New Jersey State Police were facing accusations of racial profiling before a report revealed a sharp decline in traffic stops that coincided with a rise in crashes, some of them fatal.

Now they’re facing a special counsel investigation from the state attorney general’s office, leaving troopers in a difficult position as they try to protect the public as well as their own careers amid intense scrutiny that advocates see as anti-police. 

“If you enforce traffic laws, crashes go down. If you do not enforce them, crashes go up,” said Betsy Brantner Smith, spokesperson for the National Police Association who spent three decades on the job. “Accidents are largely created by a disparity in speed, and unless we want to admit that, then we’re going to fix it.”

State troopers were accused of profiling minority drivers in a report from the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office of Public Integrity and Accountability that looked at stops between 2009 and 2021. Then they were told by union leaders that every stop they made would go under the microscope, according to a New York Times report. For months, they made fewer stops than normal. 

“The public knows this, undoubtedly, that the police have been cut off at the knees,” she told Fox News Digital. “This is just a very soft way to be anti-police. It’s almost a way to defund the police without defunding, without talking about defunding them, without making anti-police statements publicly.”

Despite the pressure campaign, she said criminal charges against state police as a result of the special counsel investigation seem like a long shot based on how the Supreme Court has ruled on what police are responsible for.

“The most ridiculous part of this is the criminal investigation,” she added. “The most horrific part of it are these additional accidents.”