Civil liberties group calls on state AG to investigate race gap in minor crimes
TRENTON -- The New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is calling on the state attorney general to investigate racial disparities in low-level offense arrests at local police departments across the Garden State.
That request is one of several recommendations in a new report that found black and hispanic people were between two and 10 times more likely to be arrested for petty crimes than white offenders in four New Jersey cities.
The ACLU report, released Monday, examined arrest data from 2005 to 2013 in Jersey City, New Brunswick, Elizabeth and Millville for four minor offenses: marijuana possession, disorderly conduct, defiant trespass and loitering.
"Whether the cities were large or small, or in north, central or southern New Jersey, the data revealed a clear pattern of people of color bearing the brunt of police practices," Udi Ofer, the head of the ACLU-NJ, said in a phone interview.
The ACLU said its findings suggest a much larger trend, recommending a state inquiry into racial disparity in arrests, more local oversight, less emphasis on arresting people for minor offenses and improved data collection, among other reforms.
The report comes amid a climate of scrutiny of widely-practiced police tactics, including the so-called broken windows theory, which posits enforcement of minor offenses prevents more serious crimes, and the practice of stop-and-frisk, which has been criticized in New York City, Newark and across the U.S.
"There are real human consequences to broken windows policing, and those consequences are borne disproportionately by communities of color," Ofer said.
New Jersey also has a troubled history of racial profiling. Two of its largest law enforcement agencies have been subject to monitoring by the U.S. Justice Department for discriminatory policing -- the State Police from 1999 to 2009, and more recently the Newark Police Department, which is in the early stages of federal oversight.
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Another ACLU report last year found Newark's stop-and-frisk policies overwhelmingly targeted black residents. The most recent report does not include arrest data for Newark, the state's largest city. Ofer said that while Newark's problems were well documented, more scrutiny is needed elsewhere.
"There is no dispute any longer that policing in Newark has been broken," Ofer said. "We wanted to begin that conversation in other parts of New Jersey, because this is not a problem unique to Newark.
The report found that black residents were 2.6 times more likely to be arrested than white residents in New Brunswick, 3.2 times more likely in Elizabeth and 5.6 times more likely in Millville. Officials in those cities either said they had not yet read the report or did not respond to messages seeking comment.
The state's second-largest city, Jersey City, had the greatest disparity in arrest data among the four the group examined. On average, black residents there were nearly five times as likely to be arrested than white residents, and in 2013 that gap grew to 10 times as likely, the report found.
Officials there were quick to point out the ACLU study included data up to 2013, the year Mayor Steve Fulop and Public Safety Director Jim Shea took office. They claimed reforms enacted during their tenure would help close the racial gap, though more recent arrest data was not immediately available.
In an interview, Shea said he had not yet reviewed the report in detail, but the findings were not surprising to anyone involved in law enforcement.
Shea, a former deputy chief in the New York City Police Department, said that the crime epidemic of the 1990s led many police departments to embrace aggressive enforcement of minor offenses in order to tamp down the rate of serious crimes like robbery, assault and murder.
"Up until 2012, (the broken windows theory) is pretty much gospel in American policing," Shea said. "Around 2013, you start to have a much larger conversation about the damage caused (to minority communities)."
Ofer said the ACLU report "discredits broken windows policing" by showing it disproportionally targets minorities, locking them into a cycle of incarceration.
The report focused on the four minor offenses, the group said, because
individuals charged with low-level offenses are generally not involved in serious crimes." Individuals charged with minor offenses in addition to more serious crimes like robbery or assault were left out.
Another recent study by the Misdemeanor Justice Project at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that as stop-and-frisk practices have fallen out of favor in New York City, law enforcement actions for those types of minor offenses have also declined.
Shea said that since 2013, police in Jersey City have "de-emphasized" the types of minor offenses scrutinized in the ACLU study, focusing more on "targeted enforcement" of more serious crimes.
"I guess it's a fishing line as opposed to a fishing net," he said.
The ACLU report also criticized police agencies for shoddy record keeping, claiming that arrest data was inconsistent and in some cases non-existent. A fifth city, Asbury Park, was "unable to produce records that could be properly analyzed" and dropped from the study, the report claims.
In Elizabeth, where more than half of residents are hispanic, officials could only provide arrest data broken down by black or white, the report found, making it difficult to determine whether hispanics were disproportionately targeted.
The group called upon acting Attorney General John Hoffman, New Jersey's chief law enforcement officer, to "set uniform guidelines" for arrest data reporting.
Paul Loriquet, a spokesman for Hoffman, said his office "received the report, and we'll assess it." He declined to comment further.
Police departments around the U.S. have struggled to strike a balance between keeping crime rates low and respecting civil liberties. Shea recalled a recent community meeting in Greenville, a high-crime section of Jersey City, where residents complained police were not maintaining enough of a presence in the neighborhood.
"They're worried about people loitering, trespassing, smoking marijuana," he said. "Pretty much the things (the ACLU study is) complaining about."
S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
