A New Jersey Senate committee has advanced a bill that would bar law enforcement agencies from looking at arrest numbers when evaluating an officer’s overall performance or making decisions about whether to promote or fire an officer.
The Senate Law and Public Safety Committee voted 6-0 to advance Senate Bill No. 1322. The measure is a companion to Assembly Bill 4058.
Under current state law, local and state law enforcement agencies cannot mandate officers meet arrest and citation quotas. However, agencies may consider arrest and citation data as part of an officer’s performance evaluation.
“We have seen for too long the way that perceived or real efforts by some officers to achieve ‘quotas’ in order to attain higher evaluations through the sheer number of arrests and citations can have a detrimental effect on our communities,” InsiderNJ.com quoted state Sen. Shirley Turner, D-Hunterdon/Mercer, a sponsor of the legislation, as saying. “Additionally, officers are all too often pressured to write more tickets to increase revenue and help municipalities balance their budgets.
“These policies, whether written or unwritten, have fallen hardest upon low-income individuals and people of color, who are arrested and ticketed at much higher proportions than others,” Turner added. “As we work to advance issues of social justice and create a more equitable criminal justice system, we hope this bill can put an end to these ill-conceived practices once and for all.”
The bill allows agencies to collect arrest and citation data and forward that information to the state police superintendent for use in the Uniform Crime Report. However, the committee added an amendment to bar departments from posting arrest numbers in common areas of police stations or barracks to reduce the potential for competition among officers.
“We applaud Senator Shirley Turner on this piece of legislation that will benefit all Law Enforcement Officers in New Jersey,” Lawrence Township PBA Local #119 said in a Facebook post. “… In this day and age we need to be able to do our jobs without the pressure of ‘stats’ being used against us.”
