"Racial Disparities" in NJ State Troopers Force, When Found Out, Almost NoTickets for 8 Months

Lena Zuccarello’s father, Giuseppe Zuccarello, was killed in a hit-and-run crash in New Jersey. He was known as “Mr. Joe” in his Queens neighborhood.Credit...Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times

 By Tracey Tully

 The New York Times

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. 

Troopers who believed that they had been closely adhering to strict rules adopted as a result of the consent decree said the report left them concerned that even small missteps might derail their careers.

“All members are reminded of the dangers of conducting motor vehicle stops,” warned an internal memo sent to troopers by their union president, Wayne D. Blanchard.

“Unfortunately, we must also contend with internal and external entities who seemingly wish to see us fail,” he added. “Whatever their motivation, one thing is certain: Every stop and enforcement action you take will be highly scrutinized.”

 

Citations issued by New Jersey State Police

The N.J. State Police issued far fewer citations between late July 2023 and March 2024 than they had in years past.

Source: New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic SafetyBy Leanne Abraham

Troopers across the state who typically issued more than 6,000 tickets a week wrote 1,205 the first week of August. The slowdown continued, largely unabated, through the busy travel holidays of Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve before finally showing signs of ending in late March 2024. 

Troopers continued to respond to crashes and emergency calls.

But proactive traffic enforcement plunged by more than 60 percent from August through March, compared with that same period the year before, according to interviews with more than 20 people familiar with the precipitous decline in stops, as well as data obtained from the State Police and the Division of Highway Traffic Safety through public records requests.

Many days, troopers pulled over fewer than 50 motorists along the length of the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, a well-traveled, 320-mile network of highways where, before the slowdown, an average of 597 drivers were stopped daily, an internal State Police memo shows.

Troopers statewide wrote just 690 speeding tickets in August 2023, down from the 5,343 summonses issued in August the year before. Citations for cellphone use fell that month to 30, down from 479 in August 2022. Drunken driving summonses dropped to 231, from 496.

And motor vehicle accidents began to climb sharply.

On the turnpike and the parkway, the state’s main highways, crashes increased by 27 percent in August 2023 as tickets for speeding dropped to 437, down from 2,066 the year before. The number of accidents increased, year over year, for six of the next seven months. 

Statewide, crashes on roads patrolled by the State Police jumped 18 percent between January and March.

The Garden State Parkway near the Great Egg Toll Plaza in Egg Harbor Township, N.J.

Many days, State Police troopers pulled over fewer than 50 motorists along the length of the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway.Credit...Ben Fogletto/The Press of Atlantic City via AP

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

But help was nowhere to be found the night Giuseppe Zuccarello was killed.

Mr. Zuccarello’s truck was filled with bushels of fresh plum tomatoes for his farm stand in Queens when he pulled over on the shoulder of the turnpike in August 2023. The truck was still running the next morning when his son Louis Zuccarello found it there, abandoned, and began making calls, frantically trying to find his father.

 

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He was standing nearby when workers mowing the grass discovered his 78-year-old father’s lifeless body 100 feet away in a shallow ravine. It had been thrust there by a hit-and-run driver who has never been found.

By that point, according to prosecutors, it was roughly 10 hours after the deadly crash.

The time lapse “drives us nuts,” said Peter Zuccarello, 52, the eldest child of Giuseppe, an Italian immigrant. 

Other families who lost loved ones in crashes during the slowdown said that knowledge of the reduced enforcement only compounded their grief, even though they had no indication that police intervention might have changed the outcome.

“It’s not right,” said Susan Kontos, whose 24-year-old daughter, Sabrina, died after the car she was driving collided with another vehicle on the Garden State Parkway on Aug. 6, 2023, three weeks into the slowdown. Two of the car’s three passengers were also killed.

“We pay their salaries,” Ms. Kontos said of the troopers. “They need to enforce the laws.”

The number of traffic fatalities did not increase immediately. By the end of 2023, there had been 43 fewer deaths on roads patrolled by troopers than the year before, as traffic fatalities throughout New Jersey fell by 12 percent.

By early 2024, however, that hopeful trend had begun to show signs of erosion.

Traffic deaths during the first six months of the year climbed by 23 percent, even as fatalities fell by 3 percent across the country — progress that the U.S. transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has hailed as a sign that roadway safety is slowly returning to prepandemic norms.

Among researchers, there is no consensus about the precise correlation between traffic fatalities and the total number of motor vehicle stops made by the police. Every accident is unique, and there is no indication that any of the 104 deaths that occurred between August 2023 and March 2024 on roads patrolled by state troopers were directly related to the slowdown. 

Jeffrey Michael, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who spent 30 years at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, called the study of traffic safety “very complicated,” but said that there was no doubt that enforcement plays a crucial role.

“If you cut back noticeably on traffic enforcement, road behavior is going to get worse,” Mr. Michael said. “So you would expect, consequently, speeds to go up and fatalities to go up.”

Assessing whether the slowdown affected roadway safety is a component of the attorney general’s investigation, according to a document that outlined the scope of one portion of the inquiry.

Mr. Zuccarello’s family does not need a study to understand the risks. His four children have long wondered how the police for 10 hours failed to notice a visibly damaged 25-foot truck, with its lights on, stranded on the side of the road.

In the months after the crash, the family desperately sought information about the hit-and-run driver. They offered a $25,000 reward and hired a private investigator. Then they increased the reward to $50,000 and paid for two billboards on the turnpike that asked motorists to report anything they might have seen. 

Giuseppe Zuccarello’s family paid for billboards that said: “$50,000 REWARD, Fatal Hit and Run.”

Giuseppe Zuccarello’s family, desperate for information about the crash that killed him, offered a reward advertised on billboards.Credit...Zuccarello family

Slowdowns, or periods of so-called de-policing, are not novel. One of the longest recorded slowdowns was in 1997 in New York City, when, according to one analysis, officers over nine months wrote 26 percent fewer tickets during a contract dispute. In the month after George Floyd was murdered in 2020, the Minneapolis police made an estimated 76 percent fewer stops.

But slowdowns rarely grip an entire state, or are permitted to last as long.

Col. Patrick J. Callahan, the State Police superintendent, said he had made efforts to boost morale and address troopers’ concerns in a blitz of station visits during the late summer of 2023. “I viewed it as my responsibility to engage directly with as many troopers as possible, to hear their concerns, and to remind them of their vital role in upholding our core values of honor, duty and fidelity,” he said in a statement.

His aides also provided 12 years of data showing that the number of roadway fatalities sometimes went up even in years when motor vehicle stops increased significantly, suggesting there was little correlation between enforcement and traffic deaths.

Asked about the slowdown, leaders of the three labor unions that represent roughly 3,200 sworn State Police officers all pointed to the critical report by Matthew B. Ross, a Northeastern University professor hired in 2021 by a former attorney general to review 6.2 million traffic stops troopers made between 2009 and 2021. 

The analysis concluded that troopers were “engaged in enforcement practices that result in adverse treatment toward minority motorists.”

That report, union leaders said, left troopers uncertain about how to do their work.

Steven Kuhn, first vice president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association, said the union “would never advise anyone to stop anything.”

“We put a message out that said: ‘Just be safe on this patrol. Just be safe.’ And however that needs to be interpreted, that’s probably what happened,” Trooper Kuhn said.

He and Frank Serratore, president of the Superior Officers Association, which represents lieutenants and captains, said top State Police commanders fully supported them.

“One-hundred percent,” Captain Serratore said.

“If you’re a colonel in the State Police and you don’t know what this attorney general is deeming as right or wrong, how can you feel comfortable sending a trooper out to do a regular patrol — where he or she doesn’t know the outcome of what they’re doing — even if they have good faith in everything they’re doing?” Trooper Kuhn said. 

Trooper Blanchard noted that the job entails more than traffic enforcement. As traffic enforcement declined, he said, other police work that is harder to quantify likely increased. “It’s a day’s work for a day’s pay, right?” he said.

A State Police spokesman said that Colonel Callahan’s visits to stations and appearances at supervisor training sessions indicated that “he did not endorse any decrease in traffic enforcement.”

Union leaders said that was not the message the rank-and-file heard.

The blue and yellow logo of the New Jersey State Police on the side of a vehicle.

The president of the troopers’ union, Wayne D. Blanchard, said other types of enforcement likely increased while traffic stops were down.Credit...Aaron M. Sprecher via AP

The day the Ross report became public, Mr. Platkin, the attorney general, announced a pilot program to address the disparate enforcement patterns.

Backlash from State Police leaders was so intense that the plan was never implemented.

Still, tension between troopers and state and federal watchdogs responsible for monitoring their performance only intensified. 

A young trooper who later admitted punching a handcuffed Black woman in the face was arrested in November 2023. The next month, a report by the acting state comptroller, Kevin Walsh, exposed damning flaws in taxpayer-funded police training sessions that some troopers attended. The Justice Department had begun interviewing troopers for an investigation tied to a spate of lawsuits from Black, Latino, female and gay troopers, who have laid out claims of systemic employment discrimination.

And in October, the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. called for the governor, Philip D. Murphy, to replace Colonel Callahan and his top deputy, Lt. Col. Sean Kilcomons, who has been accused in a lawsuit of making vile comments about a high-ranking Black major.

Mr. Murphy’s spokesman, Mahen Gunaratna, said that the governor considered public safety “an issue of utmost seriousness” and that he continued to have confidence in State Police leadership.

“He is concerned by allegations of decreased traffic enforcement and expects our traffic laws to be appropriately enforced,” Mr. Gunaratna added.

In the year since Mr. Zuccarello died, his children have struggled to run the family store without their father, who was known for working 12-hour days and making regular summertime treks to South Jersey to buy freshly picked tomatoes. 

Last month, the extended Zuccarello family gathered on Long Island for Thanksgiving.

They left an empty chair at the table.

“It still feels just impossible,” Peter Zuccarello said.