“Policing the Police” is a documentary by the PBS investigative series “Frontline.”

In July, 2014, the Department of Justice released a report that showed that the Newark Police Department had engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional conduct. According to the report, seventy-five per cent of documented pedestrian stops by the police were not justified. Yet during the three years that the Department of Justice investigated the department, its internal-affairs office dismissed ninety-nine per cent of complaints lodged against officers.

The report came down a month after Ras Baraka, the son of the poet Amiri Baraka, and a former Newark city-council member and public-high-school principal, was sworn in as mayor. Baraka, whom I’ve known since we attended Howard University together, in the late nineteen-eighties, had a long history of activism against police brutality. In the early nineties, he organized a large Manhattan demonstration against the Rodney King verdict. In 1997, he led a rally in Newark protesting the death of Dannette Daniels, a thirty-one-year-old pregnant woman, who was fatally shot by a Newark police officer during an arrest. The Department of Justice report was released amid an increasingly fraught national conversation about race and policing. Newark’s progressives believed that, if police reform could happen anywhere, it would be here, with leadership that took the issue seriously.

On a warm evening last fall, I joined two detectives in the gang unit of the Newark Police Department, Ricardo Reillo and Wilberto Ruiz, for a ride-along, for “Policing the Police.” We rolled through the city in an unmarked black S.U.V., the driver’s window down, a detective’s flashlight slicing through the dark. At the time, the officers of the gang unit went out five times per week in unmarked cars, making traffic stops, searching pedestrians, and conducting drug raids. Newark is plagued by drug trafficking and gang violence and has a homicide rate nine times higher than that of New York City. When I asked one officer how he makes the decision to stop someone, he described a set of criteria that constitute a gut instinct, not reasonable suspicion.

On this particular evening, the officers turned a corner onto Stratford Place and a shout went out, alerting the block to their presence. People jumped out of their cars and ran into a decaying building. When the officers followed, they found a dozen people in the hallway and a plastic shopping bag containing heroin packets. But, just as often, that kind of aggressive intervention yields a different result. That same night, the officers surrounded and searched a ten-year-old boy over the protests of his thirteen-year-old brother. They found nothing on him, but presumed he must have gotten rid of a stash of contraband before they rolled up. Ride with them long enough and it becomes clear that “stop and frisk” is a euphemism for something far more invasive. The searches in Newark are public and thorough. In one instance, an officer pulled at a young man’s waistband in order to look into his underwear. That search was conducted in the parking lot of an apartment complex, in full view of other residents.

Forty-nine years ago, much of downtown Newark was incinerated during a riot—black residents still insist on calling it a _rebellion—_that was sparked by the beating by police of an African-American cab driver. Amiri Baraka was pulled over during the riots and severely beaten by Newark police officers, one of them his former high-school classmate. The Lilley Report, which was issued in the riot’s wake, made a list of recommendations—better communication between the police and the community, improved hiring standards, a more diverse police force—that seem to have been passed down like an Internet term paper to subsequent inquiries into unrest. Newark did make at least one demonstrable change after 1967: the police force is now thirty-five per cent black and forty-one per cent Latino. When I asked Baraka how a diverse department could receive the same sort of complaints as an almost all-white department, like the one in Ferguson, he replied that the racism wasn’t in who was doing the policing; it was in whom it was being done to.

A few weeks after that ride-along, the gang unit stopped a fourteen-year-old boy named Jamod Watkins, who had been sent out shopping by his mother. During the exchange, Ruiz took Watkins to the ground with so much force that he broke the boy’s clavicle. Watkins lives in a high-crime area in the West Ward; his stop, which produced no drugs or guns, highlighted the problem with policing in Newark and other places like it. In place of reasonable suspicion, the police have adopted a standard in which all suspicion is reasonable.