Carteret Officer Tampered With Records, Prosecutor Says

CARTERET, NJ — A Carteret police officer who is accused of beating an African-American teenager during an arrest, sending the boy to the hospital, has now also been charged with lying and tampering with police records after that arrest.

Joseph Reiman, 31, was charged with official misconduct and records tampering, NJ.com reported Friday. He pleaded not guilty to the new charges Friday. Reiman has already been charged with aggravated assault and three counts of official misconduct, including failing to activate his body-worn camera, in the May 31 arrest in Carteret. The case against Reiman is brought by the Middlesex County prosecutor's office, who investigated the arrest after the boy's family widely shared the below Facebook post. That's the teen above, in a photo released by his family.

Reiman is the brother of Carteret Mayor Dan Reiman, who showed cautious support for his brother when he was first arrested in June, in this Facebook post, urging the public not to "scapegoat" his brother.

Prosecutors say that on May 31, while on official duty and in a patrol car, Officer Reiman was pursuing a teenage driver, who then crashed his car into a utility pole guide wire; the airbags deployed. The teen is 16 and under the legal driving age in New Jersey. After the teenager exited his vehicle, Reiman got on top of the teen and punched him several times with a closed fist, Middlesex County prosecutors says. Following the assault, an ambulance was not called to the scene. Instead, the teenager was placed in a patrol car.

An investigation by NJ Advance Media found that Reiman accounted for more than 20 percent of the Carteret police department's arrests involving force — twice as many reports as any other officer.

Reiman was also charged with failing to use reasonable discretion or restraint in the amount of force used to apprehend the teenager.