There's a brand-new legislative push to have all fatal police-involved shootings investigated by the New Jersey state attorney general. Such a law is overdue.
It's significant that state Senate President Stephen Sweeney held a press conference the other day to endorse a mandate that the New Jersey Attorney General's office be the first investigative unit to probe police-involved fatal shootings.
While we haven't seen a specific legislative proposal from Sweeney, D-Gloucester, it's encouraging that the Senate president publicly favors removing these important matters from the clutches of county prosecutors who -- in fact, or based on widespread community belief -- can be too cozy with the local officers they're called upon to investigate.
The controversial deaths this month of black men who were shot by officers in Baton Rouge, La., and, days later, outside St. Paul, Minn., may have have given Sweeney the political courage or political cover to speak out. We'd be remiss if we didn't also mention the recent fatal shootings of officers in Dallas and, this past weekend in Baton Rouge, by suspects who apparently targeted police in what was a disgustingly violent, idiotic response to the earlier Minnesota and Louisiana incidents.
Yet, it's a couple of New Jersey cases, both from Cumberland County, that should motivate changes in our own state's laws.
Bridgeton officials have confirmed that the U.S. Department of Justice is peering into the dashcam-captured shooting death of Jerame Reid at the end of 2014. It wasn't until eight months later that the Cumberland County Prosecutor's Office announced that a grand jury had decided not to indict either of the Bridgeton officers who were involved.
The handling of the Reid case ignited community protests, both before and after the grand-jury finding. That's not to say that the grand jury got it wrong. There will always be suspicion, though, of a conflict of interest when a grand-jury panel is presented evidence by a prosecutor who needs to work closely with local police in hundreds of other cases.
In another case, that of Phillip White, who died in Vineland police custody in March 2015, it wasn't until a month ago that another grand jury cleared another pair of officers. Thirteen months? That's just too long.
Sending police-custody deaths straight to the state AG's office removes any potential of conflict, and would likely stop the feds from feeling a need to step in later. Even if a state AG's probe took considerable time, it wouldn't spark speculation that a county prosecutor was purposely dawdling.
While Sweeney addressed "shootings" the other day, it should be noted that White died after a scuffle. He was not killed with a service firearm. Any bill that forwards fatality cases to the state level should include ALL suspicious police-custody deaths, as well as the ones that occur while someone is in the custody of local or county jailers.
An earlier legislative attempt to bring the state attorney general into police-involved shootings automatically was scuttled in 2013. More recent events make the need for such a law even more pressing.
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