For 8 Months, Traffic Enforcement on New Jersey's Highways Plummeted

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/nyregion/new-jersey-state-police-slowdown.html

For 8 Months, Traffic Enforcement on New Jersey’s Highways Plummeted
After a report found racial bias in traffic enforcement, state troopers were warned by a union leader that “every stop” would be scrutinized. They started making fewer.
By Tracey Tully
Dec. 8, 2024, 3:00 a.m. ET

In July 2023, New Jersey state troopers who patrol the state’s busiest highways and remote rural roads suddenly began writing far fewer traffic enforcement tickets. The next month, citations for speeding, drunken driving, cellphone use and other violations plummeted by 81 percent across the state compared with the year before.

The sweeping slowdown in enforcement continued for more than eight months and coincided with an almost immediate uptick in motor vehicle crashes, records obtained by The New York Times show.

The duration and scope of the slowdown are unrivaled in modern policing, according to academics who study traffic data and law enforcement tactics in the United States. The reduction in traffic enforcement within the State Police is now the subject of a criminal investigation by the New Jersey attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, according to five people with knowledge of the inquiry who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The drastically reduced levels of enforcement began the week after the release of a report that found glaring racial disparities in road safety enforcement. The analysis evaluated more than a decade’s worth of State Police traffic stops and reopened a stubborn wound in a department that spent a decade under the control of a federal consent decree because of similar patterns of bias.

It is unclear how troopers spent their time during the months when traffic enforcement — a primary focus of the job — slumped.

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