“Public safety has become so important in the minds of average citizens that state officials don’t trust local officials to govern on this issue effectively,” said Andrew Sidman, a political scientist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Many Democrats, like Mr. Platkin, have focused on police abuses and discriminatory enforcement, while state and federal Republican interventions in local police matters focus on empowering police officers at a time when crime rates have decreased only moderately since a sharp uptick during the pandemic.
In Jackson, Miss., the Republican supermajority in the state House of Representatives passed a bill, signed into law in April, giving the state-controlled Capitol Police jurisdiction over the city, where the local government is controlled by Democrats. Every Republican in the Mississippi House is white, and Jackson is 83 percent Black, which led some critics to describe the move as racist. Republicans countered that the goal is to make the city safer.
In Missouri, Republicans in the State Legislature attempted to place the St. Louis Police Department under state control, citing an increase in crime in the city. They also moved to replace the city’s prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, a Democrat whom Republicans viewed as soft on crime. The police takeover failed. But Ms. Gardner resigned, and Gov. Mike Parson chose a replacement.
And in Washington, D.C., Congress passed two bills this year overturning progressive changes to the district’s criminal justice system. In March President Biden signed one of the bills, overriding revisions to the city’s criminal code that reduced maximum penalties for some crimes.
New Jersey has attempted to overhaul problematic police departments in the past. When the attorney general’s office took command of the police department in Camden, in 1998, during a crime wave, it was accompanied by curfews, increased surveillance and more officers on the street, said Jason Williams, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University. In 2013, the then governor, Chris Christie, disbanded the Camden Police Department, breaking the police union’s contract and replacing the force with nonunionized officers.
County prosecutors in New Jersey occasionally have responded to complaints about police departments by taking over the local agency’s internal affairs unit, said Brian Higgins, formerly the chief of police in Bergen County, which borders Paterson.
