Looking into Montclair Police's Use of Force

The International Association of Chiefs of Police, the world’s largest professional association for police officers, defines use of force as the “amount of effort required by police to compel compliance by an unwilling subject.” The “unwilling subject” may “inspire” use of force by resisting arrest, threatening or attacking an officer, or firing a gun at the police. When New Jersey policemen use force, whether that means they are using pepper spray, a compliance hold, or using their fists, according to the Attorney General’s Use of Force Policy, they must submit a use of force report to the county prosecutor.

On November 29, 2018, NJ Advance Media, the #1 provider of local news in New Jersey, released The Force Report, a statewide database of New Jersey police use of force from 2012 through 2016. In order to produce the project, the media company conducted a 16-month investigation, filing 506 public records requests and collecting 72,677 use-of-force forms. According to the study, 70,405 total uses of force occurred in the Garden State from 2012 to 2016. In Montclair, 163 total uses of force took place. Thus, Montclair’s number accounted for .23% of the state’s total uses of force. Our beloved Essex County suburb used force at a higher rate than 337 New Jersey police departments. There are 468 departments in the state. That means that only 131 departments filed more reports than the officers of the Montclair Police Department.

One of the racial inequality subgroups of the Pressman Social Justice Internship, which, according to Montclair’s Bnai Keshet Associate Rabbi Ariann Weitzman, studies the fundamentals of organizing and taking action through a Jewish lens, looked into all of the use of force reports filed between 2017 and now. The high school and college student activists of the pod, Gabriel Slon, Carly Appelbaum, Neeve Levi, Sehaye Luks, Yael Gelman, Zoe Gelman, Quentin Zimbalist, and Caleb Levine, revealed that Montclair’s black residents are about 300% more likely to have force used on them than their white counterparts. In addition, the group’s members discovered that one third of use-of-force incidents were in response to a mental health episode, whether that meant officers were addressing a suicidal individual, an emotionally disturbed person, or someone in the middle of a psychological crisis. In these instances, 78% of the victims were black.

In 2020, the Montclair Police Department will receive a little more than 16 million dollars, accounting for approximately 17.5% of the total town budget. Montclair’s Department of Health and Human Services will be given nearly 2% of the total budget. In the time of the COVID- 19, when, as of August 9, 2020, 483 Montclair residents have died due to the pandemic, the Montclair Police Department will collect 15.5% more of the town’s total budget than Montclair’s Department of Health and Human Services.