Prosecutors abruptly dropped charges against a man arrested by an instructor who was featured in a scathing report by New Jersey’s comptroller.
Brad Gilmore, an instructor with Street Cop Training, a private police training company at the center of a far-reaching investigation by the New Jersey comptroller, was featured in videos made public on Wednesday in which he boasted about his success seizing large quantities of drugs.
“I hit 15 kilos. I hit $300,000,” Mr. Gilmore, a detective in the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey, said in footage included in the comptroller’s report, which found that instructors taught unconstitutional policing tactics in classes laced with lewd, sexist and discriminatory language.
Then, on Thursday morning — as a judge in New Jersey was seating jurors for a drug trial that was likely to hinge on Detective Gilmore’s testimony — prosecutors abruptly dismissed the charges against the defendant, who was facing 20 years in prison if convicted.
The man’s lawyer, Brian J. Neary, stood and said that prosecutors had rightly recognized that the accusations of bias and illegal policing techniques detailed in the report had irreparably undermined the case.
“This officer’s believability and credibility were so suspect that the government could not back up a prosecution based on his behavior,” Mr. Neary said in an interview.
The case, he said, was likely to be the first of many in New Jersey to unravel as a result of behavior exposed in the investigation by Kevin D. Walsh, the state’s acting comptroller.
“It’s going to open up a floodgate,” said Mr. Neary, a longtime criminal defense attorney and former assistant prosecutor in Bergen County.
Detective Gilmore did not respond to calls or messages left on his social media accounts seeking comment. He is described on a podcast and on social media as the country’s “leading expert in hidden compartments and drug trafficking.” His bio on Street Cop’s website states that, while working as a “small-town cop,” he became “extremely proficient at intercepting large amounts of contraband from criminal motor vehicle stops.”
Thursday’s case stemmed from a 2017 arrest in which Detective Gilmore, then a police officer in Ridgefield Park, N.J., stopped a car on Route 95 and discovered two kilograms of heroin in a hidden compartment in the car, according to the indictment and Mr. Neary.
The driver, Francisco A. Paulino-Edua, did not own the car, had no prior criminal convictions and was expected to argue that he was unaware that there were drugs in the vehicle, Mr. Neary said.
After the assistant prosecutor, Christine Gorzelany, announced that the government was dropping the charges, Mr. Paulino-Edua began to cry and then hugged his grandmother, who was in court with him for jury selection, Mr. Neary said.
Elizabeth Rebein, a spokeswoman for the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, said she could not “speak to the reasons we dismissed the case.”
But she said that the office was investigating the allegations linked to Detective Gilmore, who is shown on videos disparaging police supervisors and offering tips on how to extend interviews during motor vehicle stops in ways the comptroller’s office concluded were likely unconstitutional.
“We take this report and these allegations very seriously and are investigating the matter,” Ms. Rebein said.
Street Cop, a New Jersey-based company, is one of the country’s largest private police training companies. It holds classes for law enforcement officers throughout New Jersey and in 45 other states, and much of the training is paid for with taxpayer dollars, according to the report.
A six-day seminar in Atlantic City, N.J., in October 2021 drew 990 attendees and included speakers who referred to women as “whores” and appeared to mock the L.G.B.T.Q. community, certain religions and even dwarfism, the investigation found. Several instructors referred to the size of their genitals and glorified violence, and one flashed a photo of a monkey on the screen when talking about a 75-year-old Black man, videos show.
Christopher Porrino, a former New Jersey attorney general now representing Street Cop, could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Walsh said that the training threatened to undermine years worth of police initiatives focused on de-escalating tense encounters and on building trust within vulnerable communities. He recommended that law enforcement officers from New Jersey who attended the event be retrained.
The report also suggested that the seminar’s guidance could present problems for prosecutors reliant on testimony from officers who attended and from Street Cop instructors — several of whom are current or former employees of New Jersey policing agencies.
The report said that an officer’s attendance at the event might need to be disclosed during the discovery process in criminal cases because “many comments” touched on the “protected categories of color, race, ethnicity, and/or national origin.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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