The New Jersey State Police’s history of racial profiling, a decades-long injustice that’s been the focus of lawsuits, federal monitoring and legislative reviews is not over, a new state watchdog report says, echoing the recent findings made by several others.
The State Police failed to consider implicit bias as a cause for racial disparities in motor vehicle stops, the state comptroller’s office now says, the same practice officials acknowledged 25 years ago after troopers shot at Black and Hispanic men in a van following a traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The state attorney general’s office also did not sufficiently oversee the State Police, including a special management review team set up after the U.S. Justice Department intervened to end racial profiling by state troopers.