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“I don’t think we’ve met but Iwanted to introduce myself to you.I am the Head N—a,” Travara Morton quotes Sims as saying on April 4 after approaching her as she sat in a police car in the student parking lot. “[I]t don’t get no higher than me.”
Sims handed her a business card that read: “Police Commissioner” on one side and “Councilman” on the other, Morton wrote in an April 29 report to city Police Director Michael Mordaga, a copy of which was obtained by CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Sims then walked away from the car, the report says.
Morton later confirmed it was Sims, it says.
Sims, who works for the school district as a one-on-one aide for learning disabled children, couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Richard Salkin, the attorney for the Hackensack Board of Education, told CLIFFVIEW PILOT this afternoon that he has filed an Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request with the city for the report so that board members can review it and determine how to proceed.
Morton, who is black, wrote in her report: “I understand some African Americans choose to use term ‘n—a’ as a term of endearment. As the first time meeting Sims, who holds such political status in the city of Hackensack. I am truly appalled that he would feel so comfortable to introduce himself to me as the ‘Head N—a.’
“It was not appealing and it was a terrible experience of my first encounter having a one on one conversation with a public official.”
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