A training company for police officers failed in its appeal to have a subpoena from the state comptroller related to a conference in Atlantic City that featured a Fox News political commentator dismissed.
Up to 30,000 police officers, including several thousand from New Jersey, receive training each year from New Jersey Criminal Interdiction, doing business as Street Cop Training and located in East Windsor.
The negative media coverage of Street Cop’s October 2021 training conference at Harrah’s Casino, which was attended by around 1,000 people, is what Street Cop claims put it on the comptroller’s radar improperly “based on politics.”
The conference featured Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren as a keynote speaker, and she and other attendees criticized current efforts to reform the police force. Nearly eight months later, Street Cop got a request for documents from the comptroller’s office, including invoices and receipts, a list of police officers who attended the conference, unedited digital and video copies of the seminars, and more.
Cop on the beat claims the Comptroller’s Police Accountability Project, which has been ongoing for over a year, exceeds the scope of his or her mandate and thus has declined to provide the records requested. However, a Superior Court judge and now an appeals court ruled against the company.
According to the appeals court, “the mission statement of the OSC…
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is to subject governmental financial activities to uniform, meaningful, and systematic public scrutiny,” and “the purpose of the Police Accountability Project… is to detect waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct in law enforcement,” so there is an investigative purpose that authorizes an OSC subpoena.
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“Street Cop’s arguments are meritless because, as the judge intimated in his order, police departments have always been subject to investigations and audits in accordance with OSC’s enabling legislation,” the court said.
The conference cost $499 to attend. The agency that employs the officers typically foots the bill for such expenses. State law mandates that any agency or business that receives state or local government funding must provide the comptroller’s office with timely access to relevant records.
