Cruising the streets with Jamesburg’s finest

   JAMESBURG — A reporter’s ride with the Jamesburg Police Department.

By: Leon Tovey
   JAMESBURG — The town looks different at night.
   And it looks very different when one is looking at it through the windshield of a 2002 Dodge Durango driven by James Mennuti, the burly Jamesburg police sergeant who got stuck hauling a reporter from The Cranbury Press around on patrol the night of Nov. 4.
   "I remember when I first started here, you were fighting, man — every single night," Sgt. Mennuti recalled as he eased the big police SUV east along Sherman Street at about 8:30 p.m. "It’s improved a lot."
   Turning right onto Stockton Avenue and rolling south toward Veterans Park, Sgt. Mennuti shook his head in wonder at the near-empty streets. When he joined the force in 1989, he said, this was one of the most crime-infested parts of town; open-air drug dealers worked the streets with impunity, knowing that with only one officer on duty, their chances of getting arrested were slim.
   The force, which now numbers 13 full-time officers, had only six officers then, half of them older guys, close to retirement age, Sgt. Mennuti said. In the ensuing years, under Chief David Lester and his predecessor, former Chief Victor Knowles, the department has not only doubled in size, but also has gotten much younger.
   Sgt. Mennuti, a Jamesburg native who served three years in the U.S. Army before joining the police force, is in his late 30s. Only a few of his fellow officers are older than he is, he said.
   The result is a force that is much more proactive about preventing crime, Sgt. Mennuti said.
   The approach has led to some problems. A November 1996 episode of ABC’s "Primetime Live" about racial profiling in New Jersey featured hidden camera footage of a search by Sgt. Mennuti and two other officers of a Mercedes Benz driven by three black men who were stopped for a traffic violation. The three officers sued the network for defamation, but their suit was dismissed by a panel of judges from the Appellate Division of state Superior Court in 2002.
   Looking back on the incident, Sgt. Mennuti insisted the search was not only legal, but the right thing to do given the men’s suspicious behavior.
   "Those guys had been driving in circles through town for three nights," he said. "And when they finally cut somebody off and got pulled over — we found out (during the defamation suit) that they had been coached by a lawyer beforehand on how to act and what to say when they were pulled over, to keep from being searched or hassled or whatever. Those guys did the exact opposite."
   Sgt. Mennuti also insisted that taking an aggressive approach has worked; crime has gone down dramatically in the borough in recent years.
   The statistics back this assertion up. According to the New Jersey Annual Uniform Crime Report, the borough has consistently had one of the lowest crime rates in Middlesex County in recent years. It had the fifth lowest overall crime rate of Middlesex county’s 25 municipalities in 2004 with 11.6 crimes per 1,000 residents and the fourth lowest in 2003 with 13.1 crimes per 1,000 residents. Violent crime has been on a downward trend since 2002 and the borough has seen just one murder in the past decade, the 2000 shooting death of James Matikonis.
   The drop in crime was clearly on display the night of Nov. 4.
   Sgt. Mennuti, one of the force’s two night sergeants, who works a four-days-on, four-days-off schedule, started his shift (his last for the week) at 5:30 p.m. His first call came in two hours later.
   And as it turned out, the first call to come in on that unseasonably warm November night wasn’t even in Jamesburg.
   At 7:30 p.m. Sgt. Mennuti turned off of Buckelew Avenue and onto New Street, where Patrol Officer Robert Caltabellatta was talking to a man in his early 30s and a group of teenagers from an apartment complex on the east side of Barclay Brook. As he pulled to a stop, Sgt. Mennuti hit the send button on his radio.
   "Please be advised, dispatch, this might be a Monroe call," he said.
   Indeed, it was; the youths, enjoying the warmth of the evening, had been playing manhunt around the neighborhood and had, at one point, gone tearing through the backyard of a nearby house. Angry, the house’s owner had chased after them and knocked two of them, both aged 14, to the ground.
   The spot where the incident occurred was in Monroe, as is the apartment complex the kids live in. Sgt. Mennuti and Officer Caltabellatta waited while a Monroe officer who had responded to the call took down statements and loaded the two boys who had been knocked down into his car. He would drive them home and ask their parents whether they wanted to press charges against the man, whom Sgt. Mennuti had told to "go home, calm down and wait."
   As the Monroe officer and the two youths drove away, Sgt. Mennuti turned to the remaining kids.
   "Look guys, I know it’s a nice night and you’re just having a good time, but stay where you know," he said. "I mean, if you’re running through somebody’s backyard and there’s a hole, somebody fixing their septic — you don’t want to fall into that right?"
   The kids laughed and shook their heads. They did not, in fact, want to fall into someone’s septic tank.
   "All right, have a good night," Sgt. Mennuti said as they walked toward home.
   "This job, it’s all about respect," he said a few minutes later, as he pulled back onto Buckelew Avenue to start another sweep of the borough. "You show people respect and they respect you back. And that comes in useful later on."
   The drop in crime in the more than 15 years he has been on the force can not be attributed entirely to proactive policing, Sgt. Mennuti admitted as we swung onto August Street from Stevens Avenue at about 9:15 p.m.
   Stopping momentarily in front of Grace M. Breckwedel Middle School to flash his lights hello to a school custodian (the man looked up, smiled and waved), Sgt. Mennuti noted that statewide demographic shifts have also been a big factor.
   While the borough still has a large number of rentals — the U.S. Census Bureau put it at 693 renter-occupied units out of a total of 2,240 units in 2000; by contrast, Monroe had 642 renter-occupied housing units out of 13,259 total units in 2000 — shrinking housing stock statewide has made the rentals far better from a crime standpoint than they were a decade ago, when many landlords would turn a blind eye to criminal activity as long as the rent was paid, Sgt. Mennuti said.
   Driving past newly renovated houses that he could remember being gathering places for drug dealers and addicts in the early 1990s, Sgt. Mennuti observed that landlords now are much more willing to work with police in preventing and reporting crime.
   Another helpful fact has been the reduction in the number of bars in town.
   "There used to be three or four really rough bars in town," Sgt. Mennuti said as we drove past the Body and Soul Christian Book and Health Food Center on East Railroad Avenue, formerly one of the aforementioned rough bars. Today, there are only two bars in town, he said, the Parkside Tavern and Johnathon’s Grille. And because the former closes at midnight while the latter is more oriented toward its restaurant clientele, neither poses much of a problem for police.
   However, alcohol-related crimes are still a problem in town, a point that was illustrated during his second call of the night.
   At 10:07 p.m., the sergeant made a quick U-turn on East Railroad Avenue near the Post Office, where Officer Caltabellatta had stopped a southbound car with its headlight out. The driver was sitting behind the wheel, speaking with the officer when Sgt. Mennuti pulled up, but the two officers soon asked him to step out of his vehicle.
   Asked to run through a standard field sobriety test, the driver, a man in his early 20s has trouble right away, when asked to stand on one foot and count to 31.
   "I couldn’t do that if — " he said, checking himself suddenly.
   Sgt. Mennuti, noting significance in the man’s abrupt silence, prodded him a little.
   "What were you saying?" he asked "You started to say something?"
   "Uh, I couldn’t do that on my best day," the man responded.
   "Ah," Sgt. Mennuti replied.
   After the man drove away — he breezed through the rest of the sobriety test without another slip-up ("He might’ve been a little impaired, but not enough to be illegal or dangerous," Sgt. Mennuti said) — the sergeant finished the sentence as the young man probably intended to say it.
   "’I couldn’t do that if I was sober,’" Sgt. Mennuti said with a shake of his head. "That’s a classic. You’d be amazed how many times people actually say that."
   The amazing things that people often say and think was a subject of much discussion in Sgt. Mennuti’s Durango throughout the relatively quiet evening.
   Obligatory questions were asked about the mythical speeding ticket quota ("no, no quota," he said wearily before the question was even completely asked); the 10 mph-over buffer zone on speeding violations ("depending on the speed limit in the area, yeah," he admitted); and the worst excuse for speeding he’d ever heard ("’I’ve got to go to the bathroom — now,’" he said with a laugh).
   Other topics of conversation included homelessness in the borough — after several stops around town looking for a man the sergeant referred to as "Huey," yielded no results, he shook his head and mumbled that it was a warm night, Huey would probably be fine — and the problem of illegal immigrants.
   The U.S. Census Bureau put the population of Jamesburg at 6,025 in 2000; Sgt. Mennuti called that wildly off the mark.
   "We get a lot of illegals, mostly Hispanics — Peruvians, Guatemalans, Mexicans," he said. "And they’re not bad people, most of them. They just want to come here and work for a better life for themselves and their families."
   However, there is a small criminal element to some illegal immigrants, he said. Occasionally, prostitution, alcohol-related crime — fights mostly — and drugs can be a problem among the single, working men who live, often by the dozen, in some of the borough’s rental units.
   These problems are made all the more frustrating by the fact that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) doesn’t seem to take an interest in illegal immigrants unless they are caught committing major crimes, Sgt. Mennuti said.
   And, fortunately for Sgt. Mennuti, his fellow officers and the population of Jamesburg as a whole, it seems there were no major crimes being committed on the evening of Nov. 4.
   At 1 a.m. Nov. 5, just as he was preparing to rid his Durango of The Cranbury Press’ reporter, Sgt. Mennuti made one last stop — a 15-year-old kid dressed in black bombing down Half Acre Road toward Gatzmer Avenue in the dark on his skateboard.
   Out way past curfew and blatantly violating the borough’s anti-skateboarding ordinance, the kid, a reckless young Romeo fresh from Juliet’s balcony, pleaded with Sgt. Mennuti to let him walk the rest of the way home.
   "Go home," the sergeant said. "Carry the skateboard and use the sidewalk. I want to see you in the streetlights."
   Young Romeo, spared to fight the Capulets again another day, tossed off a quick, "OK, thanks," and power-walked away as fast as his long, sagging-denim-covered legs would carry him.
   "Kids," Sgt. Mennuti muttered before putting the Durango into "drive" and heading back to the station.