Issue 201: The race I really don't want to talk about.

Also: JC Bird art show, a Walker mailer, Trump comes for JC, ferals!, and more!!

Good morning! I started out yesterday morning thinking I had nothing for this issue and then now it’s ballooned into a super long one. I hope you’re enjoying your long weekend and thanks for being here! — Amy

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Jersey City Birds show

From a mailing from Jersey City Birds:

Greetings Artists, Birders, and Photographers,

Jersey City Birds is delighted to announce our next art show, taking place at Barrow Mansion on the weekend of June 20-22, 2025.

We are seeking submissions from artists and birders who are inspired by the beauty of Jersey City’s birds and wildlife. If you're interested in showcasing your bird-themed artwork and photography in this historic and unique setting, we invite you to submit.

Yay!! This has become a really fun event — they’ve had it at Park Tavern and Barrow Mansion — and it’s all about celebrating nature in Jersey City. From one of the organizers, Lorraine Freeney, “It's billed as an art show but it's also intended as a celebration of local birds and a way to highlight the amazing wildlife we have here in Jersey City, and in that way hopefully to encourage people to advocate for wildlife and green spaces and bird habitat. Some of the photographers and artists are very accomplished. Others are people who just love birds. We welcome all!”

I love this! If you’re interested and have bird-themed art, please apply by this Wednesday by following the instructions explained here. This is very fun and I hope you’ll consider participating.

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A contentious anti-Jerry Walker mailer

I’ve gone back and forth with whether or not I was going to write about this story this week. On one hand, it’s a story that stars two of my most disliked Jersey City politicians, Walker and Fulop, both of whom I’d really rather ignore. But on the other — and this is why I decided to write about it after all — I think this whole story builds well on what I wrote last week about so-called “fake news,” and how things can get distorted around Election Day.

Last week, the HCDO and Commissioner Jerry Walker — who is running for the Assembly on the HCDO slate — called a recent mailer paid for by Mayor Fulop’s PAC “racist.”

What I’m going to try to do here is explain how this image was created. Whether or not it’s racist, that I leave up to you. I’m sure you’re aware of the history of stories like OJ Simpson’s face being darkened for the cover of Time magazine, or (more locally) the flyers of Councilman Gilmore that circulated during his run. Whether or not this picture of Walker rises to those levels, again — I leave that up to you.

Walker, said, in Hudson County View:

“… You saw the picture that the picture that they posed of me: They made me look darker, that’s a racist undertone, they painted me with a Rolex watch – I don’t even own a God damn watch. This is crazy, this is crazy, but I love it.”

The substance of the mailer was about Walker’s involvement with Paul Fireman and his proposed privatization of Liberty State Park, all of which is true, and it doesn’t seem like anyone in Walker’s team disputes that at all. What they’re objecting to is the use of a particular picture. Here’s the original, along with what ran in the mailer:

Left: original picture, which appeared in the Jersey Journal; Right: picture that was on the mailer.

First off, the images are flipped — he was once looking to the left and is now, in the mailer, looking to the right. In Photoshop, this is very easily done, even on a much older version of the software, and takes about .0005 seconds. It’s literally a matter of selecting something from a pull-down menu, and the picture gets flipped. Easy.

Secondly, he does have a somewhat darker complexion in the image on the right. This seems to be the result of putting a kind of cool, blue filter over the entire image (if you look in the background and on his suit, you can see this as well). It’s possible that this was done with the intent to make his skin seem darker, or (just trying to play devil’s advocate here) maybe it was just a choice to make the overall image (which has Liberty State Park in the background) look more cold and distant, to play into the chilling story they’re trying to tell of a guy selling out a park for money. Again, I’m avoiding the why of this, but just wanted to point out that a filter was used over the image.

Something to keep in mind is that the printing that’s used for political mailers is super cheap. Because these things are cranked out by the tens of thousands and every other week, the printing isn’t super high quality. Mailers are made with the idea that they’re going to be looked at for half a second and chucked, and that’s reflected in the printing technology they use. As a result, colors might be slightly off — they may even be off from one mailer to the next. This could be part of it — it’s tough to say definitively that it’s not.

But what got me about the mailer was the third part, the arm with the watch. When I first got out of grad school nearly 30 years ago, I did photo editing and graphic design on the side, and looking at that picture and that arm, I thought — what a nightmare. Editing the image that way would have taken me a while and would have been really annoying. Surely the amount of time that would be spent getting the image to look like that implies some kind of well-thought-out intent on the behalf of the designer, right?

Then I thought to show the image to a friend who currently works with Photoshop for a living. He pointed out to me that now with AI, it’s extremely easy to do edits like that. In fact, he took the original and edited it to look like the one on the right and timed himself — from start to finish and with the computer doing the rendering, it only took 39 seconds to recreate it. And as he pointed out to me, the low quality of the printing actually helps the image. If you look at the cuff of his sleeve, you can see one of those classic AI mistakes (the cuff doesn’t really make any sense), but it’s partially obscured by the low quality of the printing. If this were a super high definition print, that error might stand out more.

Again, I’m avoiding the why of all this. But it was significant to me that editing things like this has become so quick and simple, and also that the low quality of campaign materials work so well with AI edited images. That second point makes me scared for what campaign mailers are going to be like in a couple of years, as this technology progresses and more and more campaigns make use of it. In this particular case, it might mean that the editing of the image is less thought out than I originally assumed it was, but just because something can be quickly thrown together doesn’t mean it’s any more or less sinister in intent.

Jerry Walker sucks and in my estimation, you should not vote for him. But you definitely also shouldn’t not vote for him based on a mailer paid for by Fulop’s PAC where he seems more dark-skinned than in real life, or where he’s shown wearing a watch that doesn’t exist. My opinion of Walker is pretty well known and I don’t especially want to dwell on it, but I do want to make the point that even something as simple as a headshot photo of a candidate on a mailer like this can be manipulated — and that kind of manipulation is becoming easier and more convincing.

I have to admit, had I seen the image with the watch completely in a vacuum, it never would have occurred to me that it was off. It would have just passed through my consciousness like all the other pieces of junk mail we get, and gone into the garbage. Of course, as part of this, I don’t look at people with darker skin as being more inherently criminal than those with lighter skin, nor do I ever especially pay any attention to men’s wristwatches, fancy or not (please, I promise you, I’m not trying to be one of those I don’t see race white people; I just don’t really care about watches and it just wouldn’t have occurred to me to dwell on his complexion for more than half a second as the flyer traveled from my mailbox to garbage can). But the fact that this image doesn’t emotionally affect me, personally, doesn’t matter — it’s still an untrue image, edited to elicit some sort of reaction regardless of whether it worked on me or not, and my brain never would have realized that it was edited at all and would have accepted it as real. And that’s what really concerns me about the future and how this is all going to play out over the next few years as this technology gets out there more and more.

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The Sheriff’s race I’ve been avoiding talking about

A reader came to Open Studio last week and asked, very fairly, if I was ever going to write about the sheriff’s race. It occurred to me in that moment that there’s been few races that I have so gone out of my way to avoid writing about that it’s basically pathological at this point — I just simply have chosen to pretend this race isn’t happening, and thought it was probably time to break down why.

Let’s start out with what the HC Sheriff’s office actually is and what they do. From the website of the office (which is a delightful display of municipal design elements and contains a weird pop-up window when you first log into it — I’m being snarky but I also genuinely like it):

Comprised of more than 300 dedicated personnel, the Office's responsibilities include a wide range of services and functions which assist the public, enhance the county's municipal police departments, and safeguard Hudson County’s judicial proceedings. […] The Sheriff's Office is tasked with maintaining order and security in and around Hudson County's courthouses, Hudson Plaza, county parks, and other county venues. We assist the county's twelve municipal police departments and prosecutor's office in a variety of ways, such as motor vehicle accidents, municipal transportation, task forces, public gatherings, and all related law enforcement calls. We also have specialized response units, such as S.W.A.T., fatal crash investigations, and explosive and narcotics-detecting K-9s. Additionally, the Office is responsible for process service, writs, court orders, foreclosures, court executions, and criminal warrant arrests.

Something that’s kind of confusing is that Jersey City — and the surrounding areas (and this is true of many places) — is divided up into little territories. God forbid something terrible should happen in Lincoln Park or on JFK Boulevard and you should need the police, it’s most likely that the HC Sheriff’s office would respond — not the local JCPD. Now, this gets confusing because depending on what happened and how serious it is, there may be reasons why the JCPD would also get involved, but as a rule of thumb that’s how things work. When a traffic light was out recently at Duncan and JFK, an officer from the HC Sheriff’s office was tasked with directing traffic there, not a JCPD officer.

So the short version is that the Sheriff is in charge of the force that oversees officers in these in-between places, as well as enforcing county laws. And Sheriff — unlike any of the positions in the JCPD — is an elected position, which personally I think is great but it would be far better if the candidates were any good. This year, we have two people vying for the job, after having it been an unopposed election for many years. Long time Sheriff Frank Schillari, running on Fulop’s slate, is facing opposition from Bayonne Mayor Jimmy Davis, who is running on the HCDO slate. And that’s where this election stops being fun or interesting.

Schillari has been in the position for five terms; he is almost 80 years old, and seems to not have much awareness of what is happening in his own campaign (see below for more of that). He is refusing to debate his opponent, whose own past is checkered, to put it mildly, with accusations of sexual harassment. At a recent Schillari campaign fundraiser (in Garfield, NJ, a town in Bergen County; why is a fundraiser for a HC candidate being held in Bergen County? I have no idea), “a man in a chicken suit walked and clucked away outside The Venetian [catering hall] for about an hour last night, though it’s unclear if patrons understood what was happening since he did not come with any accompanying campaign regalia or signs,” according to Hudson County View.

From that same article:

The campaign has been a fairly brutal one, with Schillari hitting Davis repeatedly over workplace lawsuits alleging sexual harassment, and the latter returning fire over the overtime spending in the sheriff’s office and saying five terms is enough.

From an earlier article:

“If Mayor Davis wants to talk about accountability, then he should start by being accountable himself. The people of Hudson County deserve the truth,” Schillari said in a statement.

“These documents [records related to sexual harassment charges] should be made public so voters can see what really happened. If Mayor Davis truly wants a debate, he should begin with transparency. Release the records, Jimmy. Let’s have a real conversation about leadership and integrity.”

Davis has twice challenged Schillari to a debate and both times the incumbent said he would only do so if the records in the Stacie Percella and Sincerrae Ross lawsuits were released.

Percella, the former Bayonne deputy registrar, received a $450,000 settlement for two cases, one involving Davis allegedly sending her sexually explicit text messages and another that alleged a hostile work environment and sexual harassment from a former colleague and her former boss during the Mark Smith administration.

The other involved ex-Bayonne City Hall worker Sincerrae Ross, who received a $500,00 jury award for a hostile work environment on May 1st that was vacated by Hudson County Superior Court Judge Kimberly Espinales-Maloney on May 5th, both as HCV first reported.

Ross’ case is being appealed and is unlikely to see any significant updates any time soon.

Meanwhile, over at New Jersey Globe:

Hudson County Sheriff Frank Schillari admitted to the New Jersey Globe that he hasn’t seen what his campaign is putting out on his Democratic primary opponent, three-term Bayonne Mayor Jimmy Davis.

“I can’t comment on it unless I research it. I don’t recall it,” said Schillari. “I see so many ads. I’ll have to ask my media people.”

One Schillari mailer brings up old allegations of sexting by Davis and claims sexual harassment lawsuits have cost Bayonne “millions of dollars.”

But Davis was dismissed as a defendant in the lawsuits. And this week, a Superior Court judge has set aside a jury verdict that awarded $500,000 to a former Bayonne city employee who claimed she was harassed and subjected to a hostile, sexually-charged work environment. Another case involved allegations that occurred before Davis was elected mayor.

“Let’s be clear: These recycled, discredited attacks have been trotted out before—during the 2018 and 2022 elections—and voters saw right through them,” said Hudson County Democratic Organization Executive Director Storm Wyche. “Why are the Sheriff and his handlers deliberately misleading the public?”

Schillari’s campaign spokesman, Paul Swibinski, doubled down on the sheriff’s mailer: “Jimmy Davis is a creep.” Swibinski worked against Davis in 2014, but for him in 2018 and 2022.

Right, so: this is why I haven’t written about this. Both these guys are terrible, no one seems to be making a serious effort to actually talk to voters, and it’s pretty hard to pick a side here.

You know what’s great though? Our version of democracy here in the US and specifically in NJ allows us to write in people for office. Generally speaking, I don’t think this is a good use of your vote, but maybe in this case it’s something to consider. Many people showing up to vote for governor or assembly are going to just pick a box to check for sheriff and really not give it a second thought, and I understand this and accept it.

But, you could. You could send a message that hey, you’re a voter that doesn’t necessarily do what either Steve Fulop or the HCDO tells you to do, and that you’re not really happy with either of these picks. You could vote for (aka write in) “none of the above” or “your mom” or whatever you want — you don’t have to pick one of these two people. This isn’t a Trump vs Harris kind of thing where I’m going to ask you to put aside your personal feelings for the good of the whole; neither of these guys is great, and I haven’t been convinced by this election that it will make a whole hell of a lot of a difference if one is elected over the other. It just really seems like two guys super entrenched in the political system fighting it out via surrogates and like, really? This is the best we can do?

Every election, a few dozen people write in someone for whatever role they’re voting for. It’s usually a blip, a curiosity, but maybe this time it could be different. Maybe it could actually signal to someone, somewhere, that there’s room for them to run. I mean, it’s something, right? Also, I don’t have the energy or wherewithal to organize this at all, but I’d like to point out that my 17-year-old dog doesn’t have too long to live, and if he got like, 20 votes for Hudson County Sheriff, that would be incredibly amusing to me. So if you wanted to write in Oscar The Dog, I won’t stop you.

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Trump and Sanctuary Cities

Ok, I think this is weirder than it originally looks, but I’m just going to be very upfront and say I may need some help with writing about this. I genuinely don’t understand what’s happening here which is possibly just the overall dysfunction of the Trump administration or the lack of defined terms in this controversy or maybe some secret other thing I haven’t thought of — I have no idea.

This week, the Trump admin said it was coming for Jersey City, and three other NJ cities for their “sanctuary city” status:

The Trump administration sued four New Jersey cities over their so-called sanctuary city policies aimed at prohibiting police from cooperating with immigration officials, saying the local governments are standing in the way of federal enforcement.

The Justice Department filed the suit Thursday against Newark, Jersey City, Paterson and Hoboken in New Jersey federal court. The lawsuit seeks a judgment against the cities and an injunction to halt them from enacting the so-called sanctuary city policies.

“While states and local governments are free to stand aside as the United States performs this important work, they cannot stand in the way,” the suit says.

Ok… I guess… but like, “Asbury Park, Camden, East Orange, Jersey City, Linden, New Brunswick, Newark, North Bergen, Plainfield, Trenton and Union City” are all considered to be “sanctuary cities” as well; Maplewood was technically the first. Is Jersey City (and more hard-to-believe, Hoboken) actually doing something more radical and progressive to ward off ICE than, say, Union City? If they are, that’s never been articulated. I mean, I welcome it if it’s true, but I genuinely don’t understand.

Meanwhile:

Princeton has signed on as a "Welcoming America" city, which, according to its website, is a network of more than 100 municipalities across the country that "provides the roadmap and support (communities) need to become more inclusive toward immigrants and all residents."

and:

According to immigration advocates, some other towns and counties in New Jersey have sanctuary-like policies in place to avoid potential wrongful imprisonment liabilities, but do not identify themselves as "sanctuary." Burlington, Camden, Middlesex, and Union Counties have varied versions of such policies in place, advocates say. [Link to both quotes here.]

Ok so wait, what? There’s a lot of New Jersey that has been declared “sanctuary cities” or similar. Why is Jersey City (and the other three cities) being singled out? What does this actually mean? Is this anything to be worried about or just bloviating from the Trump admin? Is this something that’s going to be quickly dismissed? I have no idea — this is where I’m in over my head.

Meanwhile, I can’t help but feel it’s relevant that most of the major candidates for mayor posted statements right away about this attack from Trump. Bill O’Dea’s statement is here; James Solomon’s is here; Mussab Ali’s statement is here (it’s really strong!); Joyce Watterman as far as I can tell hasn’t put out a statement, but to be fair she’s named in the lawsuit as City Council President (I heard right before sending this newsletter out that she’s sent a letter to local publications, so it sounds like a statement from her is forthcoming). I do not see a statement from McGreevey anywhere; I’m happy to update this if I’m wrong.

Also, this isn’t the best place to put this in a post, but I regret to inform everyone that McGreevey was singing the praises of Jordan Peterson in a now-deleted tweet earlier this week:

Peterson is a deeply troubling writer who has made all kinds of anti-trans, and anti-woman statements over the years. He’s been a huge star of the so-called “manosphere” where young, white men are told that they’re victims who need to reclaim their masculinity from a society that only wants to “feminize” them. It’s weird, bad stuff. In a profile in the New York Times, it was noted that “Violent attacks,” referring to violence perpetuated by incels, “are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married.”

Look, I really don’t think McGreevey knew any of that when he posted the tweet, and clearly someone told him at some point because it’s gone now. But like, there’s some disturbing stuff that’s in his orbit, and I’m starting to get really worried about this. You can have your personal religious beliefs and that’s absolutely fine; you can run for mayor with a slate filled with religious people and law enforcement candidates, and I guess that’s still ok (?). But when you’re running with religious people and law enforcement candidates on your slate and also constantly tweeting about Jesus and also reading and posting about Jordan Peterson and also not putting out a statement against Trump coming for Jersey City because of our sanctuary city status, at a certain point I’m going to not be able to give you the benefit of the doubt in terms of where your politics really are. I’ve been trying so hard to give this guy every chance to redeem himself, but I’m running out of directions to twist myself into a pretzel by doing so.

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ICYMI

The Alliance (formerly the LGBTQ Alliance) has a Q&A with the Assembly candidates on issues affecting the queer community. Please go here to read their answers.

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Feral(s) of the week!!

Ok we have two!! The first I ran into on my way home from the studio Saturday afternoon. I saw him (her?) from a distance and thought — finally. I’ve been having such a terrible time finding outdoor cats that I was just relieved to see one. I saw him at a distance, took a far-off shot, and then he came running over to me for skritches:

Gorgeous markings that don’t come through in this pic — but very unusual. A grey tabby style cat with some glints of light brown, which were really pretty. And affectionate, my goodness!

But I can’t neglect the honorary feral I happened across on my way into NYC earlier this week:

This ferocious tiger was abandoned on the sidewalk on Monday, I think? and I briefly feared it might be my only cat-related sighting of the week, so I quickly took a pic. If your child lost a leopard-style plastic critter, I think I found it. (I love how in the picture it looks like it’s headed to the tangled string-like thing up at the top.)

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