Fewer Traffic Stops, More Traffic Accidents in NJ

Title: Fewer Traffic Stops, More Traffic Accidents in NJ.

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we'll hear about developments that raise some serious questions about law enforcement practices on highways in the Garden State. Tracey Tully, who covers New Jersey for the New York Times, has been following a significant story about the New Jersey State Police. She's reported on a sharp drop in traffic enforcement across the state's highways generally and the controversial use of courtesy cards, "special passes given to certain individuals to avoid traffic tickets." Now, with former US Attorney Preet Bharara stepping in to investigate, the question is what's behind this slowdown in enforcement and what does it mean for the state police and the public trust? Tracey is here now to help us break down her reporting, explain the implications, and talk about where the investigation goes from here. Hi, Tracey. Thanks so much for being with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Tracey Tully: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: New Jersey listeners, you can help Tracey report this story of New Jersey's highways and traffic enforcement and the use of courtesy cards. Had your experience of driving New Jersey's roads been noticeably different between the summer of 2023 and the spring of 2024? That's when there was an enforcement slowdown generally, apparently. Have you ever, listeners, used a courtesy card or a Police Benevolent Association card, PBA card, to try to get out of a ticket? Did it work? Any New Jersey state troopers yourselves who want to offer your take on all this, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text.

Tracey, let's start with a drop in traffic enforcement across New Jersey's highways from sometime in 2023 until earlier this year. What was the extent of the so-called slowdown and what precipitated it?

Tracey Tully: Yes, that's right, Brian. It began in the middle of July 2023. Roughly a week after, a report came out from the AG's office that showed that there was racial disparities in traffic enforcement by the state police. That kind of reopened a wound in a department that had been under the oversight of the Justice Department like 20 years ago. Basically, word went out via the union, the main union that covers the troopers, the road troopers, to "be careful," essentially. The number of stops drastically dropped almost immediately. In August they plummeted 81% for all sorts of offenses, including DWI, including speeding, including cell phone use. It continued not quite at the 81% level, but through March of this year, which is a really long time. There are periodic slowdowns that I'm told occur with union disputes, et cetera, but they're rarely that long.

Brian Lehrer: Is it as cynical, in your view, as to say, well, if they're going to tell us to enforce traffic laws equally across racial lines, we're just not going to do it at all?

Tracey Tully: Maybe slightly less cynical. I think their point, the trooper's point, was, why should I expose myself to this outside criticism or also potentially criminal charges by doing this extra stuff?

Brian Lehrer: When they may have thought that they were doing it fairly, being told that they were doing it with racial bias. Paint the picture of what New Jersey's highways looked like during this period compared to normal times. I do see that the slowdown coincided with a rise in motor vehicle accidents, crashes.

Tracey Tully: The peak of the slowdown was August 2023, which is heavy vacation time, the Jersey Shore. The Turnpike and Parkway, our main roads, crashes went up almost immediately by roughly 27%. Now, fatalities did not go up right away, to be clear, but crashes did. The question now is, was there a correlation between those two events?

Brian Lehrer: You do tell one tragic story, at least in your reporting, that of Anthony Zuccarello. Would you tell that briefly here?

Tracey Tully: Yes. Mr. Zuccarello, an Italian immigrant from Queens, sounds, by all indications, a very special person. Was known as Mr. Joe in his neighborhood. He was coming home, so headed back north to Queens from South Jersey, where he'd bought a bunch of plum tomatoes, which he did, I guess, regularly, because he sold the tomatoes at his farm stand in Queens. I think it's Whitestone. He pulls over, for some reason, it's unclear to the family, on the shoulder of the road, and either is struck getting into the cab of the car or the truck or getting out.

It's unclear, but his body is struck by a tractor-trailer and thrust roughly 100 feet into a ravine, but the truck was still running, the lights were on, his cell phone was inside. The kids, the next morning when their dad didn't show up to work, used Life360, a phone app to find him, drive from Queensland to the turnpike in New Jersey and find the truck running, and their dad's nowhere to be found. Get on the phone, try to scramble, figure out where he is. Nearby, some workers were mowing the grass and discovered Mr. Zuccarello.

Brian Lehrer: So horribly sad. Are you attributing that to the slowdown in traffic enforcement at that place at that time?

Tracey Tully: My reporting showed that the family thinks that that 10-hour window when the truck wasn't discovered on the turnpike roadway, even if nothing could have been done to prevent their dad's death, certainly there would have been more time to find the hit-and-run driver.

Brian Lehrer: Now, let's go to the other part of the story in which you reported on allegations of a two-tiered system of justice within the New Jersey State Police which involved the use of "courtesy cards by certain individuals to avoid tickets." What exactly are these cards?

Tracey Tully: I don't have one, but apparently, a lot of people do. They're given out by a variety of policing agencies and their unions. They're very common. I think most people know of them. You could put them in your wallet. If you get pulled over, apparently, you take them out and that helps you out perhaps for some leniency. I think people are very familiar with courtesy cards. What happened was the New Jersey comptroller took a 10-day window, it was a very isolated window in December of 2022, and said, "Let's look at all the stops by the state police that did not result in enforcement." No tickets, no arrest, nothing. They evaluated the body cam footage from those stops and what they learned was that in roughly one-quarter of those stops, the driver either represented themself to be a member of law enforcement or knew somebody in law enforcement or flashed one of these cards. I think what was interesting and new about it was that we didn't quite recognize just how commonplace it was and specific. That's what they looked at, and some of the offense--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, go ahead. You want to finish the thought? I'm sorry.

Tracey Tully: No, it was just, I think also what the video that was released showed that these weren't just like somebody going 10 miles over the speed limit. Some of them were for fairly serious speeds.

Brian Lehrer: They would still be let off the hook. I think we have a courtesy card story on the phones. John in Red Bank here on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: Hi. Excuse me, let me turn off my speaker. This was not during this period that you're referring to. It was actually quite some time ago. I used to live in Harrison, New Jersey. If anybody's familiar with that tiny little town, there's a very, very busy intersection at Frank E Rogers and Harrison Avenue. That's where I used to live. It was very hard to find parking in that area.

One day I was across the street at the intersection, like at the light, and I saw a spot right in front of my building. I looked around and I didn't see anybody. I made a really egregiously bad move, a big U-turn in the middle of this intersection. As soon as I did it, I heard a cop. He must have just come right around the corner. He literally said, "You got to be effing kidding me." He just said, "Pull over." I was like, "Oh, man, I'm busted." This was so obvious. He aked me for my license and registration. I forgot that my mother's ex-husband, who was her husband at the time, was first cousins with the sheriff of Hudson County. They even lived in California. He just happened to have met him and threw me one of those cards. It said that I was an honorary deputy sheriff, if I remember correctly.

As the cop was walking back, he was walking away to check out my stuff, I called out to him, I said, "Oh, sir, I forgot." I gave this to him, and he just stopped in his tracks. He said, "Where'd you get this?" I said, "From Sheriff Cassidy," who I'd never even met. He said, "For what?" I said, "Oh, just for work I've done for him." I just made it up. About five minutes later, he came back, just threw the card in my lap in my car, and just walked away.

Brian Lehrer: Have you felt guilty about it ever since?

John: No, not at all. No, I couldn't believe it. As a matter of fact, it was really bad. I got out of the car. Oh, and I had told him, by the way, that I was lost, that I wasn't sure where I was going, and my license did have a different address on it. Then I just got out of the car, and he was watching me, and I just took out my key, opened the door to my building, waved at him, and just went inside. I felt guilty about that part of it, actually now, but it felt good to get away.

Brian Lehrer: No, thank you for that story. That definitely puts an individual face on it. Here's a question from a listener in a text message because the story that we just heard from John and the stories that you were telling, they land as yes, that's the way it goes around here in New York and New Jersey with a lot of listeners, perhaps. A listener writes, "Courtesy cards are such a New York, New Jersey thing. Nobody in the Midwest, I grew up in Minnesota, has a courtesy card." The listener writes, "Do you happen to know if it is a regional thing around here rather than a national thing?"

Tracey Tully: I have not done a thorough review of every state, but I can tell you that locally, they're very common, so common in New Jersey. This is slightly off-point, but a few years back, they outlawed the distribution of actual badges, which, I guess, was also a thing people-- People that weren't members of law enforcement were flashing these badges and getting out of trouble. They made it illegal to do that, to distribute badges, which at the time-- It showed just how pervasive this kind of leniency was. In terms of the courtesy cards being a New York, New Jersey thing, I can't say that definitively. I do know that they're common. I know they're common in New York as well. There's a recent lawsuit where an officer didn't want to abide by the courtesy card and then he says got punished for doing it.

Brian Lehrer: Governor Murphy has expressed continued faith in the state police leadership despite these revelations. The New Jersey Attorney General has called in former US Attorney Preet Bharara to investigate. What's the scope of his investigation? Is he on both the slowdown and the courtesy cards?

Tracey Tully: No, he is specific to the slowdown. His mandate is broad. He has full authority, I'm told. I believe, although they haven't said a ton about what the nature of the investigation is, it appears to me that the Attorney General's office, led by Matt Platkin, has been aware of the slowdown since at least this March and probably well before that. They've requested a bunch of sophisticated traffic analyses, trying to understand more about the correlation between the uptick in crashes. Now, this year had an uptick in fatalities as well, and the slowdown.

Brian Lehrer: Fatalities were going down nationwide at the same time, by the way, right?

Tracey Tully: That's absolutely right. In fact, in the first half of 2023, we were in New Jersey trending in the right direction as well, and that progress was flat for the rest of 2023, and then in 2024 has gone up. Now, I think they're very cautious about the fact that every accident's unique. It's hard in many cases to understand precisely what causes a fatality or an accident, but certainly, road behavior is a component.

I think that Mr. Bharara will be looking at that and really drilling down on the numbers, as well as interviewing officers, because all this, you have to remember, is all recorded. When you gas up your car, you put in your badge number, they know exactly how much driving was happening or not happening during the slowdown periods, and perhaps people who had trouble with this concept of a slowdown. I don't know that to be true. I don't know if there was internal conversation about whether they should continue doing this for as long as it occurred, but I do know that some top-level commanders were troubled by it and have offered me guidance as I've reported this story.

Brian Lehrer: In our last 15 seconds, as people hit the roads in these holiday weeks that are really starting tonight, so many crashes occur during these holiday weeks. Be careful out there, folks, if you're on the turnpike or the parkway or anywhere in any state on the roads. Are New Jersey State Police back on the job at this point enforcing speeding and things like that?

Tracey Tully: Very much so. The slowdown has ended. The numbers are nearly back up to where they were prior to the slowdown. I think that they're out there. If you need an extra reason, be careful. That's one.

Brian Lehrer: Tracey Tully, who covers New Jersey for the New York Times, thanks so much.

Tracey Tully: Thank you, Brian.

 

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