Marking the latest volley in a years-long battle, nine Passaic County police officers sued the city they work for, claiming they’ve been continuously harassed and discriminated against for their military service.
In a lawsuit filed on Veterans Day, nine out of 17 Clifton Police officers who are also military reservists sued Clifton, its police department and various police and city officials, citing a litany of allegations, including discrimination, harassment and retaliatory conduct that dates back nearly 20 years.
The nine officers suing the city are Detective Samuel Arnowitz, Frank Castro, Detective Robert Marks, Joel Muniz, Esly Panduro, Detective David Pereda, Sgt. David Roe, Detective Wayne Stine and Detective Alexander Zamora.
Among the named defendants are a former police chief, city manager, mayor, and several former and current City Council members.
Calls to a police department spokesman, the City Manager’s office and the city legal department were not returned. NorthJersey.com was the first to report on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit is the culmination of a pattern of harassment and discrimination against officers in the military reserve, Catherine Elston, the attorney representing the nine officers, told NJ Advance Media on Wednesday. For years, city and police officials criticized the reservists’ time away from the department, often mocking their service and persisting in trying to get the officers to leave the military, the lawsuit alleges.
“They [the lawsuit] encompass a lengthy history of comments and actions taken by the town to really force reservists into making a decision as to whether they want to stay on Clifton PD or they want to stay with the military,” Elston said. “In other words, you can’t have it both is their mentality.”
“They don’t want reservists there,” said Elston.
The lawsuit alleges specific examples of harassment and discrimination by city and police officials, including what they say was a near-constant barrage of questions and insults about the officers’ military service.
“Your first responsibility is the police department, not the military,” a former chief allegedly told Pereda in 2010, according to the lawsuit. “It’s not right that you guys keep volunteering for deployments and training.”
In 2008, when Pereda and Stine submitted a copy of their orders for a 371-day deployment to Iraq, a then-captain disparaged their service, the lawsuit alleges.
“It must be nice to go on vacation for a year, I wish I could,” he allegedly told the officers, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit continues a public back-and-forth that started two years ago, when Elston’s firm made the claims of harassment public.
In 2018, almost exactly two years prior to the lawsuit, the officers received letters ordering them to produce seven years of military pay stubs to prove they were actually deployed overseas during specific times, otherwise they would have pay docked, the lawyer said. They were given just three weeks to produce seven years worth of documents, she said.
The letters demanding pay stubs and the claims of harassment caused a backlash, leading hundreds of residents to pack a March 2019 City Council meeting in support of the officers, according to the NorthJersey.com report. In an interview with NBC New York, City Manager Dominick Villano apologized for the pay stub letter and called it a “mistake.”
After the officers’ claims of harassment, the City Council voted to hire an independent investigator to look into the claims, the lawsuit said. The investigatory report is now complete, but the officers have not been allowed to see it, Elston said.
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Rodrigo Torrejon may be reached at rtorrejon@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @rodrigotorrejon.
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