A New Jersey appellate court ruled Wednesday that the state’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, had overstepped his authority when he seized control of the police department in Paterson, the state’s third-largest city.
The city’s mayor, André Sayegh, hailed the decision as a victory that rightfully restored his control of a fundamental function in the city he was elected to lead.
“I’m the mayor,” Mr. Sayegh said. “I’m on the front line. I have to face the heat.”
He added: “What Matt Platkin did was unlawful and undemocratic. He disenfranchised Paterson voters.”
Wednesday’s 39-page ruling grew out of a lawsuit filed by city leaders who had sought to reclaim control of the roughly 400-member department that since March 2023 had been run by the attorney general’s office.
Mr. Platkin said he would immediately appeal the decision, which he said had undermined decades of established legal precedent in New Jersey.
“Our office stepped in following a fundamental breakdown of community trust,” Mr. Platkin said in a statement. “Since then, murders, shootings, sexual assaults, robberies and other violent crime in Paterson have all plummeted, while officer morale and community trust have dramatically improved.”
The attorney general’s office took the unusual, but not unheard-of, step of seizing control of the department after a series of police shootings roiled the 156,000-resident industrial city in northern New Jersey.
There were widespread protests, and New Jersey civil rights activists had begun urging the Justice Department to step in.
Three weeks before the takeover, Najee Seabrooks, 31, was shot and killed by Paterson police officers after calling 911 to report that he was experiencing a mental health crisis. Officers had tried for hours to persuade Mr. Seabrooks to come out of his bathroom before firing their weapons when he “lunged toward the officers with a knife in his hand,” according to a statement released at the time by Mr. Platkin’s office.
A month before Mr. Seabrooks was killed, a Paterson police officer was charged with aggravated assault and official misconduct after shooting a former city resident, Khalif Cooper, in the back, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. The charges were later dropped after prosecutors said they had found photographs that were never provided to a grand jury that showed Mr. Cooper with a gun on the day he was shot.
In March 2023, Mr. Platkin, New Jersey’s chief law enforcement officer, said he had made the decision to take over day-to-day police operations in Paterson because of a “crisis of confidence in law enforcement in this city.”
It was not the first time the state had intervened to try to fix a troubled police force.
In 1998, the state seized control of the Camden Police Department after concluding that it was understaffed and inefficient and had ignored recommendations to improve. Then, 14 years later, the department was disbanded altogether, largely in an effort to break the police officers’ union, and rebuilt with an emphasis on less confrontational law enforcement.
But in its decision on Wednesday, a three-judge appeals panel ruled that Mr. Platkin and Isa M. Abbassi, a former chief with the New York Police Department who was put in charge of the Paterson police after the takeover, had “exceeded their statutory authority.”
“We conclude defendants had no authority, either express or implied, to directly supersede the entire” Paterson Police Department, the judges wrote.
Mr. Abbassi, who held leadership positions in New York in the aftermath of the 2014 police killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island, recently moved to a new role in the attorney general’s office and was replaced by Capt. Pat Murray, a 40-year veteran of the Paterson police force.
No changes will be implemented at the Paterson Police Department for at least three days, the judges wrote, “to permit any party to seek emergent relief from the Supreme Court.”
By midafternoon on Wednesday, that is precisely what happened.
A representative of the attorney general, Jeremy M. Feigenbaum, filed paperwork asking that the decision be blocked from taking hold until the New Jersey Supreme Court had an opportunity to weigh the merits of the case.
“The court’s ruling risks chaos in the chain of command for the Police Department imminently,” Mr. Feigenbaum, New Jersey’s solicitor general, wrote. “There will be profound uncertainty and changes as to who leads the department while fragile police reforms remain underway — which will undermine the public safety for all residents.”
The Supreme Court has given lawyers for the Paterson city officials who filed the lawsuit until noon on Thursday to file a response.
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