Anatomy of the Trenton Arts Festival Shooting: Part 2 – Legal Representation
As officers ran into the line
of fire, the State PBA legal
team had their backs
n BY JOSHUA SIGMUND
It’s past 2 a.m. on June 17, and Stuart
Alterman’s phone rings. Within minutes,
he’s on the road, racing to Trenton in the
wake of the notorious gang shootout at
the Art All Night festival. Law enforce-
ment officers had been forced to dis-
charge their weapons during the all-out
brawl among a crowd of a thousand
panicked civilians, and now these offi-
cers needed backup.
The old adage that “law enforcement
officers run toward danger while others
run away” was certainly evident here.
And when that danger results in an offi-
cer-involved shooting, the NJ State PBA
ensures that immediately behind those
running officers is reliable legal repre-
sentation.
“The scene was extremely chaotic,”
Alterman recalled. “And there was con-
cern that there might be further gang ac-
tivity or perhaps some sort of indiscrim-
inate violence toward the police.”
Alterman, a former municipal police
officer, county corrections officer and
municipal prosecutor who has been
representing law enforcement officers
since 1989, visually absorbed what he
needed at the scene. Then, he headed
to the hospital to rendezvous with the
officers who had been involved in the
shooting – his new clients.
But this would only be a brief initial
consultation.
“I’ve represented somewhere between
250-300 officers who have been involved
in shootings since the 1990s, so I know
that they’re not going to remember ev-
erything immediately, because they’ve
been through a ‘critical incident,’” Al-
terman explained. “It’s like choking data
through a very small conduit from one
server to the next – it gets overloaded
and doesn’t work very well.”
He elaborated that when officers are
in these incidents in which lethal force
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NEW JERSEY COPS
■ SEPTEMBER 2018
is used, bits and pieces of memory in-
put are lost temporarily, and sometimes
much longer or even permanently.
“Understanding the neuropsychol-
ogy, it’s always been my practice to not
push everybody to give a complete and
thorough rendition of what they did
right away,” Alterman adds.
But he noted that it is important to get
enough information to figure out some
of the incident. So Alterman guided
the officers through, working with the
Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office and
attorney general to gather the top-level
story and ensure that nothing would in-
terfere with a criminal prosecution.
“Knowing full well the environment
in which we now live, each police officer
(involved in a shooting) is now a target
of a criminal investigation,” Alterman
emphasized. “They have all the consti-
tutional protections as afforded to any-
one else.”
Alterman contrasts this environment
to the one in which he began his career
nearly 30 years ago:
“At the time, officers were ordered
to give a statement right away, blow
the smoke off their guns, mount their
horses and ride off to the next job,” he
described. “But first off, those officers
weren’t targets of criminal investiga-
tions; second, they were upset; third,
their rights were obliterated; and fourth,
there was no review of the general per-
son – no psychological debriefing. Now,
I routinely assert those rights. I don’t al-
low statements to be given at the time of
the event or even within a few days.”
Rather, Alterman helped members
from Mercer County who responded to
prepare statements through the hours
and days following the event. And since
the attorney general’s office mandates
that all statements be given on camera,
preparation was geared toward that me-
dium.
All that said, this particular case fea-
tured a unique set of challenges that
forced expedition of the legal defense.
“There was concern that keeping the
scene open would interfere with the
orderly running of state and county of-
ficers,” Alterman noted. “So there was
some impetus to move the statements
along quicker than normal.”