NJ Attorney General's Office dropped stats for civilian complaints against cops in 2021

Amid promises of transparency and accountability, the state Attorney General’s Office this year stopped requiring New Jersey police departments to disclose statistics for new Internal Affairs complaints filed by civilians.

For the first time in more than a decade, the annual IA reports compiled by local police for 2021 no longer contained a column that listed the number of civilian complaints about such things as excessive force, improper arrests, improper searches and officers’ demeanor.

That’s because the Attorney General’s Office changed the forms for the local police departments’ annual IA reports that are made public and started using a new format that omitted the section on civilian complaints.

In Paterson, for example, the old reports showed that civilian complaints for the past decade ranged from 217 in 2011 to 50 in 2020, for an average of 142 complaints per year. The old reports showed that civilian complaints included 362 allegations that Paterson cops used excessive force from 2011 through 2020, for an annual average of 36.

But with the new forms, there are no numbers to compare civilian complaints for Paterson in 2021 with the track record from previous years.

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The change in IA annual report forms came about as part of an August 2020 directive that then-Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said would improve public reporting. Under that directive, the state imposed what some called a groundbreaking new requirement: the annual disclosure of the names, infractions and punishments for all New Jersey police officers who were subject to major discipline.

In response to questions from Paterson Press, the Attorney General’s Office last week said it would revise the annual report forms for 2022 and again make public the numbers of new civilian complaints.

The office also said it is considering releasing additional IA data for its 2021 reports, which officials said may include the numbers for new civilian complaints.

“Statistics on civilian complaints must absolutely be made public,” said Yannick Wood, director of the criminal justice reform program at the Newark-based New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. “The past few years have made more than clear that we need more transparency in law enforcement, not less. Transparency is key to accountability.”

With many aspects of IA operations kept confidential, the annual reports have provided one of the few windows for citizens to examine the way local police departments investigate wrongdoing by their own officers, according to social justice activists and advocates for law enforcement transparency.

Why did the Attorney General’s Office change its annual report forms?

“The new form was drafted with a focus on closed cases, for which there is more data to report, including criminal and disciplinary outcomes,” said Peter Aseltine, a spokesman for the state agency.

“The fact that the form does not include the source of new cases — only closed cases — was a collateral result of that focus on closed cases,” Aseltine added. “Next year’s form will include the number of new cases arising from civilian complaints.”

CJ Griffin, a lawyer who is one of New Jersey’s leading advocates for the disclosure of public documents, said the Attorney General’s Office ought to release reports with the 2021 civilian complaint statistics. Otherwise, she said, there would be a “permanent hole” in the data.

“This glitch is a major problem that must be resolved,” said Griffin, who worked on the lawsuit that produced a New Jersey Supreme Court decision permitting the public release of disciplined cops’ names.

The attorney general's new IA annual report form provides information that was not included in the previous version: a breakdown of closed cases that shows how many of them started as civilian complaints, how many came from other law enforcement officers and how many were anonymous tips.

But Richard Rivera, a former West New York police officer who provides expert testimony in cases about IA issues, said the new information does not go far enough.

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Rivera said the reports ought to break down the number of closed cases in which IA investigators sustained civilians’ complaints and the number of times civilian allegations were not sustained. The current format combines the numbers for outcomes for civilian and cop complaints, he noted.

“Are complaints from cops being handled the same way as complaints from someone who says they got beat up?” asked Rivera, who now serves as police director in Penns Grove in South Jersey.

The former cop said his experience is that IA investigators tend to take complaints from fellow law enforcement officers more seriously than they do those from civilians.

At the same time, Rivera said, civilian complaints often involve more serious allegations, such as violations of people’s civil rights and excessive force, while departmental complaints usually are about rule violations.

The state needs to disclose more data to improve transparency, Rivera said.

Still, the former cop praised the Attorney General’s Office for its decision to revise the IA reports so that civilian complaint statistics once again get made public.

“You have to give them credit for understanding they made a mistake and saying they’re going to fix it,” Rivera said.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ police complaints not included in 2021 IA reports