New Jersey Cop Lies About Investigating Shooting
[Op-Ed] The Police Be Lying, And Here’s Your Proof
Earlier this year, we reported on a story about a New York state trooper who, last year, reported that he was shot in the line of duty by a “Black or dark-skinned Hispanic male,” only for it to turn out he shot himself and staged it to look like he was shot by a criminal just for the attention it would bring him. I’ll say to you now what I wrote then:
“There is never a reason to take a cop’s word at face value. Whether we’re talking about officers accused of misconduct or police brutality or corrupt cops who hide their criminal activity behind their badges, police officers have the same incentive to lie that civilians have — but civilians aren’t backed by an entire justice system conditioned to give us the benefit of the doubt.”
This week, a New Jersey police officer has been charged with official misconduct for knowingly refraining from performing his police duties because on Aug. 1, he was directed to respond to calls about shots fired, but instead of doing so, he drove 2 miles in the opposite direction to get pizza. The next day, three people were found dead from gunshot wounds in the area he was supposed to be investigating.
Actually, he’s not just a police officer; he’s a police sergeant, which means he’s a supervisor responsible for training lower-ranking officers and ensuring cops follow proper protocol — such as investigating a shooting immediately instead of stopping to get dinner.
According to NBC News, Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, N.J. According to the office of Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson, instead of responding to the first call that came in, Bollaro drove nearly 2 miles in the opposite direction of the caller’s location to a bank ATM, which was proven via GPS data and surveillance video.
It gets worse.
Eventually, Bollaro did arrive at the location of the first of several 911 callers, but instead of doing an actual investigation, he reportedly told the dispatcher he didn’t hear anything and said he would continue to the locations of the other callers.
Spoiler alert: cops be lying.
From NBC:
They say Bollaro instead headed to Duke’s Pizzeria in Pittstown, where he remained for nearly an hour. Witnesses later saw him park and enter another local restaurant, where he remained for roughly another hour, prosecutors said.
Bollaro later submitted a report in which prosecutors say he made false statements about the extent of his investigation. They note that during the timeframe he claimed to be canvassing the area, the officer was already on route to the pizzeria.
The following day, Aug. 2, the bodies of Lauren Semanchik, 33, and Tyler Webb, 29, were found in a home roughly 600 feet away from the location of the first 911 caller. Prosecutors say the two had been shot to death by New Jersey State Police Lieutenant Ricardo Santos, who had later killed himself.
So, a police lieutenant shot and killed two people and then himself, and a police sergeant lied about investigating it. Maybe — and I’m just spit-balling here — but maybe being an officer of the law doesn’t inherently make one lawful or trustworthy.
Bollaro’s attorney, Charles Sciarra, said in a statement to the New York Post that the charge against his client is “unfortunate,” and insisted that “nothing Kevin Bollaro did or did not do that day impacted or could have stopped” the killings.
Yeah — even if that were true, it’s all the way besides the point.
It’s really simple: a 911 call about shots fired indicates not just a potential life-threatening emergency, but a likely one. Even if it’s true that the shots the 911 callers heard were shots that had already killed the people in danger, Bollaro had no way of knowing that. For all he knew, the shots reported were the first shots in a shootout that hadn’t yet claimed anyone’s life. There could have been innocent bystanders in danger. Victims could have sustained bullet wounds that weren’t fatal so long as they received medical attention right away. We could have been talking about a mass shooter who had just gotten started. All of these scenarios are just as likely as a murder-suicide; a cop just has to actually investigate what happened to know what happened.
And it can’t be emphasized enough that Bollaro didn’t just fail to investigate the crime; he lied and said he did.
We should all be concerned by how casually cops will lie about things, especially Black and brown people.
In 2023, a judge released the names of 17 Antioch, California, police officers accused of trading racist text messages that included free use of racial slurs, racist jokes, and memes mocking the death of George Floyd. This, of course, is only surprising if you’re unaware that cops and racism go together like pepperoni and pizza (just ask Bollaro). What’s, well, equally unsurprising but arguably more concerning is that two officers were caught in a recorded conversation conspiring to target Black people with traffic citations.
From NBC Bay Area:
In September 2020, two officers agreed by text to write a large number of traffic citations by targeting a specific group in a specific area. A male officer referred to Black people by a racist slur and said authorities should make them “eat s—.” A female officer responded, “Yes that will be easy. And it will be a good time lol start off quick with the numbers.”
How much would you wager that not a single police report from those officers would reflect that they were writing up tickets not based on traffic infractions, but a separate set of unofficial driving while Black laws?
Hell, we don’t have to go all the way back two years to find glaring examples of cops lying. Right now, under the administration of President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal cops have been running wild in cities like Chicago, wearing masks, failing to turn on their body cameras, using tear gas when they’ve been ordered not to, and — you guessed it — lying about key details involving police brutality, including the recent shooting of a Chicago protester by an ICE agent.
And it’s not just the federal police officers lying, it’s their handlers too. The Department of Homeland Security, the federal department that is in charge of these federal cops, has repeatedly justified the actions of these officers by claiming without evidence that they are “under siege,” calling protesters “rioters” even when they’re not accused of doing anything that would constitute rioting, and referring to ICE detainees as “criminal illegal aliens” even when they have no criminal records to speak of, which most of them don’t.
So, again, if you’re of the opinion that a cop’s word should automatically be taken as gospel, you’re not just a bootlicker, you’re demonstrably wrong.
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