Glassboro police did not use excessive force or violate the civil rights of two Rowan University students mistakenly pulled over and held at gunpoint during a 2018 traffic stop, a federal judge has found.
Bystanders captured the incident on video and the show of force by police drew widespread attention and claims of racial bias.
Students Altaif Hassan and Giavanna Roberson sued the borough police department over the incident, but Judge Joseph H. Rodriguez granted a defense motion for summary judgment last week, finding that even though police were mistaken in their belief that the driver was armed, their actions were not unreasonable.
The Oct. 1, 2018, incident began when someone told police that he saw a man point a handgun at a black Dodge Charger in a Glassboro shopping center, then enter the vehicle and drive off.
Officers at the scene lost sight of the car as it left the retail complex, but another officer spotted a car matching that description about a minute later near the area and followed it, before pulling the car over in a heavily populated area of Rowan’s campus.
Five officers drew their guns and ordered the occupants to exit with their hands raised. Hassan and Roberson complied, were handcuffed and placed in cop cars as officers searched the Charger. No weapons were found and the pair were released after 34 minutes.
Hassan and Roberson alleged excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, violation of the New Jersey Civil Rights Act, negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent hiring, training and supervision.
The parties previously agreed to dismiss the negligence counts, according to court documents, leaving the other two matters for the judge to consider.
The judge found that, while officers “mistakenly subjected Plaintiffs to a frightening and frustrating encounter,” they acted appropriately with the information they had when they stopped the car. They believed they were stopping a car occupied by someone with a gun, the car’s windows were tinted, leaving officers with no idea of how many people were inside, and the stop took place in a heavily populated area where bystanders could have been injured.
“Thus, while hindsight might suggest that a small team of armed officers was unnecessary to investigate the two unarmed Plaintiffs, the officers acted with the information available to them at the time.”
The judge rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that the stop was based on race and that police “made the reckless decision to pull over any black male in the vicinity” driving a black Charger. The car police stopped was on the same road and traveling in the same direction as the one reported involved in the gun incident, Rodriguez wrote, and police did not mention the race of the driver from the gun incident when putting out the vehicle description on the radio. The tinted windows of the vehicle police ended up stopping meant officers could not see who was driving, the judge added.
In addition to these findings, Rodriguez found that the defendants were protected by qualified immunity, which shields government officials from liability for civil damages, unless a plaintiff can prove that the officials violated a statutory or constitutional right.
The attorney representing the plaintiffs did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling or to say if an appeal is planned.
In an interview with NJ Advance Media days after the incident, Hassan claimed the witness who reported seeing a man with a gun had actually seen him holding the case for his eyeglasses after picking up his glasses from a store in the shopping center.
In body camera footage of the incident, Hassan said he feared for his life when he was ordered out of the car. “If I had of sneezed the wrong way, you would have shot the sh-- out of me,” Hassan says to one of the officers.
He also said he was frequently pulled over or stopped by police during his time at Rowan.
Nearly two years after the traffic stop, Hassan was charged with murder in the August 2020 killings of two Glassboro men. Hassan, his brother and two other men were indicted in August for the shooting deaths of Shantal Farrow, 36, and Manuel DelaRosa Jr., 26.
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Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com.
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