New Jersey’s lawmakers have been consistently incompetent in passing necessary police and social justice reforms, including – but not limited to -- their failure to establish civilian complaint review boards, eliminate qualified immunity, and making internal affairs records public, as they do in more than a dozen other states.
But the Senate Budget Committee took a monumental step Thursday by advancing a bill that would create and fund Community Crisis Response Teams, whose intervention strategies for dealing with mental health episodes are unquestionably more effective than a police response that includes guns drawn and sirens blazing.