Blizzard Of 'Tough On Crime' Bills In NJ Is Bad News, Advocates Say

NEW JERSEY — The public perception is clear, experts say: Americans think crime is on the rise. But according to social justice advocates in New Jersey, the blizzard of “tough on crime” laws that have recently been proposed in the state won’t actually make your neighborhood any safer – although they will put a whole bunch of people in jail.

Earlier this week, the ACLU of New Jersey and more than two dozen other New Jersey-based groups submitted a letter to the members of the state Senate and Assembly, “strongly opposing” a wave of legislation that they say will “roll back successful criminal legal reforms and lead to the mass incarceration spike seen in the 1980 and 1990s.”

Read the full letter here.

“Crime rates from the last few years are still being analyzed and the full picture is not complete; however, regardless of what they show, any trends must be analyzed within a wide historic lens,” advocates wrote.

“While there have been increases in some types of crime nationally and in [our state], New Jersey’s crime rate increase remains smaller than the national average,” they continued. “What this shows is that too often, fears about public safety are not grounded in accurate, complete data.”

The ACLU-NJ held up a proposed law that seeks to roll back bail reform in the state – sponsored by two Democrats – as an example of “tough on crime” legislation that isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

According to the ACLU, if the bill is passed, it will “lead to an explosion in the number of presumptively innocent people jailed before trial, fuel mass incarceration, and exacerbate the already stark racial disparities in New Jersey’s prisons and jails.”

“Here are the facts: ‘tough on crime’ policies aren't based on evidence, data or justice,” the ACLU-NJ said. “They rely on biased and inaccurate claims, as well as long-exploited racial tropes, for political gains at an enormous human cost. Sadly, candidates, police, and politicians are exploiting concerns about safety to undermine proven, evidence-based policies that would address these very concerns.”

“Instead of bringing back tough on crime bills that have already demonstrably failed, we must do the hard work of having honest and open discussions about why people are committing certain crimes instead of more unnecessary criminalization,” the group added.

• See related article: It's Time To Finally End New Jersey's Drug War, ACLU Says (Video)

THE POWER OF PUBLIC PERCEPTION

A recent Gallup Poll reported that a “record-high” 56 percent of U.S. residents think that crime rates have gotten worse in their local area over the past year. Currently, 73 percent of Republicans say crime in their area has risen, while 51 percent of independents and 42 percent of Democrats say the same, pollsters said.

That includes New Jersey, where lawmakers have been launching a flurry of bills aimed at cracking down on crime, including car thefts. Read More: Democrat, GOP Lawmakers Say NJ Car Thefts Are An 'Epidemic'

New Jersey officials reported 14,320 car thefts in 2021 — a 22 percent increase over the prior year. So far this year, 13,849 vehicle thefts have been reported, state police said in November. Read More: 14K Cars Stolen From NJ Streets This Year, Murphy Demands Action

State police have also said they are taking a close look at what they call New Jersey's “CorrStat Region,” a 19-mile stretch of Rt. 21 that connects Paterson and Newark. There are 80 northeast New Jersey towns in that CorrStat Region, including Newark. In 2021, the CorrStat Region accounted for 63 percent of the state's total motor vehicle thefts. And car theft in that region is up 31 percent so far in 2022, police said. Read More: Car Theft Punishments May Increase In NJ Under New Bills

However, the reporting of crime statistics is a notoriously subjective process, which is easily manipulated depending on how you define “crime,” the location and the period of time you’re analyzing, The Marshall Project recently noted:

“Nationally, what we know from both FBI data reported by police, and from an annual federal survey that asks about 240,000 people whether they personally were victims of crime, is that violent and property crimes have both been on a steady decline since the early 1990s. Murders did increase at a troubling and dramatic rate nationwide in 2020, and have remained elevated, but murder is the least common form of violent crime. Overall, violent crime has remained roughly static since 2010, following decades of decline.”

Other reports have claimed that the overall crime rate has fallen over recent years.

According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, sexual violence has fallen by half in the last 20 years (the organization notes that there is still much work to be done, with someone in the U.S. being sexually assaulted every 68 seconds).

In 2020, FiveThirtyEight reported that Americans are “terrible” at estimating their risk of being victimized by crime:

“Crime rates do fluctuate from year to year. In 2020, for example, murder has been up but other crimes are in decline so that the crime rate, overall, is down. And the trend line for violent crime over the last 30 years has been down, not up. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the rate of violent crimes per 1,000 Americans age 12 and older plummeted from 80 in 1993 to just 23 in 2018. The country has gotten much, much safer, but, somehow, Americans don’t seem to feel that on a knee-jerk, emotional level.”

So what about New Jersey?

A criminal defense attorney’s office recently took a look at national FBI data, finding that New Jersey had the fifth-lowest rate of violent crime in the United States behind Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut.

On average, across the nation, 398.5 violent crimes were committed per 100,000 people in 2020. In New Jersey, that rate was just 195.3 violent crimes per 100,000 people, the Law Office of Jorge Vela reported.

Some Garden State cities and towns have reported statistics in line with these findings.

In 2021, Newark’s former public safety director said that during the last three years, the city has seen the lowest number of murders in six decades. Violent crime ticked upward in New Jersey’s largest city last year and auto thefts were up 18 percent – due largely to “drivers leaving their vehicles running and unattended.” But property crimes were down in every other category, with drops in burglaries, thefts from auto and other thefts. Read More: Violent Crime Up In Newark For 2021, But Down Over 3-Year Period

Nearby in Essex County, West Orange officials announced earlier this year that the crime rate has reached a 41-year low, crediting some of the gains to more “community policing” and a new program, where trained mental health clinicians are called upon to respond alongside officers on certain crisis calls, which may not be criminal in nature. Read More: West Orange Crime Rate Hits 41-Year Low, Police Say

‘HYSTERICAL PROPOSALS’: NJ ADVOCATES SPEAK

Several social justice advocates in New Jersey weighed in on the debate earlier this week. They included:

Jim Sullivan, Deputy Policy Director of the ACLU of New Jersey – “Lawmakers must remember that in 2014, New Jersey voters took decisive action to virtually end cash bail and replace it with a system that has been held out nationwide as ‘a model for other states.’ If passed, attempts to roll back bail reform would lead to an explosion in the number of innocent people jailed before trial, exacerbate mass incarceration, and worsen the stark racial disparities in New Jersey’s prisons and jails. Our sense of security has been threatened by incidents we see in the 24/7 news or may have experienced personally, but these ‘tough-on-crime' policies aren't based on evidence, data, or justice. They rely on biased and inaccurate claims, as well as long-exploited racial tropes, for political gains at an enormous human cost. People across the political spectrum want an approach to the criminal legal system that is smart on crime, fair, and racially just. Now is the time for New Jersey to build on its historic decarceration and decriminalization efforts - not roll them back.”

Reverend Charles Boyer, Founding Director of Salvation and Social Justice – “New Jersey needs a legislature that responds to the needs and concerns of communities with data informed legislation rather than legislation that continues to be driven by punitive and draconian narratives. The facts are clear, that so called ‘tough-on-crime’ bills such as S3347 neither prevent crime nor keep communities safer. What it will do is continue to usher a disproportionate number of Black bodies through the prison industrial complex and further exacerbate the stark racial disparities that already exist in the state.”

Amy Torres, Executive Director of New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice – “Tough-on-crime proposals serve only one purpose: to distract the public. Hysterical proposals like the ones recently introduced in the legislature are designed to distract from the failure to pass transformative policies that build the social safety net. Safer communities are ones where every person has access to the programs, services, and rights that empower and protect them. New Jersey is more diverse than ever before, but we also remain as divided as ever by racial disparities that will only deepen with harmful proposals like these. The State has a responsibility to invest in its people and not indulge the racist hysterias that have birthed these policies.”

Alex Staropoli, Director of Advocacy and Communications of Fair Share Housing Center – “Real community safety comes from investments in housing, healthcare, food, and education. Bringing back misguided ‘tough-on-crime' policies from our past will only harm communities of color and further entrench racial disparities that are already so problematic in our state. Now is not the time to go backwards. We should instead be working towards a future that includes real solutions to the problems our communities are facing.”

Marleina Ubel, Policy Analyst and State Policy Fellow of New Jersey Policy Perspective – “These bills are not grounded in data, but rather, are a knee-jerk response that will only serve to criminalize more people. Equating motor vehicle theft to violent crime is reminiscent of the kind of 'tough-on-crime' approach that exacerbates mass incarceration while failing to actually get to the root of the problem.”

Zayid Muhammad, Organizer of N-CAP and NJ-CAP – “We demand that the Legislature unite to move forward and continue the work of criminal justice and police reform, rather than backslide and criminalize community members. Legislators stood up and committed to public safety change that helps community after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and we call on you to dare to work together with us for real police and criminal legal system reform.”

Yannick Wood, Director of the Criminal Justice Reform Program of New Jersey Institute for Social Justice – “We urge the state not to resort back to failed knee-jerk policies that despite being promoted as ‘tough on crime,’ in fact do not reduce crime in the long-term but only perpetuate the vicious cycle of over-incarceration and recidivism, especially for Black and other communities of color. New Jersey needs to build on its successful track record of bail reform and invest in communities and programs that get at root causes if we’re ever going to break this cycle and achieve lasting success. New Jersey has an opportunity to creatively and courageously lead; let’s not squander it.”

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