The Force Report is a continuing investigation of police use of force in New Jersey. Read more from the series or search your local police department and officers in the full the database.
New Jersey’s scattershot system for monitoring how often police officers use painful holds, punches, kicks and other types of force in the line of duty will get an overhaul following an NJ Advance Media investigation.
In a rare joint statement, New Jersey’s attorney general — along with local, county and state law enforcement officials as well as the heads of the Garden State’s major police unions — said they would be “working together to design a new system for obtaining use-of-force data in New Jersey.”
The announcement comes less than a week after the debut of The Force Report, a 16-month investigation by NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, which found major disparities in how police officers use force and who they use it against, as well as paltry oversight and no standard reporting practices.
The news organization filed 506 public records requests and invested more than $30,000 to collect and analyze 72,677 use-of-force reports from 2012 through 2016, the most recent year available. The resulting database, now available at NJ.com/force, includes use-of-force data for every municipal department and the State Police.
Its release prompted calls for reform as well as criticism from some police leaders, who said the data — which was self-reported by law enforcement agencies — did not present a complete picture of the circumstances surrounding use of force.
“The articles make one thing clear: although individual municipalities, departments, or counties may have effective systems in place, our statewide data collection system requires a complete overhaul,” the statement said.
“But it is for this very reason that we also caution reporters and members of the public about relying on data in the Star-Ledger’s database: because our state lacks uniform data collection methods, the records obtained by the Star-Ledger may be inaccurate in some cases and may cause those relying on the data to draw incorrect conclusions about the state of law enforcement in New Jersey.”
In the joint statement, the 12 law enforcement officials noted that in the line of duty, officers are sometimes “confronted with situations where they have little choice but to use force against an individual who is not complying with a lawful order or who poses an immediate threat to themselves or others. Oftentimes, this use of force is a necessary and appropriate response to a dangerous situation.”
NJ Advance Media’s database and accompanying news stories noted the project was not an analysis of police misconduct. Experts interviewed for the series said use of force was one of the most important performance indicators to track in order to spot gaps in training and other problems before they bubble over into injuries and expensive lawsuits.
The news organization’s inquiry also highlighted the daily dangers police face, finding more than 6,500 officers who reported suffering injuries while arresting suspects over the five years analyzed, or about 3.5 times every day statewide.
The investigation found that while the majority of police officers in the state barely used force at all, many departments have individuals who did so far more often than their peers. The data revealed multiple officers who were charged with brutalizing suspects and other types of misconduct would have raised red flags under early warning systems that track how frequently officers use force.
In one case, an officer charged with assaulting a suspect accounted for nearly 20 percent of his entire department’s use of force over two years. Prosecutors only learned about his use-of-force rate after NJ Advance Media compiled the records.
Reporters requested the documents from each department following a state Supreme Court ruling that made use-of-force reports, which record information about force used by police officers on the job, were public records.
Under a 17-year-old state directive, police officers are required to document every instance of force, and local and county officials are charged with keeping tabs on the records. But the investigation found shoddy record-keeping, incomplete and illegible forms and other problems in the trove of documents turned over by police.
In their statement, the law enforcement officials acknowledged they had failed to accurately capture how often police officers were using force and said they were “committed to fixing this problem.”
“It falls to those of us in law enforcement to improve our data collection efforts and ensure that any data we provide the public is both accurate and properly contextualized,” the statement said.
The group announced plans to standardize reporting among police departments, include more information regarding the context of a given incident and to partner with “one or more academic institutions” to make sure the state’s analysis is statistically sound.
“We intend to work quickly to develop new tools, with the goal of completing our work sometime in the new year,” the statement said. “We cannot do our jobs without the confidence of the people we serve, and we are committed to ensuring that the public understands when and under what circumstances New Jersey’s law enforcement officers use force during the course of their public duties.”
The letter was signed by Attorney General Gurbir Grewal and three of his division directors; New Jersey State Police Col. Patrick Callahan; County Prosecutors Association of New Jersey President Francis Koch; New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police President Richard Buzby; New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Colligan; New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police President Robert Fox; State Troopers Superior Officers Association President Rich Roberts; State Troopers Non-Commissioned Officers Association President Pete J. Stilianessis and State Troopers Fraternal Association Vice President Steven Kuhn.
We are continuing to make this dataset better. The numbers in this story were last updated Jan. 8, 2019. See the changes we’ve made here.