Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop was in a meeting with community and religious groups in January when he promised that the city’s police department would be the “most transparent police department that there is.”

What he didn’t say at the same time was that the city’s police department had already stopped posting monthly crime statistics for each district to its public website.

It appears that Jersey City stopped updating its “COMPSTAT” page after June 2018. The page had listed the number of crimes, such as rapes, homicides and robberies, that were reported by year and by month — and it was easily accessible to the public.

Emails to a city spokeswoman as far back as January about the failure update the crime statistics have been ignored.

On Wednesday, The Jersey Journal asked Fulop, through a spokeswoman, a number questions about the crime numbers, and most importantly, why crime statistics are no longer being provided to residents on the city website.

The city issued a one-sentence reply:

“The JCPD continues to submit all Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) data to the FBI, which the state" makes publicly available on the State Police website. A follow-up question was also ignored.

Those statistics on the State Police website appear in a spreadsheet format and are considered more difficult to read than COMPSTAT. The UCR stats are grouped by dates: January-March and April-June, and are not broken down by district. The city’s website does not include a link to State Police’s UCR web page.

Jersey City councilmen Michael Yun and Richard Boggiano, a former police officer, were outraged by the fact that residents could no longer go to the city website to learn about crime issues in their neighborhoods.

“Crime information is very important, not only for residents, but for people interested in moving to Jersey City,” Yun said Wednesday. “That’s one of the major factors they are interested in — crime and schools.”

Yun said he intends to make some calls and find out why the numbers are no longer being posted.

“We pay for that information to be made available to the public, and if it’s not, we are not getting the services we pay for. That’s not right,” Yun said.

Boggiano said “This city has got to get into the 21st Century and stop the BS. This is something that should be on the city website and I’m shocked. This is ridiculous. You go to some of the city website links and some of the information is three or four years old and not updated.”

Boggiano said the crime information is important to residents, community leaders and block associations.

“Residents want the information,” Boggiano said, adding “I’m going to make a couple of calls and find out what’s going on.”

Pamela Johnson, director of the Jersey City Anti-Violence Coalition Movement, is also upset by the fact that the crime statistics are no longer being posted.

“I just don’t understand why it was done,” said Johnson, who is also a member of the city’s Public Safety Citizens Advisory Board. “It’s important because we need to know what’s going on and we need to know that the information being shared with the public actually correlates to the data. ... I just don’t understand the logic in it.”

Johnson said she has used the data to shed light on problems in the community and to apply for grants. She lamented that even when the crime statistics were being posted, the numbers tended to be a couple of months old.

“I would like to see it posted again, absolutely,” Johnson said Thursday. “I would like to see it back up and I would like the information to be more current.”

In a recent Facebook video regarding body cameras being used by police officers, the mayor says, “Body cameras help our police force do its job with more transparency and trust from residents.”

Yet, they city denied The Jersey Journal’s Open Public Records Act request for body camera footage of Johnson’s DWI arrest in July. In its denial, the city said the footage is considered a “criminal investigatory record.”

This page appears when attempting to access crime statistics on Jersey City's website.