Five NJ cities that account for 10% of population had 62% of shooting victims in 2021

New Jersey’s shooting statistics highlight a stark disparity in the way gun violence affects the people of the state, with five major cities enduring a significantly disproportionate share of the pain.

Camden, Jersey City, Newark, Paterson and Trenton account for 10% of the state’s population but had 62% of New Jersey’s 1,412 fatal and nonfatal shooting victims in 2021.

The rate of gun violence for those cities in 2021 was almost 10 times higher than for the rest of New Jersey, according to a Paterson Press and USA TODAY Network New Jersey analysis of state police shooting data.

The five cities had 58 shooting victims for every 100,000 residents last year, compared with 6.35 victims per 100,000 people in New Jersey’s other 559 municipalities.

Activists, crime experts and public officials said they were not surprised by the imbalance in New Jersey’s shooting statistics, noting that the disparity has been a longstanding trend in the state.

Community leaders said they believe the concentration of shootings in the state’s main cities stems from chronic problems that have afflicted urban areas for decades, such as poverty, drug addiction, unemployment, ineffective schools, inferior housing and institutional racism.

Data analysis: Amid nationwide gun violence surge, NJ shootings up 6% in 2021

'Divestment of community resources'

“Black and brown communities have experienced a significant divestment of community resources, and that has compounded over the decades,” said Brooke Lewis, associate counsel for the Newark-based New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. “If you don’t have access to quality education, if you don’t have access to quality housing, if you don’t have access to quality health care, all of that impacts public safety.”

Jason Williams, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University and a Black Lives Matter activist, said structural weaknesses in the inner cities, such as a poor educational system, persistent poverty, the reverberation of the war on drugs and social inequality, have contributed to the surge in violence.

And being raised in a more violent world makes people more prone to be violent themselves, he said.

“You are who you are around,” Williams said. “If you’re socialized into violence, that’s what you become. For me, it’s: How do we erase that?”

Story continues below chart.

Brian Higgins, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, said he was not surprised at the discrepancy between the five cities’ shooting rates and the rest of the state.

“Urban areas, where you have a higher concentration of people, tend to have more crime,” said Higgins, a former chief of the Bergen County Police Department. “Urban environments are going to have people who are lower on the economic scale. It’s a money thing. It’s an economic thing.”

'We will deploy all available tools'

When asked about the imbalance in shootings, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office said reducing gun violence is its top priority and cited more than a dozen recent announcements about anti-crime initiatives and police crackdowns in the state’s urban areas.

“The challenges these five cities face are sadly not new, and the disparity in gun violence statistics between these cities and other locations in the state is a difficult and complicated issue involving a number of factors,” acting Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said in a written statement.

Platkin described a double-barreled approach to combating gun violence — providing law enforcement agencies with the latest technology, like gunshot detection systems, while funding community-based prevention programs.

“We will deploy all available tools to stop violent criminals while working with the administration to address the root causes and drivers of gun violence throughout New Jersey,” Platkin said.

Legislation: NJ mayors want to alter bail reform to jail those arrested on gun charges before trial

Keith Germain, vice president of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police, said he would be more surprised if the numbers didn’t show those five cities with the worst rates. The statistics indicate that citizens in the communities that have most harshly attacked law enforcement have predictably suffered most heavily from the surge in violent crime, he said.

“The people who need the police most are in the places where we have academics telling us, ‘Police aren’t the solution,’ ” said Germain, police chief in Barnegat. “Well, they seem to have been a pretty good solution for the last several decades.”

Germain said local politicians and the people in the communities they serve need to support police by letting them do their jobs. Suburban cops often see markedly more support, he said. That makes a difference.

“The cops can’t do it by themselves,” Germain said. “But the signal they’re getting from their government entities is, ‘We don’t want you to work, we don’t want you to police these communities, we don’t want them overpoliced.’ ”

COVID complications

Many people interviewed for this story cited the widespread belief that COVID-19 has fueled violence in American cities. The data for New Jersey shows that the statistical disparity was more pronounced before the pandemic.

In 2019, the state’s five highest-crime cities accounted for 70% of the shooting victims in New Jersey, our analysis found. In 2020, that rate fell to 66%, and it dropped to 62% last year.

The data shows that some cities outside the “big five” endured substantial jumps in gun violence in 2021, which may explain why the concentration of shootings in a handful of places diminished somewhat. For example, the number of victims last year increased by 50% in Elizabeth, by 16% in Irvington, by 150% in Passaic and by 275% in Vineland, according to the state police statistics.

Story continues below chart.

Williams, the Montclair State professor, said the pandemic had a significant economic impact on the inner cities that he doesn’t feel has been captured in the nuanced fashion it demands. He said the mental health crisis that came with COVID hit places like Paterson or Newark or Trenton particularly hard.

“All of that builds up,” Williams said. “And a lot of the young kids in the inner cities don’t know how to address their feelings — they go out and engage in violent behavior because they have no way to vent in the proper way. So I think the pandemic, the economic effects and the mental health component caused a lot more of the violence in those areas … There’s a lot more going on than what’s typically said.”

Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., the former mayor of Paterson who now represents that city in Congress, noted that there has been a spike in crime across the country.

“Cities are tragically the first place negative impacted when these trends rear up,” Pascrell said. “Pandemic fatigue, population density, the continued flood of guns into states, formerly closed schools — there is sadly no single cause to pinpoint.

“But that any of our communities feel persistently unsafe on their streets cannot be wished away, and we need a whole-of-government approach to beat back these negative trends,” the congressman added.

Pascrell asserted that local law enforcement agencies need an increase in funding, and he cited federal programs designed to help cities hire more cops and track crime guns.

But Zellie Thomas, leader of Paterson’s Black Lives Matter group, sees the situation differently.

“We don’t need more police, we need more resources,” Thomas said. “If you look at the locations where these shootings are happening, you see high poverty, you see a lot of drug activity, you see not enough good housing.”

Even within high-crime cities, there are disparities in gun violence levels, Thomas added.

“In all these communities you have hot spots,” he said, “and they didn’t become hot spots just last year. They’ve been the same hot spots for 10 years and 20 years.”

In Paterson, for example, the city’s 4th Ward had 231 shootings from 2016 through 2021, according to data compiled by Paterson Press. In contrast, Paterson’s 2nd Ward had 30 shootings during that same time, its 3rd Ward had 33 shootings and its 6th Ward had just 18.

The Rev. Allen Boyer, a longtime clergyman in Paterson’s 4th Ward, said too many young people in the city grow up without one or both of their parents.

“They get lost in the crowd on the streets and they get influenced by the wrong people,” he said.

Boyer, who is African American, said racism contributes to the social problems that result in shootings.

“They try to keep us in a certain place where we end up turning on each other,” he said. “Black-on-Black crime is too high. I just don’t understand it.”

'Urban centers have always struggled'

Trenton ranks second in per capita shootings in New Jersey, its numbers surpassed only by Camden’s.

“Influx of illegal firearms are probably the biggest factor, which are all too readily available on the street,” said Will Skaggs, a spokesman for Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora. “This ready supply of weapons combined with historic neighborhood conflicts, increased economic hardship from COVID-19, and persistent mental health and addiction problems have exacerbated this problem greatly.

“Urban centers have always struggled with these issues more than their suburban neighbors, so naturally we have been hit even harder during COVID-19,” he added.

Gusciora, Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka are part of a group of urban mayors who say New Jersey’s bail reform enacted several years ago made it too easy for people accused of gun crimes to return to the streets while their charges were still pending. That group has been pushing for changes in state law that would keep gun suspects jailed while they await trial.

Higgins, the john Jay College criminal justice professor, said bail reform has likely affected violent crime in sometimes unanticipated ways. For instance, in the time before bail reform, a suspect might sit in jail for days after an arrest. This would give people time to calm down and separate themselves from whatever situation put them in the lockup.

But now, they’re back on the street within hours. And they’re still angry.

“I think we need to take a look at some of these policies that are just not working,” Higgins said. “There’s a direct connection to enforcement.”

But Lewis, the lawyer from the social justice group, raised concerns about what she called “knee-jerk” reactions to the rise in gun violence that she said could result in “mass incarcerations.” Lewis said community-based violence intervention programs staffed with “trusted messengers” like former shooting victims represent the best way to directly address the rise in gun violence.

Joe Malinconico is editor of Paterson Press.

Email: editor@patersonpress.com

Steve Janoski covers law enforcement for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news about those who safeguard your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

Twitter: @stevejanoski

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ gun violence: Paterson, Newark among high shooting rates