TRENTON—Key policies and processes that were put in place to address and prevent discriminatory policing by New Jersey State Police (NJSP) have been “largely performative,” and oversight has been ineffective for years, the Office of the State Comptroller finds.

The NJSP spent ten years under federal supervision, due to allegations of racial profiling on state highways. When the Consent Decree was dissolved in 2009, the State developed a robust system of policies, processes, and oversight to continue the work of eliminating discriminatory policing related to motor vehicle stops. This included the creation of the Office of the Law Enforcement Professional Standards (OLEPS) within the Attorney General’s Office to take over the day-to-day oversight of the NJSP from the federal monitors.

OSC’s report, released today, finds that while the NJSP met regularly and issued 200-plus-paged reports chock full of data, leaders never meaningfully grappled with certain data trends that indicated persistent, adverse treatment of racial and ethnic minority motorists. OLEPS, whose mandate is to “promote” and “ensure” NJSP’s compliance with law and policy, was, at times, thwarted and was too often passive, according to the review.

“The New Jersey State Police is not doing all it can to prevent and detect discrimination on New Jersey highways,” said Acting State Comptroller Kevin Walsh. “The fact that for years the State Police was aware of data showing disparate treatment of people of color on our roads—yet took no action to combat those trends—shows that the problems run deeper than previously realized.”

The Law Enforcement Professional Standards Act of 2009 directs OSC to conduct annual reviews of the NJSP and OLEPS to evaluate their compliance with the law. In July 2023, the Attorney General released an independent report by an outside expert, which found “strong empirical evidence” of discrimination against Black and Latinx/Hispanic motorists. As a result, OSC decided to re-visit and dig deeper into the effectiveness of the NJSP’s risk management process, which includes the Risk Analysis Core Group (RACG), a team of civilian analysts, and the NJSP’s Risk Management Advisory Panel. Made up largely of high-level NJSP officials, the Panel is charged with examining RACG data analyses and determining if, when, and how to intervene to eliminate risks of biased policing.

Interviews and meeting minutes showed that for years, the Panel was repeatedly presented with detailed data-driven analyses showing trends similar to those flagged in the July 2023 report. An in-depth, 85-page December 2021 internal memorandum from OLEPS documented law enforcement patterns that reflected persistent and significant disparities across racial and ethnic groups in motor vehicle stop data over a ten-year period. OLEPS said it repeatedly requested the NJSP to offer any “organizational, environmental, or contextual” information to explain these trends, but most times, the NJSP “provide[d] little or limited responses.”

Worse still, NJSP leaders apparently never took a single vote or recommended a single initiative to address these ongoing, troubling, and well-documented trends, the report said. And the NJSP has refused for years—and continues to refuse—to consider implicit bias as a possible explanation for such data trends even when unable to identify anything else that would credibly explain the data showing disparate treatment of ethnic and racial minority motorists.

OSC’s review also identified several other deficiencies, including:

• In mid-2021, the NJSP’s computer-aided dispatch and records management system was replaced, and the new system routinely failed to accurately record the race and ethnicity of drivers for more than two years. The RACG continued to analyze the data – even while acknowledging in documents that “the true increase or decrease in the race/ethnicity” was unknown. None of this was adequately communicated to the public. The failure of the NJSP to collect accurate data also meant that the NJSP and OLEPS could not conduct the analyses needed to evaluate whether discrimination was occurring.
• OLEPS was remarkably effective at identifying data trends that required examination and explanation from NJSP. But when NJSP failed repeatedly to respond to inquiries with reasonable explanations or at all in some cases, OLEPS tended to acquiesce and did not raise the alarm to the Attorney General. OSC found OLEPS generally approached its role more as a collaborator, rather than an objective oversight entity with significant authority.
• The NJSP reported that since the Consent Decree, of the approximately 60 race-based complaints a year made against troopers, none was deemed substantiated. The NJSP denied OSC access to the investigative files related to complaints so OSC was unable to evaluate the effectiveness of this process.

Both OLEPS and the NJSP impeded OSC’s ability to complete a comprehensive review. Both agencies refused to provide OSC with current information about any changes to policies or practices that were made in response to the July 2023 report, and redacted or wholly withheld an unknown number of documents while asserting, without adequate explanation, that certain information is privileged. NJSP and OLEPS also declined to provide a log of documents they claimed were privileged.

OSC has directed OLEPS and the NJSP to submit a corrective action plan within 90 days. “There needs to be a reset,” said Walsh. “Fifteen years ago, the State committed to using sophisticated data collection and analyses to ensure equitable treatment of all motorists. It’s clear that promise hasn’t been fully realized, and some key safeguards have broken down. The Attorney General’s release of the independent report last summer was an important first step in providing needed transparency, but more work needs to be done to make progress.”

Read the full report. 

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