Introduction
In November 2021, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office of Public Integrity and Accountability (NJ-OPIA) engaged the author of this study for the purpose of conducting an independent analysis of traffic stops made by the New Jersey State Police (NJ-SP). Based on the author’s extensive experience working
with state and local policymakers to develop early warning systems for identifying police disparities, the NJ OPIA requested that the analysis focus on the central question of whether there was disparate treatment on the part of NJ-SP towards racial and ethnic minorities.2 After cleaning and linking all of the raw data provided by the New Jersey Office of Law Enforcement Professional Standards (NJ-OLEPS), the analytical sample used in this analysis consisted of 6,177,109 traffic stops made by NJ-SP from 2009 to 2021. In the full analytical sample, 60.52 percent of traffic stops were made of White non-Hispanic motorists while 18.8 percent were Black/African-American and 13.44 percent were Hispanic/Latinx. The overall volume of minority motorists stopped by NJ-SP increased from 35.34 percent in 2009 to 46.28 percent in 2021
www.nj.gov/oag/newsreleases23/2023-0711_NJSP_Traffic_Stop_Analysis.pdf
Future of Policing 