A former New Jersey police chief who allegedly called Donald Trump the “last hope for white people” is on trial for a 2016 hate crime. According to Newsweek, a South Jersey police officer testified that Frank Nucera Jr used regularly used racial slurs and even said black people should be shot.
Sgt. Nathan Roohr from the Burlington County department took the stand last week and detailed one specific incident in which Nucera used excessive force on an 18-year-old male. Roohr said Nucera grabbed Timothy Stroye’s head “like a basketball” and slammed it into a metal door jam. “[It] made a loud thud,” Roohr explained. “I immediately knew it was wrong. I knew I had an obligation to report it. This was an obvious excessive force.”
Stroye was handcuffed during the incident and was accused of sneaking into a hotel with his 16-year-old girlfriend and using the pool.
Nucera retired in 2017 and has been charged with hate-crime assault, as well as civil rights violations and lying to the FBI. Prosecutors say Nucera has a history of making racist remarks. and to support the allegation Roohr and several other cops provided tapes of Nucera spewing racial slurs including one in which he states: “It’s gonna get to the point where I could shoot one of these [N-words].”
In another incident tires on a squad car were slashed and Nucera could be heard saying: “These [N-word] are like ISIS, they have no value. They should line them all up and mow ’em down. I’d like to be on the firing line, I could do it.”
“The conduct alleged is a shocking breach of the duty of every police officer to provide equal justice under the law and never to mistreat a person in custody,” U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick added. “As a result, the former chief of police is now a charged federal criminal defendant.”
Nucera’s attorney denies the allegation and says they’ve only been brought up because his former subordinates didn’t like his disciplinary actions. If convicted Nucera faces up to 20 years in prison and will forfeit his $8,800 a year pension.
