By James Queally and Alexi Friedman/The Star-Ledger

Shoot and kill someone in New Jersey, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get caught: 65 percent to be exact.

But if you were the triggerman in one of the 2,593 nonfatal shootings that happened in the state’s bloodiest cities from 2008 to 2011, the odds were even better you got away with it.

A Star-Ledger review of police data over those four years shows about three quarters of all nonfatal shootings in New Jersey’s most violent cities remain unsolved, leaving hundreds of would-be killers on the streets each year. All told, nearly 2,000 nonfatal shootings went unsolved.

The data, gathered through public records requests that took months for most police departments to comply with, reviewed the state’s nine most violent cities: Newark, Camden, Paterson, Jersey City, Elizabeth, Atlantic City, Irvington, Plainfield and Orange.

In high-crime Trenton, police denied repeated requests for information. A department spokesman said the city does not track nonfatal shootings, and had no way to compile that data.

The disparity in solve rates between homicides and nonfatal shootings was startling. In 2010 — the most recent data available to The Star-Ledger — about 65 percent of the state’s 375 homicides were solved. During that same period, only 21 percent of the 652 nonfatal shooting cases were closed.

Police officials attribute that difference to diminished municipal resources, uncooperative victims and the priority given to homicide investigations over everything else.

Criminal justice experts, however, fault police departments’ outdated methods of tracking crime. Most departments use the federal Uniform Crime Report as the model for tracking crime, which does not have a separate category for nonfatal shootings.

As a result, experts say police don’t closely follow the statistic, though the only difference between a nonfatal shooting and a homicide might be a combination of aim, luck and a good hospital trauma ward.

"You’ve got dozens and dozens, if not scores, of dangerous people who commit heinous crimes, who walk away and who are not held to account, and that has all kinds of implications for public safety in those towns," said Eugene O’Donnell, John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor in Manhattan, and a former assistant district attorney. He said failure to track nonfatal shootings underscores "the medieval approach that police have to crime statistics. You would think that this would be a barometer of the safety climate and the police would be on top of it."

While trying to gather information for this story, The Star-Ledger found few police departments track nonfatal shootings or the number of those cases solved. In some places, like Jersey City, the data was readily available. But most agencies needed several months to compile the statistics because the incidents first had to be identified then organized.

Because the category is not tracked as closely as homicides, experts said many law enforcement agencies may not comprehend the full extent of the problem. That would be a mistake, said Wayne Fisher, a professor at the Rutgers University Police Institute and its former director. The low closure rates in New Jersey, he said, can pose a serious threat to the public.

"What’s left on the street is both the firearm and the person that’s willing to use the firearm," Fisher said. "Let’s face it, an offender who is willing to shoot a gun at another person is an obvious threat to the public safety, whether or not that bullet, misses, injures, or takes the life of the intended victim."

LACK OF WITNESSES

Earlier this month, a 19-year-old Newark man was shot multiple times while driving through the city’s South Ward, an attack for which he remains hospitalized and barely conscious, investigators said.

Police have not identified a suspect, and no witness has stepped forward. The teen’s passenger, who was the intended target, has barely spoken to police, and the victim has been unable to communicate.

It’s a story that has played out countless times in Newark, where arrest rates for nonfatal shootings have hovered at around 20 percent from 2008 to 2011, the most recent statistics available. Newark Police Director Samuel DeMaio blamed in part the department’s staggering case load, where 272 nonfatal shootings were reported last year, nearly 100 more than any other city in New Jersey.

But the data shows a different story. Police departments in cities with fewer shootings — and fewer investigators — fared no better. In 2011, Irvington solved just two of its 29 nonfatal shootings. Orange Police detectives closed just 11 percent of their cases, six of 51, in four years combined.

In addition to staffing, police say uncooperative witnesses, and in many cases victims, also hinder investigations into nonfatal shootings.

"You’ll find a lot more of your witnesses that come forward are infuriated that someone is dead. Someone that they know is dead," DeMaio said. "In a shooting incident, you don’t see that same sense of urgency."

That survival instinct is understandable, according to Bishop Jethro James Jr., who leads Paradise Baptist Church in Newark. The longtime pastor said residents and police are equally responsible for the high number of unsolved cases.

"How much will we tolerate before we say enough is enough?" James said. "The reality is we need more resources, but the community also has a role to play along with the police department. Until we start having that conversation, it’s not going to change."

In crime-plagued Camden, the situation has intensified after layoffs cost the city half its police force in 2010. Camden had the dubious distinction of pairing the state’s second highest nonfatal shooting total since 2010 with one of New Jersey’s worst closeout rates. The city had 314 nonfatal shootings in 2010 and 2011. Police solved just 56 of those cases, or about 18 percent.

With solve rates dropping as the city endures a record-high year for homicides, Camden Police Chief Scott Thomson said it’s clear that layoffs devastated his department.

"On one day, we lost our entire homicide, shooting and narcotics units," he said. Even if the remaining 229 officers show up for work each day — absentee rate is about 20 percent — "we are at 1962 staffing levels."

Camden County prosecutor Warren Faulk tried to better address nonfatal shootings by creating a task force to attack the problem.. The plan was "to treat shootings the same as homicides," Faulk said. "Because sometimes before the grace of god or Dr. Ross at Cooper Hospital, we would have a shooting instead of a homicide."

But the unit never had the intended impact because of layoffs, and city officials recently announced the police department will be replaced by a county wide force. "Unfortunately, with Camden’s situation now...we don’t put the same amount of crime scene effort into it," Faulk said. "The scene itself is given the once over. The shell casings are collected. There is a canvas, and that’s about it."

And when gunmen aren’t captured, criminals take notice in Camden and other cities.

"Low arrest rates for shootings and homicides embolden those who pull the trigger," Faulk added. "It fuels the street culture wherein the medium for dispute resolution is lead."

In Plainfield, where only 18 percent of all nonfatal shootings led to an arrest from 2008 through 2011, homicides remain the focus. Like other towns surveyed, Plainfield’s arrest rate for homicides is much higher than for nonfatal shootings. Union County Prosecutor Theodore Romankow attributes that to the county’s homicide task force, which consists of detectives from police departments throughout the county and the prosecutor’s office.

"Nonfatal shootings don’t get that kind of attention," Romankow said. They are handled solely by municipal police departments that are already constrained from staff and budget cuts.

That’s the case in Irvington, where police solved just 16 of 92 nonfatal shootings from 2009 to 2011. The police department has lost 65 officers since 2010, and Police Director Joseph Santiago said the problem is amplified by the presence of "community guns" — weapons passed between gang members and drug dealers that are often linked to multiple crimes.

"Even if later, you arrest somebody in possession of that gun, you can’t close the shooting because you don’t have any evidence to show that’s the shooter," Santiago said.

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Franklin Zimring is director of the criminal justice research program at the University of California, Berkeley. He said the general failure of New Jersey police departments to make arrests in nonfatal shootings is a national problem. Zimring was involved in a study of violent robberies in Chicago that found police solved 55 percent of those crimes in which the victims were killed. In stark contrast, the solve rate for robberies without a fatality was just 11 percent.

Police officials throughout New Jersey say they are doing their best, and they know the public safety risk of leaving hundreds of armed assailants to roam the streets.

DeMaio, Newark’s top cop, said all too often suspects in his shooting cases later become defendants in homicide trials. But with fewer and fewer officers, there’s little he can do about it.

"If I try to shoot you today, and I missed or I just grazed you or I hit you in the arm, I might not be done. My intent may have been to kill you," DeMaio said. "So that means I’m going to come back, and I’m going to keep coming until I finally kill you."

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