All six accused Paterson cops trained at police academy in 2014

PATERSON — The recruits the city sent to the police training academy in 2014 were supposed to help rebuild a force decimated by layoffs, but instead six of those officers ended up being arrested in an FBI investigation that brought disgrace to their department.

Four of the FBI’s targets were among 21 recruits who went to the police academy in January 2014, while the two others were part of the class of 26 trainees who started in July 2014.

That concentration of corruption has astounded long-serving Paterson law enforcement officers and precipitated changes in the way the Police Department screens its job applicants, including the hiring of a different company to perform psychological evaluations of candidates, officials said.

The reforms already appear to have had an impact on the Paterson Police Department’s hiring practices, according to statistics city officials provided to Paterson Press last week.

In 2014, none of the 132 Paterson applicants who passed the police civil service test were disqualified because of the psychological evaluation, the city’s statistics show. But 12 of 321 applicants were rejected because of psychological screening from the three recruiting classes between July 2017 and July 2018, according to the city.

Disqualifications resulting from police applicants’ background checks also have been on the rise, the city’s numbers show. In 2014, the department rejected 11.4 percent of its applicants because of problems in their past. That rate increased to 15 percent in the 2017 and 2018 groups.

Paterson Police Chief Troy Oswald said the fact that the cops targeted by the FBI went through the training academy together quickly caught his attention.

“I was stunned when I first saw the numbers,” said Oswald, whose law enforcement career started in 1988. “To have four of them come from the same class — that’s something I’ve never seen before.”

Watch:Video shows fired Paterson police officer brutally assaulting hospital patient

Sentenced:Drug-dealing Paterson cop Ruben McAusland sentenced to more than five years in prison

Who are they? Six Paterson cops arrested in FBI probe

The chief said he began reviewing the hiring and personnel records of the suspected officers when the FBI started its probe, well before any of the arrests, which started in April 2018.

“I wanted to see what happened and to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.

Oswald, who was a captain in charge of the narcotics division in 2014, declined to say whether he spotted anything in the accused officers’ background files that he thinks should have disqualified them from being hired.

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The January 2014 class of recruits included Jonathan Bustios, Ruben McAusland, Daniel Pent and Eudy Ramos, while Matthew Torres and Roger Then were in the July 2014 training group.

McAusland has pleaded guilty to selling drugs while on duty and assaulting a hospital patient. Then has admitted participating in the hospital assault and recording video of the crime on his cellphone, while Bustios pleaded guilty to making illegal traffic stops and taking money from people he wrongfully detained.

Pent, Ramos and Torres all face federal charges that they conspired with Bustios in the traffic stop shakedowns.

Federal authorities have not given any indication how they believe the officers in the alleged conspiracy formed their bonds. Several veteran Paterson police officers said they do not know whether the accused cops met each other in the training academy or were acquainted before that.

Oswald said three of the suspected officers in the January 2014 class came from different parts of Paterson, and the fourth grew up in a Passaic County suburb.

“We don’t know if it was one bad apple who turned the others, if all of them were bad apples coming in,” Oswald said.

Federal authorities have said the FBI’s investigation started near the end of 2016, which was about two years after the accused cops hit the streets.

That’s a “pretty quick” time frame for new police recruits to get accused of crimes, said Jon Shane, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“It almost seems to say they came in with evil intent,” said Shane, a retired Newark police captain.

McAusland said during his sentencing in federal court last week that he ended up selling drugs because he kept in touch with old friends who were not police officers.

“I just saw it as a shortcut,” the convicted cop said before a judge sentenced him to more than five years in federal prison. “It started off as something really small and it snowballed into something else.”

Shane said studies have shown that outbreaks of wrongdoing by cops sometimes happened during periods of rapid hiring. He said that years ago, when Miami was expanding its police force, it didn't do proper background checks and ended up with cops in handcuffs.

The class of 2014 was Paterson’s first group of training recruits after the 2011 layoffs cut the department’s ranks by 25 percent, down to about 375 officers. But the city didn’t seem to be in a particular rush to hire cops at the time. Paterson already had rehired dozens of the laid-off officers in 2012 and 2013.

Shane said the fact that six officers were convicted from the same year’s training classes doesn’t mean the Paterson Police Department did a bad job screening its applicants in 2014.

“Sometimes it’s hard to predict whether you’re getting someone who’s going to be a good cop or if you’re getting an individual who’s going to go out and commit crimes,” the criminal justice professor said. “Without having more information, I can’t say whether it was something in their control or something outside their control.”

Zellie Thomas, leader of Paterson’s Black Lives Matter group, said he was alarmed by the high number of 2014 police recruits entangled in the FBI case.

“I think this is part of the culture that exists in the Paterson Police Department that tolerates bad behavior,” Thomas said.

The activist asserted that political and personal connections play too large a role in police hiring in the city. Thomas said he has about six friends who grew up in Paterson and were rejected when they applied for the Paterson Police Department, but ended up working as cops in surrounding towns.

“We may never know if Paterson is getting the best candidates for its police force,” Thomas said. “But there’s something that’s keeping homegrown, qualified candidates from getting police jobs in Paterson.”

Meanwhile, the president of the union that represents Paterson’s ranking police officers, Mason Maher, noted that the FBI probe started at the request of the leaders of the Police Department. He said he welcomed the department’s changes in screening police applicants.

“It’s definitely a good thing because of the rigors of this job,” Maher said. “Maybe a stronger psychological test would have weeded out some of these issues.”

The councilman in charge of Paterson’s public safety committee said he thinks the outbreak of police corruption might have been avoided if the city still had its own law enforcement training academy.

“Paterson lost its ability to keep its finger on these things,” Councilman Michael Jackson said of the closing of the city’s academy, which happened in 2009.

Oswald said Paterson, Newark and Jersey City were forced to shut down their local academies because of a decision rendered by a state commission calling for regionalization. Paterson has been using the police academy in Bergen County since its own closed.

The city police chief praised the work of the two men who were put in charge of Paterson’s Internal Affairs Division and screening new police applicants a couple of years ago: Capt. Gustave Sedeyn and Lt. Dalton Price.

“They’re keeping our standards as high as legally possible,” Oswald said. 

Paterson police classes

January 2014 class

Applicants who passed written test: 70

DQ (disqualified) for background checks: 7

DQ for psychological evaluation: 0

Hired: 21

July 2014 class

Applicants who passed written test: 62

DQ for background checks: 8

DQ for psychological evaluation: 0

Hired: 26

July 2017 class

Applicants who passed written test: 101

DQ for background checks: 17

DQ for psychological evaluation: 7

Hired: 25

January 2018 class

Applicants who passed written test: 162

DQ for background checks: 25

DQ for psychological evaluation: 3

Hired: 25

July 2018 class

Applicants who passed written test: 58

DQ for background checks: 6

DQ for psychological evaluation: 2

Hired: 12

Statistics provided by the Paterson Police Department