State officials initially wanted police agencies to report 20 years of disciplinary data, but unions objected. The public loses, reformers say. (Photo by New Jersey Monitor)
When state public safety officials ordered law enforcement agencies in 2020 to publicly identify officers guilty of serious misconduct, they wanted departments to disclose 20 years of data, aiming to build the community’s trust and alert officers that their actions were not above public scrutiny.
“For decades, New Jersey has not disclosed the identities of law enforcement officers who commit serious disciplinary violations,” then-Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said at the time. “Today, we end the practice of protecting the few to the detriment of the many. Today, we recommit ourselves to building a culture of transparency and accountability in law enforcement.”
But after police unions fought the issue in court, the Attorney General’s Office quietly caved, retracting their requirement that a handful of state agencies retroactively report the names of officers who faced major discipline.
The state police alone had nearly 500 cases of major discipline over the prior two decades, so the decision ensured that hundreds and potentially thousands of cases of past police misconduct would remain hidden — including those of officers still on the job today. Now, the public can get that information just back to 2021, with the latest data released this week.
Jason Williams is a criminologist and justice studies professor at Montclair State University. He regards the state’s failure to require retroactive reporting of police disciplinary cases as part of a larger pattern of policymakers’ long-standing reluctance to embrace wide-reaching policing reforms, such as making all disciplinary records public and appointing independent oversight.
Last month’s death of Sonya Massey, who called 911 to report a possible prowler and was gunned down in her Illinois home by the responding officer, shows why the public should know the full histories of officers tasked with keeping their communities safe, Williams added. The officer who killed Massey had hopscotched around several agencies in just a few years, racking up multiple disciplinary infractions, according to CBS News.
Independent oversight and citizen involvement in watchdogging the police are key to ensuring accountability and building public trust, he added.
“I know that this particular A.G. is really trying to move forward in a positive direction in terms of transparency,” Williams said. “But it’s very important, given the climate we’re in right now regarding policing with the Massey case and that particular officer’s disciplinary history, that we go the extra mile.”
When Grewal issued the directive in June 2020 mandating disciplinary disclosures, he ordered the state police, the Juvenile Justice Commission, and the attorney general’s criminal justice division to identify officers who had been disciplined in the prior 20 years, citing the state’s lack of any police licensing system. Revealing two decades of disciplinary data would allow the public, policymakers, and police brass to track repeat offenders across agencies, Grewal wrote. Citizens also would then be able to hold agencies accountable for their response to patterns of discipline, he added.
But police unions argued that officers relied on the promise of confidentiality in resolving disciplinary disputes. Their challenge ended up before the New Jersey Supreme Court, which in June 2021 upheld the state’s right to publicly identify officers with serious discipline — but not retroactively.
The justices booted the case back to lower courts for closer review of the past discipline issue. But Attorney General Matt Platkin in November 2022 issued a 94-page directive on transparency in internal affairs investigations that retracted the mandated 20-year lookback in a one-sentence footnote. Public reporting of past discipline “was never implemented due to litigation,” the footnote reads.
Platkin’s office didn’t respond to questions this week about that decision. Lawmakers in 2022 acted to require police licensing statewide, and Gov. Phil Murphy signed that law in July 2022.
Platkin’s transparency directive led to his office creating a publicly accessible internal affairs database, which also was updated with 2023 data this week. But neither that, nor the major discipline database, links to original internal affairs paperwork or reports.
That’s a problem, according to attorney and transparency advocate CJ Griffin. Griffin has represented the New Jersey Monitor in various legal matters.
“The issue with the entire report is there’s no way to fact-check it,” Griffin said. “They can leave out anything they want, and we’d never know.”
There’s also no analysis — and there should be, added Richard Rivera, who is director of the Penn Grove Police Department and who supports reforms to the criminal justice system.
“This isn’t a report, it’s not a review, it’s not a study. This is a list. This is a scarlet letter. That’s all this is. There’s no thinking involved. There’s no analysis. The A.G. didn’t put together statistics. This doesn’t tell us comparisons from one year to the next. It’s just minimum, plain vanilla check boxes that they leave to public interpretation and speculation,” Rivera said.
The attorney general’s office requires agencies to compile annual executive summaries and submit them to the attorney general’s office for their review, he added.
“We’re required to come up with our own statistics, to analyze them, to rationalize what is taking place, to understand the trends, and then report that on an annual basis. But there’s a double standard here. They slap together a report, 375 pages, seven months late, and we’re all supposed to scratch our heads and figure out what it means,” Rivera said.
The public is entitled to see internal affairs reports of officers in the major discipline database under the common law right of access, Griffin said. But, she added, “Why not automatically put all the reports into a database so they don’t have to be requested and we get the full story up front?”
State lawmakers have introduced bills every legislative session since at least 2020 that would require police disciplinary records to be public, including again in the current session, but they have not gotten much traction in the Statehouse.
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