rooms, but explicit directives from the former mayor himself—who, according to the state, egged his lieutenants to “keep chasing the spooks out of town,” in language that all but writes its own obituary.

The statistical portrait drawn by the state is as telling as the invective. Black motorists were 3.7 times more likely to be searched during traffic stops than white ones; Hispanic drivers, 2.2 times more so. Traffic stops, rather than focusing on dangerous driving, leaned heavily on minor equipment or administrative violations—handily providing a thin pretext for rummaging through cars. Odours of marijuana, it seems, were smelt at a truly prodigious rate.

Such numbers are more than awkward. Clark’s roads bracket the Garden State Parkway, a vital migratory artery for working people streaming between cities. By allegedly combining this geography with quotas and targeted policing near the town’s border, officials appear to have optimised for maximum exclusion. The township’s reassurances that things are now different—proffered by Angel Albanese, the current mayor—ring hollow to those wary of a pattern too recently brought to light.

The direct implications for greater New York are plain. Clark is neither the first nor last suburb facing scrutiny over whom it stops, searches, and welcomes—or does not. In these towns, lines drawn decades ago to give shelter from “urban problems” now intersect with legal scrutiny. For Black and Hispanic New Yorkers, the message is clear: passage through parts of the metropolitan patchwork still comes with a higher statistical risk of humiliation or worse.

Wider effects may ricochet across the local economy and politics. Communities that fail the sniff test for inclusion risk reputational damage and lower commercial investment. Their ability to attract the young, educated, and diverse—on whom New Jersey’s future tax base depends—may shrivel. Legally, the Clark case may put steel in the spine of state authorities keen to police the police, not just in the courts but via civil-rights oversight: the township only recently clawed back control of its police from Union County prosecutors.

A country of bursting diversity, America nonetheless remains patterned by a palimpsest of exclusion. Too often, suburban police wield the traffic stop as a subtle form of border control—a pattern familiar from Ferguson, Missouri to Los Angeles County’s formerly “sundown” towns. Only the verbage changes. By comparison, New York City, with its sprawling police force and relentless public scrutiny, projects less systematic animus but is hardly immune: its own stop-and-frisk regime drew federal condemnation just a decade ago.

What distinguishes the Clark debacle, if anything, is its baldness and the trail of documented leadership involvement. The temptation for surrounding communities to treat it as a peculiar failing—a rotten apple rather than a broader malaise—will be strong, especially with local officials decrying the lawsuit as “frivolous” or politically motivated, as Ms Albanese has done. Such dismissals tend to age poorly, as any survey of the last half-century’s legal history of policing will show.

An unfinished reckoning

Yet there is dry hope in this regulatory doggedness. New Jersey’s recent foray into aggressive oversight—five years’ worth, no less—is an encouraging sign that external intervention is not merely performative. Admittedly, the machinery of remediation is ponderous, and the odds of rapid cultural change remain puny when cliques of entrenched officials treat oversight as a mere obstacle course. Still, lawsuits and data-driven exposure make it awkward for offenders to slink quietly back to business as usual.

For the metropolitan region’s millions, the Clark lawsuit is less an outlier and more a barometer. Neighbouring towns with similar demographic shifts may now pause before rolling out the welcome mat for selectively. The episode should also remind legislatures, from Trenton to Albany, that sunlight, and not just scandal, is the best disinfectant. Policy nudges—mandated reporting of stop data, independent citizen oversight, and frequent rotation of leadership—offer drier but surer paths to lasting improvement.

Nationally, the slow move toward transparency around policing is both promising and incomplete. The unpleasant truth is that data drives change more reliably than outrage alone. For all its delays, the prospect that a modest township like Clark can be forced to reckon, at least in court, with old habits, bodes tepidly well for the broader project of equal treatment—not just for the benefit of minority drivers, but for the licenses of decency small towns require to flourish.

The Clark affair does not portend the end of policing as we know it. (Nor, if history is any guide, does it spell the swift eradication of the subtle arts of exclusion.) But here is a rare instance where scandal, litigation, and a stubborn trickle of facts may, with luck, combine to propel change even in New Jersey’s quieter corners. In an era when division is often monetised, that is a sign to be, if not buoyant, then at least patiently attentive. ■