This report is the product of an independent analysis of traffic stops made by the New Jersey State Police between the years of 2009 and 2021. Dr. Matthew B. Ross was retained by the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General in 2021 to conduct this study. The Office of Public Integrity and Accountability (NJ-OPIA) requested that the analysis focus on the central question of whether there was disparate treatment on the part of the State Police towards underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. The data was provided by the New Jersey Office of Law Enforcement Professional Standards (NJ-OLEPS). The analytical sample consisted of 6,177,109 traffic stops, with 60.52 percent 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 non-White motorists stopped by NJ-SP increased from 35.34% in 2009 to 46.28% in 2021. The overarching finding from the analysis is that there was extremely strong evidence of a large and persistent disparity both in the decision to stop as well as the decision to engage in post-stop enforcement like search, vehicular exits, use of force, and arrest. In general, the results were estimated with a very high degree of statistical confidence, survived multiple robustness tests, and were found across most years and troops/stations. Following best practices, this study applies an ensemble of the most reliable statistical tests available in the scientific literature.