New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal on Thursday acknowledged the state has for years failed to properly track and stop police officers who might be using unnecessary force during arrests, and pledged wholesale reform to improve the system.

His comments came a few hours after the debut of The Force Report, a 16-month investigation by NJ Advance Media for NJ.com that found major disparities in how police officers use force and who they use it against, as well as paltry oversight and no standard reporting practices.

He praised the work as “nothing short of incredible.”

“They have put together a database which has brought into it every use-of-force report that they were able to get in a five-year period in the state of New Jersey, and they digitized it so it can be analyzed,” Grewal said at an unrelated news conference in Jersey City.

“They’ve analyzed it for trends, and they’ve analyzed it to see if there are patterns of behavior that should cause concern or raise red flags. That’s something that we should be doing.”

The news organization filed 506 public records requests and invested more than $30,000 to collect and analyze 72,677 use-of-force reports from every municipal police department and the State Police from 2012 through 2016, the most recent year available.

The results are now available at nj.com/force, the most comprehensive statewide database of police force in the United States.

When presented with NJ.com’s findings earlier this week, Grewal offered no defense of the current way local, county and state officials track police use of force, and said it was up to his office to fix statewide reporting, analysis and early intervention.

"The reporting that you’ve done and the hoops you had to jump through to get this data are completely unnecessary,” Grewal said. “It shouldn’t have taken you a year and 500 OPRA requests, and we’re committed to making this data more available, not just to the media but to the public. Folks have a right to know this information.”

Grewal, who was appointed by Gov. Phil Murphy in January, has over the past year introduced a number of reforms meant to improve transparency in police shooting investigations and to detect problem behavior by police officers. But those reforms have so far failed to address the major shortcomings in the state’s use-of-force system.

Tracking and analyzing police use of force is a widely accepted best practice to identify outlier officers and departments, and intervene before problems spiral out of control, resulting in unnecessary injuries, excessive force lawsuits and expensive legal settlements. But most officers in New Jersey, among the best paid in the country, have for years escaped meaningful scrutiny.

Grewal acknowledged even he, during his time as Bergen County prosecutor, did not monitor use-of-force trends in the local departments he oversaw. He said NJ Advance Media’s findings were “troubling” and that county prosecutors across the state should use the data made public by the news organization to determine areas that warrant review or investigation.

“We should be able to analyze it in a hundred different ways to identify patterns, and we’re committed to doing that,” Grewal said.

Below is an excerpt of Grewal’s interview with NJ Advance Media:

NJ.com: The statewide numbers raise some questions. There is widespread racial imbalance in who gets subjected to force by police. What’s your reaction to that?

Grewal: It’s troubling to hear that, but without having the data in front of us and doing our own analysis, it would be difficult for me to comment beyond that. It’s something that we should be looking at. It supports why we should be looking at this data more closely and collecting it in a better way and analyzing it, and we haven’t been doing that since the data started being collected.

The difficulty sometimes is contextualizing this data and drawing conclusions from it. That sometimes requires a little bit more, and sometimes the public and the media don’t have all the information when they just have the numbers. But that’s our responsibility: to contextualize it and to analyze it and help put forward conclusions from that data. That’s a commitment we’re more than ready to make moving forward.

NJ.com: We’ve heard different stories about what these forms are supposed to do. Are they an oversight tool, or are they just a record of an incident that’s supposed to sit in a criminal case file or an internal investigator’s folder in case problems arise down the line?

Grewal: I don’t believe in collecting information that we just file away.

One of the first things we did when we got here was to do an audit (at the state Division of Criminal Justice) of the types of reporting that we're asking our county prosecutors to do and the types of information we request from them, and what we do with it. Our role should be an oversight role.

We should be using this as a tool to improve officer behavior, to hold problematic officers accountable, for retraining and to prevent the next excessive use of force case and, if there's a bad apple, get them out of the police department.

NJ.com: But you were Bergen County prosecutor before you took this job. Did you ever use these forms to do any sort of meaningful police oversight?

Grewal: No.

There weren’t processes in place there either to do it. We would do our annual reports, which were required of us, and we would send them to the Attorney General’s Office, and we would not know what happened to them after they got here. There were no guidelines for us on how to use those reports, the reporting was inconsistent coming up from the local departments. So it was not an ideal system.

As a county prosecutor, before I became attorney general, I would always question, 'What are we doing with this information?' And we would try to do our best to do our own analysis, but it really requires the Attorney General's Office to put into place meaningful processes and put into place uniform standards for reporting and uniform guidelines to make the data useful.

NJ.com: Earlier this year, you ordered all police departments in the state to implement early warning systems to detect problem behavior, something a lot of departments were doing but many more were not. But among all the indicators included in the system, use of force was left off. Why?

Grewal: Departments were free to do more and already do do more. I can tell you with the State Police, with our early warning system, we do look at all use-of-force reports in our early warning system, and any two use-of-force reports will trigger a review. With respect to including it in the directive, I wouldn’t foreclose us from adding it.

We're revising the directive as we speak to add additional criteria.

NJ.com: Our reporting indicates that most county prosecutors are focused on investigating criminal behavior by cops rather than identifying troubling trends before they bubble over. Is that their role?

Grewal: Our county prosecutors are the chief law enforcement officers in their county and it’s their obligation to supervise law enforcement operations in their counties, which includes prosecuting and investigating crimes but also ensuring that officers are trained properly and that they’re acting properly in their counties. So it’s incumbent on me to give them the tools to do that. They haven’t had those tools.

They should be looking at the information you've provided in your report to make sure there's no problems in their counties.

NJ.com: We spent months collecting paper records and turning them into data. It’s 2018. Shouldn’t these records be digital?

Grewal: That’s a no-brainer. It should be digitized, it should be easily accessible, you should be able to work with the data very easily.

We have the ability to put together online portals where the local departments don't have to spend a lot of money to buy systems and put systems in place, so there's a whole host of ways to do it. We should be able to analyze it in a hundred different ways to identify patterns and we're committed to doing that.

NJ.com: Do you anticipate problems doing that? Police departments might say they don’t have the money or the manpower to change their systems, and local governments could call that an unfunded mandate.

Grewal: The way our system is structured in New Jersey, with the attorney general having oversight of law enforcement, I think that gives us the ability to require this kind of reporting, and understanding that obviously there are costs associated with any types of reporting, which we would try to minimize and make as easy as possible. That’s a process that’s underway on our end, whether it’s creating an online portal where this information is entered, creating standardized reporting, we’ve done this in other areas, so this should be no different.

NJ.com: So what are the next steps?

Grewal: Even before your reporting, we had been talking to some academic institutions on how best to collect this data, what type of data we should be collecting, what the forms should look like. We’ve been looking at that internally. And I invite a conversation beyond this interview with you and the folks on your team who have drilled into it. Because you’ve obviously highlighted shortcomings in the system and we’re committed to fixing whatever shortcomings there are to ensure we have the best system here in New Jersey to collect this information and to review it.

It’s a process. I don’t have all the answers now. It’s something we were working on prior to your reporting, but certainly this reporting, it’s going to be a piece that we use in building a better system here in New Jersey.

Grewal spoke with reporters S.P. Sullivan, Craig McCarthy and Stephen Stirling on Tuesday, Nov. 27. This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Read more from The Force Report:

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.

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.