A project of the Criminal Justice Reform Taskforce
By Jane Gaertner and Tom Moran
Near the beginning of 2026, longtime CJR Task Force chair, Tom Moran, and member, Jane Gaertner, had an idea which could offer progress on justice issues in the news lately. Over the past 18 months they gained solid insight into policing programs that paired police personnel with mental health workers to lessen violent incidents when police encounter persons in a mental health crisis. They learned that Rutgers University offers skilled interns to various organizations. They investigated the process and enlisted Avron Stoloff, a retired software developer, to look into the Attorney General Office’s two databases: Use of Force and NJ Arrive Together. The team is applying to RU for two interns for the summer term.
The project involves ascertaining how these two large databases relate to one another and plans to organize data to make it more useful. In a possible second internship application for Fall 2026 term, they seek to study the outcomes and submit recommendations to our legislators, state and police unions, the Attorney General Office and the Department of Law and Public Safety.
Other possible outcomes would be to:
- Partner with local and state-wide organizations to include their input, learn from their experiences with law enforcement in their communities.
- Identify patterns of police encounters with persons in possible mental health crises, eg, use of force, location, other key factors.
To better understand the current state of police and mental health worker response to mental health crises, it is important to understand the reporting on incidents that are or might be characterized as mental health incidents. We feel it would be useful to compare incidents that are characterized as mental health incidents and are treated as such by the involvement of mental health professionals, and other incidents which might have some or all of the markings of mental health incidents and which are, for various reasons, not characterized as such. In particular, it is important to track incidents that involve the use of force.
There are two main databases maintained by the state’s Office of Attorney General which address these incidents and record the data. These are (1) The Use of Force Database AG Use of Force DB, and (2) The Arrive Together Database, Arrive Together Data. These databases presumably often report on the same incident from different points of view. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to match incidents across these databases. This is one of the major tasks this project undertakes from a data architecture point of view.
Within each of these two databases, some data issues beg for attention. Many individual fields of each database are used as rather free-form entry brackets. Given this, it is difficult to collate data on what is ostensibly a single item of interest.
- An immediate goal of this project is to analyze the existing data architecture of these databases.
- The next step is to offer a modified architecture and to determine whether that architecture can be readily implemented, given the real constraints under which these databases have been implemented, and what kind of effort such a revision would require.
- Following that, we want to implement the preferred architecture on a “test bed” database and pull all the existing data from each of these databases into the target structure.
- Finally, we can test queries against these modified data structures as proof that these modifications actually lead to databases that are easier to query and that produce more usable data to those launching queries against them. This will take straightforward data analysis and categorization.
We also seek an automated process which can take the newly released monthly updates and distinguish new data from old data.
We will then isolate the new data, and push it through our parsing machinery to merge the data.
There are additional testing procedures we will design and run to ensure accuracy of our work.
A next level of analysis will require different analytical skills, as we look to analyze the effectiveness of NJ Arrive Together in the context of Use of Force data.
Jane Gaertner has served on the Unitarian Universalist FaithAction-NJ Criminal Justice Reform Taskforce for 7 years. She is a member of UU Congregation at Montclair.
Tom Moran is a retired database analyst and database developer. He has been active in NJ Politics, on the Board of Trustees at UU FaithAction NJ, and currently as Chair of the Criminal Justice Reform Taskforce. Tom is a member of the Morristown UU Fellowship.
Also on the team: Avron Stoloff, a retired software developer, database administrator and teacher. He is active in NJ criminal justice reform, most recently through the Criminal Justice Reform Taskforce and is a member of UU Congregation at Montclair.