By Charles Boyer
Last week, community advocate Terry Collins traveled from Gloucester County to address a crowd of local leaders and residents at a community event in Elizabeth. His message was simple but resonant: “We are tired of the war on African-Americans. Now is the time for us to find our peace.”
At the event, pastors, academics, poets, and students joined alongside Collins to amplify an urgent message for state leaders — police are not keeping our communities safe.
Community members call for funding, resources, community involvement, and a holistic understanding of residents' needs.
The police-only approach to public safety has been the dominant policy in our state for decades. Police officers are required to address issues of homelessness, youth disengagement, drug use, and mental health crises, yet they are not equipped with the expertise or training to effectively de-escalate and resolve these delicate situations.
We’re seeing the consequences of that policy failure.
Police violence is at an all-time high, overdose deaths have continued to climb, and our communities have never felt less safe. As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer - everything looks like a nail - and police departments have been hammering away at our communities for generations.
For far too long, New Jersey’s leaders have been making the wrong call for public safety by spending increasing amounts of time, funding, and resources into local police departments without community involvement or a holistic understanding of the needs of residents.
Residents from across the state are developing their own alternatives to violent, racist policing and charting a new vision for substance use and overdose response in New Jersey.
To make the right call, our state’s leaders need to listen to communities and invest in community-backed solutions for crisis response. That’s why residents from across the state are developing their own alternatives to violent, racist policing and charting a new vision for substance use and overdose response in New Jersey.
Months after state-sanctioned police violence against Black people reached a boiling point nationwide, we brought together residents from across the state who have been most impacted by over-policing to share experiences, discuss solutions, and determine a path forward. From those discussions and debates came Make the Right C.A.L.L., a brand-new campaign co-created by my organization, Salvation and Social Justice, and community members to reimagine the state’s response to substance use and mental health emergencies.
Make the Right C.A.L.L. aims to empower local residents on how to best deliver public safety in their communities.
Make the Right C.A.L.L. aims to empower local residents to determine how best to deliver public safety in their communities, minimize the role of police in crisis response, and create viable alternatives to modern policing through investments in community resources.
We identified an important truth: New Jersey’s police-only approach to substance use and overdoses doesn’t work. A new report from the New Jersey Policy Perspective found that drug violations accounted for approximately 21% of all arrests in 2019. Of those arrests, 43% were Black, despite Black residents only making up 15% of the New Jersey population.
Our campaign report details the trauma embedded in our communities as a result of aggressive police tactics. Residents of Elizabeth and Gloucester County expressed a sense of “hypersensitivity-yet-numbness” as police violence becomes routine and community healing can never begin.
The emphasis on the “War on Drugs” and the dehumanization of people experiencing drug use or mental health-related issues is harmful and often deadly, as police presence can escalate a situation when empathy and resources would be more effective. In New Jersey, there are more police and correctional officers than counselors and social workers combined and police spending outpaces investments in health and human services.
New Jerseyans are demanding lawmakers reverse the decades-long trend of pouring money into police departments while disinvesting in health and human services. Residents want investments in housing, education, mental health services, harm reduction, and restorative justice to address the root causes of the issues affecting our towns and cities.
Our communities need an alternative to police that includes mental health professionals, social workers, and other emergency personnel.
New Jersey lawmakers must align budgets with community demands. We have a chance to end the vicious cycle of violence, distrust, and trauma that weighs heavy on every family in over-policed communities. It’s time to make the right call for New Jersey. The true safety of our communities depends on it.
The Rev. Dr. Charles Franklin Boyer is the pastor of Greater Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Trenton and the founder of Salvation and Social Justice, a non-partisan Black faith-rooted organization that believes liberation should precede legislation and prophetic vision should precede public policy.
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