Professor John Pfaff shared his findings for an article in The Appeal that discusses two new expert reports shedding light on a federal lawsuit brought against Port Authority police for allegedly targeting and wrongly arresting men perceived to be gay or gender nonconforming.
John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University hired by the plaintiffs, found that just five officers out of more than 1,700 in the department, including Opromalla, were responsible for 70 percent of the public lewdness arrests in 2014, the year of Holden’s arrest. Seventy-three percent of Opromalla’s arrests that year were for public lewdness, according to the report.
“The PAPD [Port Authority Police Department] could suggest that the officers were acting on their own rather than following a centralized policy,” Pfaff wrote in his report, “although that, of course, raises questions about why the PAPD turned a blind eye to their behavior.”