It’s Pride Month and I’m here to talk about a New Jersey police chief found to have used a homophobic slur while on the job and ended up with a slap on the wrist.
The chief is Stacey Williams, who led Roselle’s police department until 2024, when he was fired after a county prosecutor’s probe concluded he used the slur while talking to subordinate officers. I won’t repeat the word, because I have a bit more decency than Williams does, but it’s a common one that begins with f.
Williams was back on the job last week, as reported by NJ Advance Media, after the state Civil Service Commission in December backed an administrative court judge’s ruling that Williams’ comments, while offensive, justified a 30-day suspension, not termination. A state Superior Court in April declined to step in to keep Williams from resuming his old job.
Attorney Peter Paris, who represents a gay cop who said he heard Williams use the word multiple times, called the mess “a real shame.”
“While there is a long and sordid history of homophobic behavior by police chiefs in Roselle and other towns, I never imagined that the Civil Service Commission would expressly condone the unapologetic use by a police chief of abusive, homophobic tropes toward a subordinate officer. When you consider what has happened in Clark and in Roselle, it is clear that bigoted police chiefs in New Jersey are protected by the powers that be,” Paris told me.
Williams’ attorney did not return requests for comment.
Here are the details, largely taken from a transcript of a January 2025 administrative law hearing about the matter:
Two of Williams’ subordinates alleged he used the slur in reference to one of the chief’s friends during an October 2022 conversation in a basement hallway of Roselle’s police department. One of the cops who made this allegation is Delmonte Pryor, who is gay. The other is Helder Freire, who succeeded Williams as chief when Williams was initially fired.
Williams challenged his termination, and he told the judge overseeing the dispute that he did not recall using the word but conceded it was possible. He also admitted that about 10 years ago he called another cop a shortened version of the word because that cop griped about the smell of a decomposing body at a crime scene, a comment that Williams’ lawyer said happened “eons ago” (10 years ago was 2016, hardly eons).
Pryor, who is suing Roselle over this and more, alleges Williams used the same slur in a conversation with him in 2020. Pryor said he did not file a complaint about it at the time because his previous complaints about homophobia in the workplace were not taken seriously.
On the witness stand, Williams insisted both that he didn’t use the word and, if he did, it would have been no big deal.
“It’s like calling somebody a punk,” Williams testified.
Later in the hearing, Williams again said he did not remember using the word but added that the basement conversation was “about a friend, joking about a personal friend of mine, nothing to do with anybody homosexual whatsoever.”
That prompted Pryor’s attorney to ask, “Do you think that the word f****t is funny?”
“Well, it depends on how you look at it, because culturally if you look into the Black neighborhood, people utilize f*****t and the N word,” Williams responded.
Williams’ defense — that he was the victim of a political hit job, not a raging homophobe — worked on the judge, Thomas Betancourt, who said he found Williams convincing and concluded that he did indeed use the word during the October 2022 basement conversation, but that his “use of the word was neither discriminatory nor targeted toward another officer or specific individual in such a manner exhibiting homophobia or disapproval of those who identify as homosexual.”
I guess the lesson here for public officials is to feel free to use slurs and just pretend they aren’t used to target anyone.
The judge found Pryor, who also testified during the hearing, less convincing than Williams.
“I thought his amount of discomfort over (Williams’) use of the offensive term overstated,” Betancourt said.
Pryor’s experience here is common to many if not most queer folks. We’re stuck in a work conversation or talking with people we hardly know at a party, hear someone bandy about a vile slur, and often must accept it with grace or else be accused, by folks like Judge Betancourt, of overreacting.
The push to restore Williams to power hinges on this idea that a gay person who is not super jazzed about hearing his boss use a homophobic slur at the office should man up, take a joke, relax. It reminds me of the Financial Times story from January 2025 quoting a “top banker” who said Donald Trump’s reelection as president liberated him to use slurs at the office “without the fear of getting canceled.” That’s probably the feeling among the anti-gay bigots at Roselle’s police department now that Williams is back as chief. Happy Pride!
