Current Events > Big investigation on police use of force in NJ

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The single greatest authority granted a police officer is the right to harm another person, and most use it sparingly to protect themselves and the public.

But who's watching the ones who abuse their power? Who's making sure people of all colors, all communities and all backgrounds are treated equally? Who's tracking trends and stopping overly aggressive officers before someone needlessly gets hurt, costing taxpayers big money?

Nearly two decades ago, state officials envisioned a centralized system to track police force and flag bad policies and bad actors. Instead, paper records detailing tens of thousands of violent encounters between police and the public now collect dust in filing cabinets.

The Force Report, a 16-month investigation by NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, found New Jersey's system for tracking police force is broken, with no statewide collection or analysis of the data, little oversight by state officials and no standard practices among local departments.

In an unprecedented undertaking, the news organization filed 506 public records requests and collected 72,607 use-of-force reports. They covered every municipal police department and the State Police from 2012 through 2016, the most recent year of data available. The results are now available at nj.com/force. It is the most comprehensive statewide database of police force ever created and made public in the United States.

Among the findings:

- While using force is a normal and necessary part of policing, NJ Advance Media found glaring disparities across the state that warrant review. Ten percent of officers accounted for 38 percent of all uses of force. A total of 296 officers used force more than five times the state average, according to the database.
- Whenever police use force, the stakes are high. At least 9,302 people were injured by police from 2012 through 2016. At least 4,210 of those were serious enough that the subject was sent to the hospital, though reporting of hospitalization is inconsistent. At least 156 officers put at least one person in the hospital in each of the five years reviewed.
- Statewide, a black person was more than three times more likely to face police force than someone who is white. In Millville in South Jersey, black people faced police force at more than five times the rate of whites. In South Orange, it was nearly nine times. In Lakewood, it was an astronomical 21 times.
- The system for reporting use-of-force by police is a mess. Different departments use different forms, making tracking difficult. Officers self-reported incidents, but thousands of reports were incomplete, illegible, lacking supervisory review or missing altogether. At least 62 times, forms were so sloppy the officers accidentally marked themselves as dead.
- New Jersey fails to monitor trends to flag officers who use disproportionately high amounts of force. The state recently implemented a new early warning system to identify potential problem officers but did not mandate tracking use-of-force trends as a criteria, which experts called a gaping hole in oversight.

"This is the sort of the analysis that should be done from the local to state level," said Rich Rivera, an expert on police practices and former West New York police officer. "Its a watershed moment for policing in New Jersey."

Presented with the news organization's findings, state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal offered no defense of the current system, conceding it needed a complete overhaul and promising to make it happen.