February 05, 2024
Tariq Zehawi/NorthJersey.com; USA TODAY NETWORK
According to a new ACLU report, New Jersey police stopped Black residents more often for violating the state's stay-at-home order during the COVID-19 pandemic, and penalized them more frequently with citations and arrests than white people. The image above is a file shot from 2023.
New Jersey police were more likely to stop and penalize Black residents for violating the statewide stay-at-home order in 2020 than white residents, according to a new report.
The order, issued by Gov. Phil Murphy at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, closed non-essential business and banned gatherings of any size. It remained in effect from March 21, 2020 to June 9, 2020.
An analysis conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey found racial disparities in both the number of police stops and subsequent arrests and searches tied to the stay-at-home order. The report was limited to incidents in which racial data was recorded.
"Black people were stopped at disproportionately higher rates than white people in every county" where stops were recorded, the civil rights group concluded.
This conclusion is especially stark given population breakdowns in New Jersey. Though Black people comprise only 13.5% of the population, they represented 50% of all individual stops and 81% of all COVID-19 enforcement actions. The ACLU concluded that Black residents were overrepresented in stay-at-home enforcement stops at a rate four times higher than their relative population.
Black residents also were more likely to face consequences for violating the stay-at-home order. Police issued summons to 86.7% of the Black people they stopped, and arrested 10%. Similar statistics were observed across Hispanic populations. About 89% of Hispanic people stopped received a citation, and 10.1% were arrested.
By contrast, police issued summons to about 55% of the white people they stopped, and about 10% were arrested. In all remaining cases, no punitive action was taken, making white residents eight times more likely than their Black peers and 10 times more likely than Hispanic people to face no consequences.
Essex County reported more overall stops than every other county combined with 1,465. The overwhelming majority of those stops occurred in Newark. Somerset and Atlantic counties had the next-highest tallies, though they were comparatively small, at 167 stops in Somerset and 156 in Atlantic. Cape May County reported no stops at all.
There were relatively few stops in Camden (34), Burlington (24) and Gloucester (7) counties. In Camden County, police were 2.5 times more likely to stop Black people than white residents. Racial breakdowns were not available for Burlington and Gloucester counties.
The ACLU of New Jersey characterized the findings as more evidence of existing racial disparities across the state. According to a 2021 report, more than half the New Jersey prison population is Black and the Black-white disparity is larger than 9-to-1. Additionally, the majority of people who are homeless or living in shelters identify as Black or African American.
"The results are dismaying," Karen Thompson, former ACLU-NJ senior staff attorney and author of the report, said in a statement. "COVID pulled off the blinders around these well-familiar inequities that led to communities of color experiencing higher rates of infection and death.
"The results reflect racial inequality in New Jersey that remains entrenched and deadly."
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