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TagsFormer Garwood police officer caught on tape rifling through papers in town clerk's office
BY JOE TYRRELL
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Video of a former Garwood police officer rifling papers in the borough clerk's office while on duty is a public record under common law, a Superior Court judge has ruled.
After that August incident and one involving a change machine, borough authorities initially filed disorderly persons charges against Genarro Mirabella, but then allowed him to resign.
Unusually, they also agreed to drop all disciplinary charges and tell future employers that he left "in good standing." A judge then ordered all records of the complaints expunged.
The borough's course of action raised eyebrows in Union County, because the former policeman is the brother of county Freeholder Alexander Mirabella.
Open government advocates John Paff and Tina Renna asked videos of the incidents from surveillance cameras at the two sites.
In response to requests from open government advocates, Garwood released a video of Mirabella appearing to stuff slips of paper into a laundromat change machine. But they declined to release the DVD from the clerk's office, citing investigatory and security concerns.
Paff, head of the Libertarian Party's open government efforts in New Jersey, filed suit.
After hearings this spring, Judge Kathryn Brock ruled the state Open Public Records Act does not apply because the record originally was part of a criminal investigation.
After inspecting the video, though, she found the security concern issue was overblown. Moreover, she noted the borough had stored it with other police department records, not those covered by the expungement order.
She noted a new appellate division ruling from Hudson County, which held that even if a records of a matter are expunged, commenting about is not defamation.
"The common law interest of a requestor can either be a personal interest or a public interest," Brock wrote.
The handling of the complaints and expungement "were the subject of public interest, particularly because during the relevant time period, Officer Mirabella's brother was a Union County freeholder," the judge wrote.
"Without the opportunity to view the DVD, the public can only speculate about what it shows," she said.
Since the Garwood incidents, though, the former officer has had another minor scrape with the law, but also came out of it better than might be expected.
After being charged with shoplifting in Frenchtown, Genarro Mirabella was allowed earlier this month to plead to loitering and pay a small fine.
Again, charges are frequently downgraded, but this decision may violate 1998 guidelines issued by the Attorney General's office after legal blows to the validity of vaguely worded municipal loitering statutes.
Because of the long history of abuse of such "hanging around" statutes, the Legislature dropped that section of the law from the 1979 state criminal code. In 1998 then Attorney General Peter Verniero sternly reminded towns to stop applying archaic statutes.
But many towns have kept them on the books, including Frenchtown, which provides a textbook example of the type of ordinance that has been eliminated in New Jersey, including "concepts of spending time idly, loafing or walking around aimlessly, and shall include the colloquial expression 'hanging around.'"
Although such statutes are invalid, Paff has pointed out that they make it easier for defendants and local prosecutors to reach plea deals.
While the town collects a fine without going to trial, a loitering conviction, unlike a statutory offense, will not show up on Mirabell'as record.
Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
