NJ police chief who showed up drunk to accident also ridiculed employees, swore and spat at staff and attacked his officers, report says
The disgraced New Jersey police chief forced into retirement after a drunken, caught-on-camera scuffle with one of his officers has a lengthy history of misconduct that includes racial profiling, berating underlings, on-duty drunkenness and violence, according to a damning report from prosecutors.
Numerous allegations involving Bradley Beach Police Chief Leonard Guida were uncovered during an investigation by the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office — including one instance when the drunk, enraged chief spat on a man over a disagreement about politics at police headquarters.
Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond S. Santiago went so far as to say there were so many allegations of Guida yelling at, belittling and berating his subordinates that investigating them all would be too arduous a task.
“The findings outlined in this report illustrate unmistakably that over the previous year and a half, Chief Guida has been an active hindrance to the very law enforcement agency he was entrusted to lead,” Santiago said in a statement.
“The picture the report paints is not pretty — but that is precisely why we felt that it was so vitally important to publicly release it,” Santiago said. “Transparency is rendered meaningless if ugliness is kept opaque.”
Guida stepped down Friday — six months earlier than intended — after local news outlet TAPinto published bodycam video of the inebriated chief interfering with his own cops as they worked a drunk driving crash back in November.
The scene turned ugly when Guida put his hands on frustrated police Sgt. William Major, who in turn threw Guida onto the hood of a department cruiser and told him to get lost before he got arrested.
Guida was later suspended, and has been barred from duty since December.
But the eye-popping confrontation — which effectively cost Guida his $202,000-per-year gig — was only one of a long string of transgressions, Santiago wrote.
The prosecutor’s report, which the office posted to its website, found the chief at fault in seven of nine questionable incidents that investigators looked into, according to the Asbury Park Pres
The chief — who had worked in the small Jersey Shore town south of Asbury Park for more than four decades — also violated the department’s rules and regulations 24 times and broke state attorney general guidelines twice, among other things.
Some of the allegations that the prosecutor found to be true are particularly ugly — such as a Sept. 18, 2022 incident in which Guida screamed at a patrolman as he helped set up for the town’s Latin Festival because the cop had smiled at a woman and told her to have a good day.
“Guida proceeded to berate him for approximately 15 minutes, telling him, ‘I’ll never promote you,’ that he was the ‘worst officer we have,’ and that he ‘never should have been hired,’” the report said.
The former chief also yelled at a patrolman in front of his kids — and when the officer complained about it, told him, “Maybe your kids need to see their dad get yelled at,” the report said.
Guida told investigators he later regretted this.
Another time, on Aug. 14, 2023, the chief unexpectedly showed up at police headquarters at about 9 p.m., reeking of alcohol.
Fox News was playing on a department television, and an unidentified employee complained about a conversation the network was having about whether Hillary Clinton should have been indicted several years ago over improper use of her email account.
Guida got offended, brought the man into a conference room and pilloried him with profanity for more than an hour, Santiago said.
“Guida was so worked up that he spit on [the employee] as he chastised him,” the report said, adding that Guida also shoved the man into a chair two different times.
Someone asked the chief to calm down — and he responded with even more vitriol.
“F–k you, I’m the Chief,” Guida responded. “I’m going to handle things the way I want to handle things.”
When the prosecutor’s office interviewed him about the confrontation, Guida said he didn’t know if he’d been drinking before the incident but that it was “very possible,” the report said.
He denied being drunk, however. And when asked about why he put his hands on the employee, replied “I’m Italian, what do you want me to do?”
Two weeks earlier, Guida violated the civil rights of a black man by ordering him detained solely because he was walking near a Main Street tire shop, the report said.
Guida and other officers only let the man leave after dispatchers called in that the man had no warrants.
“When interviewed, [the man] stated that he walked that route every day, that Bradley Beach police vehicles routinely drive past him, and that this was the first time he was stopped,” Santiago wrote. “He believed he was stopped by Chief Guida due to his race.”
The prosecutor’s office agreed, and said Guida broke the man’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Then there was the Nov. 9 drunk driving crash, which the prosecutor’s office said Guida interfered with while he was drunk — even though he was on-duty at the time.
Major, the police sergeant, told investigators Guida had been showing up to work hammered for the last six months. And he’d been getting increasingly physical with his subordinates.
Guida responded to the allegations by telling the prosecutor that his own officers were out to get him — and they were also “not credible, not nice and not capable.”
The prosecutor took the rank-and-file’s side, however.
“While we will consider Sgt. Major’s conduct in a separate letter, it is important to note that the confrontation between Sgt. Major and Chief Guida occurred because Chief Guida showed up on scene intoxicated, asserted his control, and argued with Sgt. Major about his jacket while Sgt. Major tried to do his job,” Santiago wrote.
“What has become clear during this investigation is that the relationship between Chief Guida and his subordinates is irretrievably broken.”
