- The New Jersey Office of the State Comptroller says that NJ police give “preferential treatment” to some motorists.
- Those drivers simply had a “courtesy card” from another officer, claimed to know a cop, or flashed a badge themselves.
- Bodycam video shows several instances of exactly this behavior.
All citizens are equal before the law, right? Well, apparently not as far as the State Police in New Jersey is concerned. According to an investigation by the Office of the State Comptroller, the department routinely provides preferential treatment to some drivers. Those drivers offer a courtesy card to the officer, claim to know another police officer well, or simply flash a badge. Across 501 no-enforcement stops made by the NJSP, 139 showed evidence of this preferential treatment.
The OSC says that bodycam footage of no-enforcement stops is rarely reviewed. These are stops where “tickets were not given, arrests were not made, and no one was even ordered to exit their vehicle.” The stops reviewed by the OSC all come from a small 10-day period in late 2022. As mentioned above, in 139 of the 501 stops, drivers received preferential treatment.
More: NYPD Cop Claims Officers’ Friends And Family Given “Courtesy Cards” To Get Out Of Tickets
In one case, officers pulled over a speeding Alfa Romeo Stelvio. It was weaving between lanes, not using turn signals, and driving at over 94 mph (151 km/h). When officers first made contact with the driver, he immediately gave them a card indicating that he had a relationship with another officer. He then admitted to having two drinks at the place where he’d just been. The officers who pulled him over tried to contact the cop that the driver reportedly knew.
When they can’t reach said officer one of the two says “I’ll do the right fXXking thing,” before letting the driver go with little more than a verbal slap on the wrist. He even admits to the driver that “If you didn’t have this (the absent officer’s card), we’d be going a whole different way,” and then that “Let’s be real, you crash… there’s going to be a fXXking problem, right?” It would seem that he’s openly admitting that he would personally be liable to some degree if the driver crashed the car later down the road.
In a second video, officers pull over a woman speeding in a Kia at over 100 mph (162 km/h). At first, she pulls off to the left side of the highway before the officer gets out, corrects her, and tells her to pull over to the right side of the road. In that simple maneuver it’s clear that she frustrates the officer as she cuts off traffic to try and move directly across the active highway. There, she tells the officer that her father is a lieutenant. He goes back to his car, confirms that, and lets her go.
The OSC says that in almost half of the stops it reviewed, “drivers were speeding, sometimes well over 90 miles per hour, and did not receive a ticket.” Ultimately, it found several important points. “Courtesy cards – which are given out by police labor associations and sold by private companies online – appear to be in wide usage and function as accepted currency.” In addition, it asserts that “In short, this two-tiered system of justice that provides differing treatment for those with law enforcement connections and those without is unethical, discriminatory, and fundamentally unfair.”
For now, it’s recommended a few things to the NJSP. It wants leadership to review videos like this more often. It also wants the NJSP to issue a new directive “prohibiting law enforcement officers from considering” the relationship that a driver has to any member of law enforcement or their own personal status in such a field”. It remains to be seen if any of these recommendations come to pass or if they reduce the use of courtesy cards in New Jersey.