meanwhile investigations into racism allegations within the town of Clark's police department and mayor's office haven't yielded any real outcomes more than a year after beginning secret recordings made public last year revealed the police chief and Internal Affairs sergeant and the mayor using racial slurs including the n-word the township quietly paid a whistleblower and his attorney in a settlement to conceal those allegations well now locals are demanding a long promised report on the incident from prosecutors for more I'm joined by Riley Yates reporter for NJ Advanced media who's been covering this story Riley I think a lot of folks in the town especially were expecting some movement at this point what have we heard from prosecutors who are working on a public report and the Attorney General's office well we've heard uh very very little you know it's a year coming in almost three years into this investigation being launched and the AG's office which is now heading the investigation has said a little other than just that the investigation is ongoing and This Promise of oh one day there'll be a thorough and unbiased Report with its findings as one of the activists told me who I spoke to recently God knows what they are doing so at this point um is there any type of public records request that can be submitted to get a little bit more information through your reporting we know people are still really feeling in the dark there me and Sean Sullivan a colleague of mine have filed a number of public records requests over this uh ultimately how we got this was through uh the shoe leather reporting through leaked documents um it doesn't seem like there's a lot of Avenue there but meanwhile it's costing local taxpayers about forty thousand dollars a month for these three suspended officer salaries yeah so break that down for us what do you mean by those costs sure well so there was a four hundred thousand dollar settlement uh that gave the Whistleblower and his attorney that money as well as uh he was allowed to stay on the payroll for uh two years without working so that's another almost three hundred thousand dollars on top of that we have three officers who are suspended with pay uh two of whom were caught on these uh recordings using racial slurs and over the course of this uh it's 32 months I believe uh they've earned about 1.2 million dollars without working have there been any other changes Riley within the department that we know about since the investigation began since those recordings were leaked yeah well we know that the Union County prosecutor's office is now in control of the police department and so there's a uh County detective who is Lee who is now the chief and they've they've been promoting officers and hiring officers and so the town itself seems to appears to be kind of sidelined in terms of who who's coming into the department and who's running the department we also know that the PBA the union that represents the officers has condemned the mayor Sal Bona Corso for these racist comments Riley Yates for us from NJ Advanced media hopefully we'll have more updates soon and we'll definitely be checking back with you thanks so much yeah thank you for your interest in the story [Music]