A federal lawsuit filed by a woman who claims a police officer punched her in the face for no reason and left her with severe injuries to her nose is about more than just this one incident, according to a former cop who investigates police brutality cases.

He feels it should lead to statewide changes in how excessive force cases are treated.

Brittany Starzi filed a federal lawsuit last month accusing Deptford Township Sgt. Kevin A. Clements of assaulting her while she was a patron at a bar in March 2018.

Three months later, Clements shot and killed LaShanda Anderson, 36, of Philadelphia, after she allegedly tried to run him down with her SUV while fleeing an aborted shoplifting in Deptford last year. Clements was cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting, but the case remains under federal review.

Terence Jones is director of the Police Accountability Project with Absolute Justice, a Philadelphia-based organization that investigates police brutality and wrongful convictions, and is advocating on Starzi’s behalf.

Jones, who was a Philadelphia cop for 11 years, argues that Deptford didn’t properly investigate the Starzi case and has repeatedly failed to hold its officers accountable.

He wants to see the state Attorney General dismantle the department’s internal affairs unit, and implement a system statewide in which officers are pulled off the streets while citizen claims of excessive force are under investigation.

Punches fly on St. Patrick’s Day

Clements was in uniform and working a special detail at Nipper’s Pub for St. Patrick’s Day last year when he reported problems shortly after 2 a.m., according to a police incident report.

Nipper’s remained open until 3 a.m. and seemed to be attracting new patrons from other bars that had closed at 2, he wrote. Fights began breaking out and officers tried to disperse a crowd inside the bar. Several people ended up being arrested before the scene was cleared.

Clements encountered Starzi, who appeared to be "very intoxicated” and seemed to be trying to start a fight, he wrote.

As he tried to guide her out of the bar, she resisted and then “spun toward me and was cursing and yelling directly at me.”

After again ignoring his order to leave the bar, he said the woman struck him. “I do not know if Starzi’s intention was to slap, push, scratch or punch me, but she reach (sic) forward and struck my chin with her flat fingers,” he wrote.

That action caused his head to “recoil slightly.”

“I reacted to Starzi’s actions by immediately punching her one time on the left side of the cheek with a closed fist,” he wrote.

Clements said the injury to her nose was caused when she was pushed to the ground by the crowd leaving the bar.

Starzi, who is 5 feet 2 inches tall and around 130 pounds, claimed that when Clements punched her, she fell backward down a few steps, landing on her back and striking her head.

She suffered a concussion, bruising on the brain, broken nose and a deviated septum, according to Starzi.

The mother of two already had one surgery and will require two more, including one to correct breathing problems caused by her nose injuries, Jones said. Another surgery to correct cosmetic damage — an external rhinoplasty — isn’t covered by insurance and costs more than $12,000.

Brittany Starzi will require two more surgeries to repair damage to her nose.

‘I turned around and he punched me’

Starzi denied she was intoxicated and trying to start a fight.

“There was no fight at all,” she said. “He was asking us to exit the bar because it was over-capacity.”

She described the limited space near the exit, which left little room for anyone to move. Then the shoving began.

“I didn’t say anything to him,” Starzi said. “I never put my hands on him. He shoved me, I turned around and he punched me.”

A bystander recorded video of the moments after Starzi was injured.

She can be seen briefly on the left side of the screen, with what appears to be blood on her arm and on the ground.

“When I got up, I was screaming, ‘He hit me,’” she said.

Deptford Police Capt. William Bittner is seen on the video assuring Starzi that she wasn’t hit by a cop.

“The captain was right there and let me lay on the ground and stated that his officer did not hit me,” Starzi said. “He didn’t even help me up off the ground.”

Starzi said she’s still in a lot of pain from the injury, suffers migraines and can’t breathe out of her nose.

Apart from getting compensation for her injuries, she wants justice.

“I would like for Officer Clements to go to jail,” she said.

Deptford Police Chief Kevin Pancoast declined to comment on the allegations because of the ongoing litigation.

Clements, who was paid $112,570 a year, took a disability retirement in March of this year after 20 years on the force. The state pension board approved him for accidental disability in August and he now collects pension payments of $6,254 a month, according to a state treasury official. It’s not clear what accident led to his disability.

No wrongdoing found

Clements lied about how Starzi suffered her injuries, Jones said, noting that Starzi suffered no cheek injury to the spot where the officer claimed he hit her. Police also lied when they reported Starzi scratched Clements on the chin during the incident, Jones added.

While the incident report includes photos of other injuries incurred by officers during the melee, no photos show scratches to Clements’ face.

The police report notes that the encounter between Clements and Starzi was captured on a security camera in the bar. Jones expects to get that video as part of discovery in the lawsuit.

Jones is co-founder of Absolute Justice with Starzi’s attorney, Emeka Igwe.

Police didn’t actually decide to arrest Starzi until well after the melee had ended and they realized she planned to file a complaint against police, Jones asserted.

She was about to climb into an ambulance when she was arrested and taken to the police station, he said. While at the station, police decided she should be taken to a hospital for treatment.

Starzi was charged with aggravated assault on police, resisting arrest, riot, failure to disperse and disorderly conduct.

While her original lawyer recommended she take the diversionary pre-trial intervention program, Jones said Starzi rejected that option and hired Igwe to handle the case. The charges were ultimately dismissed.

Brittany Starzi and Terence Jones stand outside of Deptford municipal court.

After she was released from the hospital, Starzi filed an excessive force complaint against Clements.

The department’s internal affairs unit reviewed the matter and found that “the officer reasonably believed that the use of force was immediately necessary to protect himself against the use of unlawful force.”

The Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office confirmed it didn’t pursue the charges against Starzi and found no criminal wrongdoing by police.

“The Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office reviewed the pending criminal charges against Ms. Starzi and declined to move forward with prosecution,” according to a statement. “The GCPO Special Investigations Unit, in accordance with N.J. Attorney General guidelines, conducted a comprehensive review of the incident in question. Subsequent to that review, which did not disclose criminal conduct on the part of the involved law enforcement personnel, the matter was forwarded to the Deptford Township Police Department for administrative review.”

Take them off the street

Because of the Starzi case, Jones believes Clements shouldn’t have been on the street June 9, 2018, when he shot LaShanda Anderson outside of a Marshalls department store in Deptford.

Anderson and two others were accused of trying to leave the store with more than $3,000 in merchandise when store officials intervened and called police.

At the request of the Gloucester County NAACP, Jones conducted his own investigation of the shooting and concluded that Clements used excessive force and “placed himself in imminent danger” when he stepped in front of Anderson’s fleeing SUV.

Many departments across the country place officers on desk duty or administrative leave with pay while complaints of excessive force are investigated, Jones said. He feels that should have happened in Starzi’s case, which occurred less than three months before the Anderson shooting.

The internal affairs review of the Starzi case apparently wrapped up in late June, after the Anderson shooting, based on a letter Starzi’s attorney received dated June 20 indicating police had cleared Clements of any wrongdoing.

Jones plans to use the Starzi case to urge the state Attorney General’s Office to craft a rule requiring that officers under review for excessive force complaints are taken off the street until investigations are complete.

Deptford Police Sgt. Kevin A. Clements

Turning a blind eye

The Starzi case highlights what Jones feels is a lack of accountability in Deptford.

“It’s obvious that Deptford Police Department has a pattern and practice of turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to citizen complaints,” Jones said. “I’m pushing for some accountability. It wasn’t that hard to realize that this is a very violent officer. He should have been flagged as a violent officer.”

Jones referenced another incident in which Deptford was sued over Clements’ arrest of a 70-year-old woman who claimed she was roughed up during a 2013 traffic stop. That case was settled for $20,000.

In reviewing five years of citizen complaints against Deptford officers, the department’s internal affairs unit has never substantiated a citizen’s allegations of excessive force, Jones said, providing professional standards summary report forms for the years 2013 through 2017.

He wants the state Attorney General to dismantle the department’s internal affairs unit “because the Brittany Starzi case shows that the police cannot police themselves.”

In addition to taking his concerns to the county prosecutor and township police, Jones sent complaints over Starzi’s case to Deptford’s elected leaders, but said he received no response.

“They should be ashamed of themselves,” he said. “How would they feel if it was their daughter? If it was their mother?"

According to the NJ.com’s Force Report, which chronicled police officer use of force incidents across the state from 2012 to 2017, Clements used force five times during that period, compared to the statewide average of 4.1 force incidents per officer over that span.

No body cameras in Deptford

Complicating investigations of both the Starzi incident and the Anderson killing is the Deptford department’s lack of body cameras.

They still don’t have them, but Mayor Paul Medany said the topic is always under review.

He cited the cost of purchasing and maintaining a system, along with the resources that would be needed to handle Open Public Records Act (OPRA) requests for video.

As it is, Medany estimated the township has received about 1,700 OPRAs this year alone.

“It’s something that we have to deal with on a daily basis and body cameras would come into play with that,” he said. “Budgets are tight. Things haven’t changed in the municipal budget world.”

Medany declined to comment on the allegations raised by Jones, citing the federal lawsuit.

Video raises more questions

To further make his point that police cannot police themselves, Jones referred back to the Starzi video from Nipper’s Pub, which she provided to New Jersey Advance Media.

After Bittner, the police captain, tells Starzi that a cop didn’t hit her, a man punches the captain in the mouth.

A bouncer and police take down the assailant.

Bittner then moves away from the man and retrieves an object that was apparently dropped during the scuffle — Jones says it’s a flashlight — and uses it to repeatedly strike his assailant. Another officer hits the man with a baton.

Jones says these officers went too far and should face charges.

“This is fundamentally excessive force," Jones said. "Once someone is subdued, you have to just put the cuffs on him.

“He could have killed the guy. It’s a wolf pack mentality to assault this guy and he’s defenseless."

The prosecutor’s office reviewed this incident, too.

“The GCPO Special Investigations Unit conducted a thorough review of the incident in question pursuant to Attorney General Guidelines on the Use of Force,” according to a statement. “There was a determination that there was not a violation of the guidelines and the GCPO did not proceed with any charges being filed against the officers involved in the incident.”

Jones doesn’t buy it.

“Who made him judge and jury?” he said of Bittner. “That person, even though he punched that cop, he should be protected by our laws. If not, what type of society are we?”

Bittner, whose salary was $129,322 a year, retired at the end of 2018 after more than 20 years with the Deptford department. He receives monthly pension payments of $7,364.27, state treasury officials confirmed.

‘I deserved getting my ass whipped’

Even though Jones sees a clear case of excessive force in the video, the man on the receiving end didn’t see it that way, Jones said.

He reached out to the man in the video, who pleaded guilty to punching Bittner. The guy was actually irritated with Jones, not the cops.

“I talked to him on the phone and I told him it was excessive force and he says, no, I deserved getting my ass whipped,” Jones said. “The guy was upset that I called him.”

Jones said he knows many people who tend to side with police will see it the same way, but that’s not how it’s supposed to work. "If you’ve got the mentality of the criminals you lock up, you shouldn’t be a police officer,” he said.

From his years as a cop, Jones recalled a case in which a perp punched him in the mouth and took off running.

“I caught him and I took him to the ground, and I get up and I’m going to punch the guy,” he said.

Then the perp said the magic words.

“I give up.”

The man put his arms at his sides and indicated he was surrendering, Jones said.

“As angry as I was, I couldn’t punch that guy. It’s inhuman,” Jones said. “Am I pissed that he punched me in the mouth? Sure, but it comes with the job.”

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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