It’s the third Tuesday of the month, 10:00 a.m. sharp. Newark, New Jersey, Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose, calls the gathering to order and takes his seat at the head of a table of police chiefs, hailing from departments of all sizes, who quickly seat themselves among the adjoining chairs and tables. They are surrounded by a much larger group of crime analysts; state police commanders; county chiefs of detectives; assistant county prosecutors; members of the Northern New Jersey Urban Area Security Initiative (NNJUASI) and the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (NJOHSP); and special agents from federal law enforcement. Always present and attentive in the wings are representatives from the Rutgers University Center on Policing and the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE), the domestic liaison within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Rutgers and PM-ISE are there to gauge the pulse on domestic law enforcement needs and priorities.

Virtually all the attendees come from the most populated northeast counties of the state—Hudson, Bergen, Passaic, Morris, Essex, and Union—home to a diverse population of nearly five million and all part of the urban and suburban sprawl spreading out from New York City for 20 miles.

The meeting starts out relaxed, but the business of being in that room is important and the discussion quickly shifts to the critical criminal matters at hand in the region. Lt. Joe Brennan, a state police supervisor from the Regional Operations and Intelligence Center (ROIC), New Jersey’s full-service fusion center, cues up a slide presentation that will drive the meeting agenda. Upward of 30 slides represent a month’s work of phone calls, interviews, and painstaking analysis by the ROIC and its satellite at Newark Police Headquarters, the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC). The first slide on the screen is always the same, evoking a soliloquy from Lt. Brennan that has become the emblematic opening of every meeting:

Lt. Brennan runs through the slides, highlighting the ROIC’s monthly analysis of the corridor’s carjackings, property crimes, wanted felons, homicides, shooting hits, strong-arm robberies, and residential burglaries. The presentation methodically constructs a large pie-chart of the corridor’s criminal activity, to which everyone in the room has added a slice. Questions and comments are welcome and often forthcoming.

Director Ambrose interrupts Lt. Brennan frequently, asking if DNA and fingerprints were found on several recovered stolen cars, whether recently seized crime guns were sent to the state lab for testing, inquiring as to why there are still outstanding criminal warrants on a couple of repeat offenders, and pointing out similarities and patterns in robberies and residential break-ins across several municipalities. His inquiries press select chiefs and their detectives to sense cross-currents on seemingly disparate crimes, diving deeply into incidents and investigations to draw out unexplored tips or leads, and connecting the dots.

At some time before the meeting ends, everyone will take part in a rapid roundtable discussion that will wring out the last few drops of information. There are no blind spots at CorrStat.

CorrStat takes its name from Corridor Status. The corridor of interest is the 19-mile stretch of New Jersey State Highway Route 21, running north and south alongside the Passaic River and connecting the cities of Newark and Paterson. A patchwork of 19 municipalities line the perimeter of the highway, home to several million people and making up an ethnic and pragmatic suburban and urban enclave within which the cast and crew of The Sopranos chose their familiar sights and sounds.

Police departments along the corridor vary widely from less than 40 officers to more than 1,000. They patrol an amalgam of urban and suburban communities with indistinct borders. Some neighbors have different zip codes, and street signs here and there along busy routes offer the only clue that one has crossed from one town to the next. Crowded municipalities share problems because crime and criminals are not bound by geography. CorrStat police chiefs must deal with a criminal landscape where the burglars of one town become shooters just down the highway.

Midway along its length, Route 21 passes under Route 3, a bustling east and west thoroughfare that cuts through Hudson County towards the grey skyline of Manhattan. Criminal activity in northeastern New Jersey is greatly influenced by its juxtaposition to New York City.

Data from the corridor has always been an eyesore in the columns of the state’s uniform crime statistics. Amounting to only 129 of the state’s 8,772 square miles, or 1.3 percent of New Jersey’s land mass, the region’s metropolitan communities have experienced a highly disproportionate share of the state’s violent crime, particularly gun homicides, non-lethal shootings, and robberies. Tracked over a five-year interval, 2012–2017, the CorrStat region has witnessed 3,823 of the state’s 7,095 shooting incidents (54 percent), resulting in 823 of the 1,513 shooting murders (54 percent), and 3,883 of the 6,911 shooting victims (56 percent). Exacerbating these statistics is the alarming presence of gunslingers. More than 6,000 of the 14,418 guns seized statewide during arrests were seized in the region. Displaying guns was also commonplace in the more than 2,000 carjackings over the same period. Stolen cars were used variously for joyrides, chopped up for parts, hidden in intermodal containers for shipment to West Africa, or used to carry out violent crime sprees.

Luxury vehicles are the preferred target of carjackers plying their trade in the CorrStat region. Although high-end vehicle thefts account for only 795 of the more than 33,000 vehicles stolen statewide in the last two and a half years, almost half of those thefts are in the CorrStat counties.

In 2011, that inordinate concentration of violent crime along the corridor and its impact upon the city of Paterson prompted Police Director Mike Walker to advocate for a collaborative crime-fighting initiative.¹ Walker was frustrated by the increase of out-of-town offenders who came to Paterson to commit serious crimes, then quickly fled to hideouts in Newark and elsewhere along Route 21. Guns used in Paterson felonies were being recovered miles away at unrelated crime scenes or during arrests and searches, and the weapons often passed through many hands before being removed from the street. Many of those crime guns ended up in sealed plastic bags and were kept as trial exhibits in evidence lockers without ballistics testing or comparisons to other corridor crimes.

A violent drama was playing out on Paterson’s streets, exacerbated by shooters and victims from other locales who were quick to draw a gun in the face of a dispute. Director Walker had further reason to believe that a disproportionate amount of the community’s violence was being committed by a smaller group of chronic offenders, many of whom were tied to drug dealings and property crimes in other towns. Then, two very personal losses for New Jersey law enforcement sounded the alarm and awoke regional police chiefs to the need for information-sharing on crime.

On January 7, 2007, Paterson Police Officer Tyron Franklin, off duty and unarmed, was shot and killed as he attempted to thwart an armed robbery of a bodega in Paterson. His killer, Teddy Charlemagne, was arrested at his residence in Irvington, an urban community just west of Newark. A check of Charlemagne’s criminal history disclosed 12 arrests—3 for possession of a handgun and multiple arrests in Newark and Bellville for the lesser offenses of burglary and drug possession, all along the Route 21 corridor. In 2008, Charlemagne pled guilty to the killing.

In 2009, Director Walker brought his concerns to a working group of commanders from the NNJUASI and New Jersey State Police who were devising the means to bridge state and local crime data sharing. Using homeland security funds passed through the NJOHSP, NNJUASI took a bold step with its financial support, setting the stage for CorrStat by choosing to support information-sharing needs regionally rather than funding myriad ad hoc requests by prosecutors and police chiefs for technology and equipment of little benefit or connectivity across local borders.²

Two years later, on November 7, 2011, off-duty Newark police detective Michael Morgan was shot and killed in Paterson as he intervened in an armed robbery. Jerome Wright, a Newark resident, was charged and convicted of the murder. Wright’s criminal history revealed 11 prior arrests for gun and drug possession in East Orange and other towns along the Route 21 Corridor.

In 2011, Jerome Wright was just one of 410 Newark residents who were arrested in other CorrStat communities that year, a disturbing trend that also included 98 Paterson and 123 Jersey City residents. NNJUASI and state police commanders, supported by facts and figures from the Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC), began to actualize Director Walker’s idea of multiple police departments collaborating to fight crime. June 21, 2012, saw the first meeting of CorrStat, attended by 17 police departments.

While crime analysis from the ROIC eliminated some valuable gaps in CorrStat information sharing, a growing caseload of unsolved violent crime all along the corridor spoke to the need for a more expeditious support to violent crime investigations. From the outset of the CorrStat meetings, it became apparent that the ROIC, although producing significant intelligence linking crime guns to offenders and violent crime, was a near-time asset that required up to 24 hours to properly complete the intelligence production process. Homicide detectives scouring neighborhoods for leads at crime scenes had to interrupt their investigations in order to conduct time-consuming database inquiries on suspects and victims back at their precincts and departments. Progress set back even an hour or two gave a head start and clear advantage to fleeing felons and facilitated repeat offenses by their escape. Street detectives needed lead value information in real time; delaying even a few short hours meant that frightened witnesses were not answering the door and suspects were nowhere to be found.

To fulfill this need, the Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC) began operations at Newark Police Headquarters in 2013 with the mission “to provide timely, accurate and complete information to our customers to help identify, find, and arrest criminals through the use of shared resources and capabilities.” Today, it’s a 24/7, year-round operation that has become a one-stop-shop for corridor detectives chasing violent felons. Should a shooting or homicide occur in the CorrStat region, within two hours, RTCC detectives produce a Person of Strategic Interest lead package on all suspects and victims, to include active warrants, criminal histories, domestic violence incidents, mugshots and driver’s license photographs, records management system checks, weapons purchases, parole or probation status, addresses and telephone numbers of relatives, social media activity, and registered vehicles and ALPR data on the associated license plates.

A distinctive feature of the monthly CorrStat meeting is that it creates a level playing field for law enforcement agencies, regardless of size and sophistication, to contribute information meaningful to an aggregate analysis of regional crime. Some have likened the information exchange to crimestoppers at arms-length, while others describe it as an unscripted CompStat. Perhaps the best acknowledgement came from NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, who, during a visit to CorrStat in June 2014, along with Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence John Miller and future commissioner James O’Neil, remarked at the meeting’s conclusion that “CorrStat doesn’t just follow the principles of CompStat, it expands upon them.”

It wasn’t long ago when most police departments followed a misguided canon that power and prestige came from withholding criminal intelligence. After the 9/11 terror attacks, U.S. law enforcement wondered how to achieve the depth of information sharing and collaborative crime fighting that would enhance homeland and hometown security in the post-9/11 era. This was particularly hard felt in New Jersey, from where nearly 700 of those murdered on that day began their last commute.

The advent of the national fusion center network, with its infrastructure of 79 state and local subsidiaries, has driven a spike through that narrow mind-set and has become the premier U.S. information-sharing platform. Notwithstanding that progress, local and state information-sharing initiatives can still suffer disinterest and dissolution when participants see no return on their investment.

But process defines that there is no intelligence without the analysis of raw information to connect the dots.

Fundamental to the CorrStat mission and its durability is the willingness of the chiefs to share with their peers at all levels of government and to tear down the information silos that had allowed interjurisdictional crime to flourish within a parochial enforcement environment. But process defines that there is no intelligence without the analysis of raw information to connect the dots. Stated pure and simple: having more dots to look at creates a more distinct picture drawn by analysis and results in a better crime-fighting intelligence product. For this reason, the CorrStat, ROIC, and RTCC triumvirate is upheld by a core principle and pledge to the CorrStat chiefs that a quarter’s worth of information nourishes the aggregate analysis and yields a dollar back in intelligence.

Chasing a Few Crumbs

In January 2017, a sweeping reform of New Jersey’s broken bail system was revealed, which sought to avoid pre-trial detention for indigent defendants who could not post bail for a minor offense.³ Judicial decisions over bail or no-bail rely on a public safety assessment (PSA), a court appraisal that takes into consideration the seriousness of the crime and the risk of flight. In cases where those issues were de minimis, prosecutors and judges applied the reforms with liberality, and an overwhelming majority of low-level offenders were returned to the streets.

Even the best of medicines can have adverse side effects, however. Bail judgements depend on criminal histories that publish judicial outcomes with little or no information about the original arrest. For instance, an individual may have had five prior gun arrests, a second-degree felony offense that is considered a non-violent crime, but, through a bargaining arrangement, pled guilty to a lesser charge of possession of stolen property or burglary in four of those cases. In each of those pre-trial negotiations, the initial charges of criminal gun possession were dismissed and did not appear on the criminal history. Therefore, a judge and prosecutor would see a PSA for a defendant whose level of threat to society was significantly undervalued by scoring one gun arrest instead of five. Low PSA scores may be persuasive in bail judgements; however, they are exceedingly poor predictors of risk to commit future crime.

Police chiefs began to voice concerns among themselves and at CorrStat meetings that too many offenders released under the new bail reform protocols showed no remorse and had returned to their old tricks. Some had escalated to violent incidents involving guns.

To alleviate the unintended ill consequences of the bail protocols and perhaps better inform the courts on the likely harm in releasing some offenders, the ROIC and RTCC adapted a mathematical scoring tool already being used at CorrStat meetings to gauge an offender’s likelihood to engage in violent acts involving guns. It was a simplistic formula that would give prosecutors context and depth to an offender’s criminal history, essentially providing the criminal court with a three-dimensional view of a two-dimensional rap sheet. Plea bargains and other sidebar agreements were of little interest to ROIC and RTCC analysts scoring an offender’s propensity to commit more crimes. These scores created a risk profile for each violent offender based upon objective criteria from past violent activity.

Singling out those offenders who presented the greatest risk for future shooting and looting was challenging, so the ROIC/RTCC focused upon both arrest data and court outcomes; namely, the number of prior arrests (A), felony convictions (F), gun arrests (G), and participation as either a suspect (S) or victim (V) in a prior shooting. Weighting the severity and frequency of each of these factors in the algorithm, (1xA)+(2xF)+(3xG)+(5xS)+(3xV), produces a sum score called the Criminal Record Uniform Matrix Brand (CRUMB). CRUMB is a somewhat nuanced acronym that represents a demonstrable appraisal of an offender’s risk of relapse to violent gun-related crime. It should be noted that a CRUMB score is an analytical tool to enhance the decisions of prosecutors and police, not a proscription. The striking difference between the PSA that drives bail and detention judgements and an offender’s CRUMB score is that the former assesses the defendant’s risk of failing to appear at court proceedings, while the CRUMB score forecasts the likelihood of a released offender committing more violent crime.

Figure 3 points to the effectiveness of CRUMB scoring as it was used in 2016 to assist the CorrStat chiefs in focusing their limited investigative resources against 20 of the highest profile criminal targets in the CorrStat region. The capacity of the formula to calculate those offenders at greatest risk for recidivism was apparent in the 2016 analysis seen in Figure 3.

In 2018, the ROIC updated the criminal activities of ten high CRUMB scorers who were left on the street in June 2016. Of those ten, six had been involved in shootings during which five were shot, two fatally, one from a confrontation with police. Of the remaining three wounded in shootings, one involved a police officer. One of the five was present at multiple shootings. Of the total eight survivors, all of them have been arrested in the previous nine months and were incarcerated. Four of the eight arrests involved the criminal possession of guns. In other words, CRUMB scores do work. 

Every week, CorrStat chiefs and prosecutors receive a package from the RTCC with mugshots of recently arrested felons, along with their CRUMB scores. The higher the CRUMB score, the greater the severity of their criminal history and potential for recidivism. CRUMB scores are classified and color-coded in three tiers of severity: a score of 20 or above is considered high severity and highlighted within a red box, 9 to 19 is identified as severe and highlighted in purple, and a score of 0 to 8 is of low severity and highlighted in yellow. Recognizing the value of scoring gun arrests as a predictor of future violence, on May 24, 2017, the New Jersey state attorney general issued a directive ordering state and county prosecutors to seek detention for any individual arrested in criminal possession of a gun or eluding police, both second-degree offenses that elevated the risk of injury or death to other people.⁴

Staring Down the Barrel

Countermeasures to violent crime activity in the CorrStat region begin with the recognition that a smaller but very dangerous sector of criminals resort quickly to gunplay to settle their interpersonal rivalries and disputes. Gang members and drug dealers who use guns to maintain discipline, protect territory, or to consolidate their authority and power will generally keep on shooting until apprehended. The same maxim can be applied to the serial occurrence of robberies, burglaries, and other property crimes.

Detectives from more vintage eras will recall handmade flip charts and wall posters filled with Polaroids of somber faces and quirky aliases giving shape to the pyramid of a criminal organization. It is a bygone practice effectively replaced by software graphics and a few keystrokes. During monthly CorrStat slide presentations, link charts often cede top billing to the image of a semi-automatic crime gun with linear offshoots to homicides, shootings, robberies, and forensic connections to various shooting suspects. In one notable CorrStat briefing in 2017, the ROIC identified a crime gun that had been utilized in 16 different shooting incidents over a seven-month period.

The success of the RTCC in bringing the CorrStat chiefs to focus upon the those most serious gun felons is ensured by several important crime gun initiatives at NJSP: NJ-Trace, the Crime Gun Center, and GunStat.

In 2006, approximately 3,000 recovered guns in New Jersey were being entered into NCIC every month and sent to the FBI to determine if they were stolen. Unfortunately, the NCIC standard for a weapons search did not include the entry fields that would allow a crime gun to be run through an ATF database called eTrace. eTrace is essential in tracking a recovered crime gun back to its original sale and ownership. According to ATF statistics, approximately 75 percent of the guns recovered by police in New Jersey in 2009 came from outside the state and from as far away as Texas.⁵

The trail of a crime gun often begins with a legal purchase in a state with lax gun laws by an individual with a clean record and valid identification and ends with that gun in someone’s hands who has a criminal record and has used that gun in a crime. A person who willfully diverts a legal gun purchase by selling or turning over that weapon to someone for criminal purposes is called a “straw purchaser.” The interval from legal purchase to police confiscation is called the “time to crime” and is a key factor in suspecting the involvement of gun trafficking.

Filing a police request for an ATF eTrace on a recovered crime gun was not mandatory in New Jersey. Consequently, many police officers chose to forgo the chore of submitting a separate written application. As a result, only 30 percent of the guns seized statewide every year were being traced by ATF. Police departments across the state were depriving themselves of a powerful tool that may have connected some of the 25,000 untraced crime guns seized every year to interstate gun trafficking and street violence. This issue was of paramount concern in the northeast CorrStat region. In 2010, more than one-third of the statewide crime gun recoveries came from the CorrStat communities of Newark, East Orange, Paterson, and Jersey City.

Using technology to streamline the trace request protocols, state police leveraged their control of the CJIS/NCIC search and data entry screens. They modified the stolen inquiry screen to compel entry of gun information alongside the stolen weapon inquiry, backed up by a 2013 state attorney general’s directive requiring entry within 24 hours. In the span of a few months, ATF tracing of New Jersey crime guns jumped from 30 percent to well over 90 percent. The ATF now had a heads-up on the movement of crime guns to and throughout New Jersey and could focus upon those gun dealers and straw purchasers who were complicit in criminal sales.

The flood of New Jersey investigative leads brought about from the expanded gun tracing initiative led to the establishment of a joint task force with ATF and the creation of the NJ-Trace program. Two ATF analysts were assigned to the ROIC to ensure the accuracy of all submitted eTrace requests. eTrace responses from ATF were sent to the originating police department and to the ROIC, where analysis was conducted to reveal trends and patterns of gun trafficking and to initiate task force investigations with ATF against illegal arms merchants operating in the state. By the end of 2013, seven criminal indictments against gun traffickers had been handed down and were attributed to NJ-Trace and the ATF/NJSP Firearms Task Force.

In addition to the screen alterations, New Jersey enacted a law in 2013 ordering police departments to request an immediate trace on a gun at the time of recovery and then to deliver that gun as soon as possible to the nearest county or state laboratory with National Integrated Ballistics Identification Network (NIBIN) access capabilities.⁶

New Jersey enacted a law in 2013 ordering police departments to request an immediate trace on a gun at the time of recovery.

In early 2015, the ROIC began analyzing the stream of all recovered crime guns and possessors entered into NJ-Trace in the prior 24 hours. A CRUMB score was ascribed to the most serious and repeat gun offenders in the CorrStat region and elsewhere around the state, further identifying their involvement as shooters or victims. Mugshots and CRUMB scores, personal identifiers, and recovered gun information are circulated weekdays to the CorrStat departments in a Daily Crime Gun Recovery Report, prompting prosecutors to focus on repeat offenders for enhanced prosecution and offering detectives opportunities for source development.

The use of NIBIN has proven to be an essential part of CorrStat’s spotlight on violent gun offenders. Today, statewide NIBIN hits on crime guns are averaging more than 90 a month. The submitting police department is immediately notified of each hit, and a dedicated state police unit has been established to follow up and work with those police departments in solving a local or regional crime and identifying a serial offender.

In a recent firearms recovery report presented at the August 2018 CorrStat meeting, in the previous month, 132 crime guns were submitted to NJ-Trace by 41 law enforcement agencies statewide. Of that number, there were 58 NIBIN hits linking to 11 shooting murders, 68 shooting hits, 92 shootings (no hits), and 11 arrests for gun possession. Of the 75 felons found in possession of those guns, 33 were identified as federal trigger lock candidates, 19 had pending charges, 12 were involved in shootings and 34 had prior gun arrests.⁷

GunStat is the masthead on an ROIC product that heralds the accomplishments of the CorrStat police departments in targeting the corridor’s most violent offenders. Success is measured by the consequent investigations and arrests brought about by NIBIN ballistic hits connecting guns and crimes to those responsible. As in other ROIC and RTCC products, analysis and forensic proofs can be authoritative in persuading prosecutors to seek high bail or detention against those at most risk of continuing their violent criminal careers.

Guns with forensic value to solve incidents of violent crime were languishing in a bureaucracy of testing backlogs as they moved between several units.

Before 2015, a crime gun delivered to the state police lab for ballistics testing entered a queue that lasted up to 10 months. State police recognized that lengthy times to test crime guns was an issue of process delayed at the time of intake and examination. Guns with forensic value to solve incidents of violent crime were languishing in a bureaucracy of testing backlogs as they moved between several units.

In January 2015, the New Jersey State Police (NJSP) fundamentally altered its ballistics testing processes by rearranging the crime gun forensic examination protocols and established a “one-stop” Crime Gun Center that removed many of the administrative hindrances and consolidated testing functions under one roof.⁸ Under the new protocols, once a crime gun is submitted to the Ballistics Unit, it undergoes a 360-degree forensic analysis, to include trace evidence collection (fibers, blood, hair); latent fingerprint examination; forensic photography; ballistics analysis; swabbing triggers, grips, ammunition clips, bullets, and gun barrels for DNA; raising obliterated or defaced serial numbers; and making immediate entry into NIBIN of all test-fired or recovered shell casings.

To ensure that NIBIN hits were being promptly pursued by local and county police departments, NJSP created a Violent Crime Unit within its homicide bureau and divided it into two squads tasked with processing crime guns and pursuing NIBIN investigative leads in the field, respectively. The NIBIN processing squad expanded its daily work schedule to two shifts and quickly eliminated the backlog.

From the implementation of the protocols in January 2015 through May 2017, 4,877 crime guns have been processed, resulting in more than 800 NIBIN hits involving more than 2,000 criminal cases. Almost half of those incidents involved out-of-town offenders. Within 24 to 48 hours of submitting a crime gun to the state laboratory, the police department receives a report providing all the lead value information that was extracted from the gun, therefore expediting the progress of investigations and ending violent criminal careers. As chronicled in GunStat, the enhanced value of the crime gun protocols to the CorrStat chiefs is that it doesn’t just identify violent crime, it prevents violent crime.

 The Morning Coffee Clutch 

Information sharing is no sleight of hand. Developing a common operating picture of the criminal environment for several dozen CorrStat police departments requires a unique means of communication. There are varying intelligence and information demands that must be met. A street gang terrorizing a neighborhood in one town may be juxtaposed to another suffering from a string of push-in burglaries. To pull it all together, the RTCC fulfills hosts 9:00 a.m. conference calls every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

The CorrStat departments taking part in the morning call confront crime with tight budgets and inadequate resources and struggle with communications technology. Call participants can dial in either by phone or through access to a secure online platform operated by the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN).⁹ The call ordinarily lasts 20 minutes and covers burglary trends, local and interjurisdictional arrests, officer safety, crime gun recoveries, wanted offenders, and any other trend du jour.

Through the morning call, the RTCC gets a thrice-weekly perspective on emerging crime patterns cutting across multiple jurisdictions, as well as a heads-up on investigations that involve out-of-town felons. Each morning call generates a CorrStat Morning Call Report that is distributed to all involved in the conversation, as well as to their colleagues who could not participate.

The morning call is critical to the ROIC’s formulation of violent crime mitigation strategies for the region and yields a miscellany of analytical products circulated on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These products are designed to make smart police chiefs better informed decision makers in matters of deploying limited resources and selecting local targets for investigation.

The Daily Crime Overview adds the preceding 24 hours of CorrStat and statewide criminal activity to a continual analysis of crime trends over a five-year period. The overview chronicles incidents of carjackings, shooting hits and murders, crime gun recoveries, and police-involved shootings.

The RTCC has connectivity to all county based fixed and mobile automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the CorrStat region and others around the state, in addition to commercially purchased ALPR data from tow trucks. A special sharing agreement with the New York Police Department adds ALPR information from the five boroughs of New York City. In sum, the RTCC has access to over 6 million license plate reads every day.

When felony vehicles are identified in a criminal investigation, their license plates become “flags” in the RTCC databases. When a license plate reader spots a flagged vehicle, an immediate email notification is sent to the RTCC and the appropriate police department is contacted for additional investigation. Departments in need of vehicle information in connection to a crime receive an Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) Analysis report. The report contains all vehicle registration information and map plots, as well as ALPR location photos with date and time stamps. Through precise tracking, stolen or getaway cars in the CorrStat region are often located within hours or days of their theft or use in a crime.

ALPR technology deployment in New Jersey is continually improving. The average time to recovery of a wanted vehicle has been steadily decreasing. In 2016, on average it took 10.5 days to recover a flagged vehicle; in 2018, that recovery time is four days and dropping. Recovering stolen vehicles in a timely fashion also allows the vehicle to be processed for forensic leads.

An Intelligence Dissemination Report (IDR) is released to the CorrStat region at any time a specific criminal event or identified trend occurs, such as a series of distraction burglaries of elderly victims, suspicious pawn shop activity, or the seizure of several ghost guns. The IDR also provides valuable information to keep police officers situationally aware and safe in their surroundings by tipping off departments to street gang warfare, the presence of auto theft crews, outlaw motorcycle group rallies, or any other event where the intelligence indicates a threat of violence.

The Criminal Arrest Notification (NJCAN) flyer provides public safety officials with real-time arrest information for persons of strategic interest. The value of this notification creates opportunities for debriefing, informant development, and suggested targets for enhanced prosecution.

Through access to the statewide Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) and NJ-Trace, the ROIC publishes a Statewide Daily Arrest Report and Statewide Daily Gun Recovery Report, providing a 24-hour snapshot of individuals arrested statewide and of those arrested for criminal possession of a gun, respectively. The gun report also conveys if a suspect was involved in a prior shooting and attaches a CRUMB score to that individual.

As circumstances or events may require, the RTCC releases an Operational Support Report, providing information, temporal analysis, and current intelligence for warrant sweeps, gang takedowns, or other enforcement initiatives. To ensure officer safety, these reports afford a heads-up on known violent offenders, state parolees, federal probationers, and intelligence on any other criminal groups with a known presence in the area of enforcement operations.

The output of real-time intelligence products from the RTCC has been extraordinary and unprecedented.

The output of real-time intelligence products from the RTCC has been extraordinary and unprecedented. In five years of operation, the RTCC has circulated more than 18,000 products, including answering more than 7,700 ALPR requests and conducting 3,700 database inquiries, issuing 2,800 victim profiles, providing information on 1,300 persons of interest, and disseminating almost 200 reports on crime trends and notifications of high-profile events of public safety interest. Continually supported by the ROIC through the production of more contemplative intelligence and trend summaries, the RTCC has assisted in the progress and solution of innumerable violent crime investigations occurring inside and outside the CorrStat region.

On October 2, 2018, more than 100 federal, state, county, and local police executives attended the 116th CorrStat, held in its original meeting room at MetLife Stadium, overlooking the manicured battlefield of the Giants and Jets. They attended not only to celebrate its history, but also to plot the next evolution in crime fighting, anchored in stronger collaborations and leveraging new communications and analytical technologies. Six years of monthly CorrStat meetings and five years of 24-hour real-time support from the RTCC has brought about a fundamental and irreversible shift in crime fighting to New Jersey. The CorrStat chiefs now lift and expand their sights upon the region with an awareness that crime and criminals are not provincial, with a recognition that solutions can often be found outside the boundaries they are sworn to protect.

Notes:

¹ Former Paterson Police Director Michael Walker is now a professor of criminology at the Passaic County College.

² NNJUASI financial support to statewide and regional information sharing has been critical to the progress and sustenance of the CorrStat and ROIC information-sharing projects since their inception, investing millions of dollars of their federal allotment to build systems, technologies, and training for the crime-fighting initiatives described in this article.

³ Lisa W. Foderaro, “New Jersey Alters Its Bail System and Upends Legal Landscape,” New York Times, February 6, 2017.  

⁴ Download copy of this revised directive. .

⁵ State of New Jersey, Office of the Attorney General, “Nine Indicted on Gun Trafficking & Weapons Charges as a Result of Historic Partnership of AG’s Office, State Police, & ATF,” press release, May 27, 2010.

⁶ Using NIBIN, ballistics examiners create digital images of shell casings recovered from crime scenes or from crime guns test-fired in a laboratory and then enter those images into an ATF database that immediately seeks out comparisons with shell casings from other crimes.

⁷ The federal “Trigger Lock” law provides for prison terms of 10 years or more for convicted felons who are caught with a gun.

⁸ The reader is encouraged to view an instructive video, No Gun Left Behind: New Jersey’s Inside-Out Approach to Gun Crime..

⁹ HSIN is the preferred secure platform used by the National Fusion Center Network to share sensitive information.