The Force Report is a continuing investigation of police use of force in New Jersey. Read more from the series or search your local police department and officers in the full the database.

Lydia Couch feels like an enemy in Millville, not someone police are sworn to protect.

Altaif Hassan was raised learning how to avoid police confrontations, yet still ended up with an officer's assault rifle trained on his back in October at Rowan University.

And Aprille Smith will not call the Maplewood police, even if she's in trouble.

All three of them are black, and all three see police as an obstacle — or worse, a danger — in their lives. It's all they know.

"I don't call the police for anything now," said Smith, 42, said. "I can't. Because I know it's just going to end up being more trouble for me."

They're not alone.

In communities across New Jersey, generations of black residents have believed police focus more on them, are more likely to stop and question them, and more likely to get aggressive and handcuff them.

That increasingly frustrates officers who say they go where the crime happens, regardless of skin color, and that they, too, are under enormous scrutiny. They say they just want to lock up criminals, keep people safe and get home at the end of the day.

It's an impasse of two competing experiences, without a clear solution and with little evidence to prove where bias actually might exist.

But now, there's a trove of never-before-seen data exposing the truth.

As part of The Force Report, a 16-month investigation by NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, the news organization filed 506 public records requests and collected 72,677 forms covering every restraint, punch, kick or other use of force by local police and state troopers from 2012 through 2016, the most recent year available.

The resulting database provides hard evidence of racial disparities in police use of force across New Jersey.

Among the findings:

Black people are three times more likely to face some type of police force than whites.



In 68 cities and towns, black people were at least five times more likely to face force. In Millville in South Jersey, they were seven times more likely. In Lakewood, they were an astounding 22 times more likely.



Black people were more likely to face nearly every kind of force used by police, including punches, kicks, pepper spray, baton strikes and dog attacks. They were more than twice as likely to be shot.



Black children faced a disproportionate amount of force. Of the more than 4,600 uses of force against people under 18, slightly more than half were black. But they account for only 14.5 percent of the state's child population.



The data shows white people are more likely to show aggressive behavior toward police, like threatening or attacking police with a car, knife or gun. Black people are more likely to run away.

"It is the data on the front end that is able to show without a doubt the injustice that's being done," said the Rev. Charles Boyer, pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Woodbury and the founder of Salvation and Social Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group focusing on civil rights reform through the clergy.

"Because historically the word of black people is not good enough. The vocalizing of our experience is never good enough. It is not until it is shown and it is proven by statistics. Once that is done, there can be no justified argument."

Data alone cannot tell the entire story of policing and race in New Jersey. But experts said the analysis provides unique insight that gives residents and leaders alike evidence from which to ask questions and seek solutions.

"We know N.J. has one of the worst disparities between black and white people. We can't fix it if we cannot measure this," said Alexander Shalom, senior supervising attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union in New Jersey. "(This project) is incredibly useful. But this is a project that should be coming from the government. I hope the future iterations of this come from them."

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When presented an overview of the findings, some police chiefs bristled. Others balked. Others pledged reform.

In Lakewood, Chief Gregory Meyer said he was surprised and concerned to see the numbers and planned to take action. In South Orange, where black people are nine times more likely to face police force, Chief Kyle Kroll said it was possible implicit bias was playing a role. In Millville, Chief Jody Farabella said the disparity there was a nonissue.

"It doesn't concern me 'cause there's no concern about it," Farabella said. "We don't have any complaints on it."

In October, Millville officer Jeffrey Profitt was indicted on allegations of beating several suspects between 2014 and 2016. Profitt is also accused of falsifying records, including use-of-force reports. Four of the five victims included in the indictment are minorities.

Profitt, who has pleaded not guilty, averaged 7.2 uses of force per year from 2012 through 2016, almost nine times the statewide average. He had the second-most uses of force in the department during the five-year period.

About 58 percent of the people he used force against were black, though black people accounted for 47 percent of all arrests and just 19.5 percent of the population.

He’s just one example of how use-of-force data can flag potentially troubling trends.

"The data is a mirror reflection of what is occurring in our towns and cities in (New Jersey)," said Zellie Thomas, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Paterson. "The data shows that this is not simply one bad apple, but a problem in policing and American society."

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State Attorney General Gurbir Grewal so far has remained muted on the findings regarding race, calling them "troubling" but declining to comment further. Presented with the findings, Gov. Phil Murphy issued statements praising law enforcement and said he is in support of eliminating racial disparities in policing, while declining to acknowledge their existence in New Jersey.

"My administration has long advocated for the elimination of racial disparities in the criminal justice system," Murphy said. "The Attorney General’s Office is committed to understanding the data and addressing any and all factors that contribute to unnecessary use of force."

In 2017, Murphy received 94 percent of the African American vote in his path to win the governorship, after making racial equality a cornerstone of his campaign.

Walter Hudson, who founded Salem County-based civil rights group National Awareness Alliance, said Murphy’s comments were “not good enough.”

"The governor is a politician and he is a rich white man who cannot identify with the struggles that black and brown people go through," Hudson said. "Murphy cannot have it both ways, he cannot say overwhelmingly police officers handle their duties professionally, and then say 'we need criminal justice reform from a broken system' as he have said on his campaign trail."

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New Jersey is no stranger to racial problems in policing.

The term "racial profiling" entered the public lexicon in the late '90s after New Jersey State Police troopers fired on a van of four unarmed black and Hispanic men on the Turnpike. The ensuing controversy led to a national conversation about officers targeting people based solely on the color of their skin. The episode ended with the State Police being placed under federal monitoring.

The Newark Police Department came under similar scrutiny for its "stop and frisk" program more than a decade later. It, too, came under federal monitoring after a Justice Department review found that black people — 54 percent of the city's population — accounted for 85 percent of pedestrian stops. About three-quarters of all stops were deemed unconstitutional.

Last year, the police chief of Bordentown Township resigned and was indicted on hate crime charges. He's accused of slamming a teenager's head into a metal doorway. An officer then recorded the chief making racist comments, according to a criminal complaint. He is awaiting trial.

And in September, the Bergen County sheriff and several of his top staffers resigned after he made racist comments about black people in a recording.

Still, experts say, the extent of racial bias in policing is difficult to quantify. Is a particular incident the result of an individual cop's bias? Or is it the product of a department policy they didn't write, a law they didn't pass or just a reality of society beyond their control?

Making the problem worse, much of the data on race collected by police officers is self-reported or determined only by appearance, if it's collected at all. While it's easy to track crimes and arrests, properly tracking trends on race is far more difficult.

That leads to inevitable arguments.

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As part of The Force Report, NJ Advance Media first compared uses of force by race to population numbers provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Black people account for about 14 percent of the state's population, 38 percent of all arrests from 2012 through 2016 and 40 percent of all uses of force during the same period.

Based only on population, a black person is 224 percent more likely to have any type of force used on them compared to someone who is white.

By contrast, white people account for about 55 percent of the state's population, 60 percent of all arrests during the five-year period and 48 percent of all uses of force, according to the data.

Many people criticize such calculations based on population, however, saying they don't account for the fact black people are more likely to be arrested. But if you rerun the numbers based only on people arrested, it's still unequal: Black people were 38 percent more likely to face force than whites.

The arguments stem from the fact many Americans believe black people, especially black men, have a propensity to commit crimes, said Samuel Walker, a retired professor of criminal justice at University of Omaha, Nebraska.

"Anybody making the argument that black people are more dangerous because they are involved in more violent crime is making a giant leap from the general to the specific, and that is unacceptable," he said.

Still, there is no way to draw conclusions about the intent of any officer or department based on data alone. To even come close, police officers would need to track every person they talked to throughout the day, not just those arrested.

"We have to look at interactions, right?" said Barnegat Police Chief Keith Germain. "If, if I interact with a group at a certain rate, do I use force at a greater rate? That's the only way to get the true number. And again, you can't do that and I can't do that because we don't have that interaction breakdown."

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Experts say incomplete data surrounding police force and race does not mean what does exist shouldn't be used to examine police practices. And The Force Report provides plenty of areas for further investigation.

The police chief in Lakewood, Meyer, said he planned to talk to his captains and trainers about the data to see what could be changed.

"We do a lot of diversity training here with our officers when they're new, because things are changing so quickly," Meyer said. "But if we're doing something poorly, we want to know about it."

The town of more than 100,000 is the fastest-growing in the state and a magnet for the predominantly white Orthodox Jewish community. The black community has shrunk from 12 percent of the population in 2000 to 4 percent in 2016.

But black residents make up nearly 40 percent of the department's uses of force.

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"It appears people who are historically disenfranchised are only being disenfranchised further," said Fred Rush, of the Lakewood chapter of the NAACP.

Millville, a city that once flourished around the glass industry, now struggles to make ends meet. It was crushed by the 2008 housing crisis and, unlike much of the state, hasn't recovered. Crime is ever-present. The police are understaffed.

But people from one segment of the city say they still feel the brunt of police.

"It ain't just the police. It's race. It's white people," Nancy Carter said outside her center city apartment complex. "We (are) dangerous in the eyes of a lot of white people. And all it takes is that one phone call from that one white person that can get a person killed, for nothing."

Cops in Millville reported using force on black people at nearly seven times the rate they did on white people. But the chief, Farabella, insisted his officers did not base their arrests on color.

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Yes, they heavily patrol areas where more people of color live, he said. But those areas are "hot spots" for crime, he said, and more calls come in about incidents there.

In September, a group of Millville residents gathered in a bookstore to discuss how to expand a neighborhood watch.

The group was mostly white, and they needed volunteers from center city, a predominantly black area, but no one knew anyone there. They eventually agreed that anything unusual would be classified suspicious and merit a 911 call. They trusted the police to parse out who was an actual threat.

But a few miles away in center city, police officers aren't people to trust, residents said.

"We have no relationship," Carter said. "We just live out here, and they control us."

Lydia Couch said police don't offer even basic respect to black residents.

"People feel like walking targets," Couch said. "If you ride your bike in broad daylight, you get pulled over … if a cop has schoolyard history with someone, they'll harass them."

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Altaif Hassan knew what to do that afternoon in October, even if he didn't know why he was doing it.

"Just do what they say," he said he thought to himself as he walked backward toward a line of police at gunpoint. "Don’t speak. Don’t flinch."

"I was so sure I was gonna die," he said.

For Glassboro police, it was a difficult and fast-moving situation. They were investigating a shoplifting call from a nearby mall when a witness told them he saw a black man holding a gun run toward a car.

Hassan said the only thing he was holding was a case for the new glasses he had bought at an eyewear shop. But police didn't know that.

Up close, it's an impossible problem: police responding to a legitimate call, acting on bad information from a witness. But pull back and there's simple math: Hassan is far more likely to be in that situation because of his skin color.

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Some departments have systems for reviewing use-of-force, but monitoring trends based on race is rare. Glassboro was one of the first police departments to implement body cameras, and it has a multifaceted system for reviewing officer conduct, digitally tracking all police interactions with the public.

But no part of it deals specifically with race, department officials said.

"We look at the incident and the circumstances of how it unfolded and determine if it was in compliance with attorney general guidelines," Chief Frank Brown said.

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To Hassan, his skin color was the only reason he was stopped. Police say race wasn't a factor, they simply believed he was armed and dangerous, so they responded appropriately to the threat. The question becomes, how do you bridge that gap?

Hassan escaped physical injury, but said he still suffers from the unseen trauma, anger and resentment. He has had trouble sleeping since the incident, he said, and sees an assault rifle pointed at him in his dreams.

"I keep thinking: If I had sneezed, I'd be dead," he said.

When Hassan found out why police had drawn their weapons on him, he erupted in the back of a police cruiser, he said.

"Did y'all find a f---ing gun? Did y’all find a gun? Go search my f---ing vehicle."

They did not find a gun.

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In 2005, the state Attorney General's Office mandated every officer in New Jersey go through training on how to identify subconscious racial bias.

South Orange Police Chief Kyle Kroll keeps a copy of the training materials on his desk.

Kroll said he revamped training in his department after officers detained a black teenager called in as suspicious and carrying something in his pocket.

It was a Subway sandwich.

"Look, an arrest is an arrest," Kroll said. "But what brought you to that arrest? We seldom act randomly. Officers need to understand that, and we need to question ourselves. If we can't start by questioning our own actions as officers, then where are we as a society?"

In South Orange, black people are nine times more likely to be the subject of police force than whites. The department hasn't studied it, Kroll said.

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In 2016, Maplewood, a leafy suburb in Essex County, was shaken by a race-related police brutality scandal. On July 5, officers responded to an alleged fight among four Maplewood and South Orange teenagers, Maplewood police said. They kicked, punched and pepper sprayed them, a video of the incident shows. They then attempted to move them over the town line with Irvington, a predominantly black city.

Public outcry over the dashcam video of the incident has led to disciplinary action against 10 officers and the dismissal of Police Chief Robert Cimino and Capt. Joshua Cummins. But for Jim DeVaul, the new chief, restructuring the department to improve a strained relationship with the community was not easy.

Since becoming chief, DeVaul reviews and signs every use-of-force incident himself and has disciplined officers for even "minor incidents."

"I come to the union meetings and I tell our officers that this is what's going to be different," DeVaul said. "We're gonna listen to our community and we're going to implement things that they're suggesting."

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From 2012 through 2016, black people in Maplewood were more than four times more likely to face force than white people.

Despite the chief's efforts, many in town don't feel like much has improved.

Aprille Smith can easily recount her encounters with police.

There was the time police filed a report with child services when she thought her son had run away, she said. Or the time, she said, that she was pulled over for having a taillight out only to realize later that it wasn't. Or the time when, she said, an out-of-town police officer slammed her stomach-first onto the hood of her car moments after she told him she was five months pregnant.

"The thing that makes me mad is that whenever it comes up people say, 'Oh, it's isolated little incidents, it’s isolated incidents,'" Smith said. "If every black person has a story about being mistreated by police, it's not isolated."

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Read more from The Force Report:

We are continuing to make this dataset better. The numbers in this story were last updated Jan. 8, 2019. See the changes we've made here.

NJ Advance Media staff writers Erin Petenko and Craig McCarthy contributed to this report.

Disha Raychaudhuri may be reached at draychaudhuri@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @Disha_RC.

Stephen Stirling may be reached at sstirling@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SStirling.

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