We're taking a deeper look at what can be a deadly intersection policing and mental health and the accountability that remains rare.

A 2019 state law was meant to change that.

Yet more than six years later, indictments are nearly nonexistent and the public still has no clear or centralized way to track deadly police involved encounters.

The issue was put back in focus after the police involved shooting of a New Brunswick woman experiencing a mental health crisis.

Our senior writer, Colleen O'Dea and mental health writer Bobby Brier teamed up to look into the issue and join us now.

Colleen, Bobby, thanks for coming on the show.

You both tackled this story from sort of two different lenses.

And Bobby, I want to start with you.

Looking at this troubling trend when it comes to police involvement in mental health crises and you sort of zeroed in on this incident in New Brunswick that has renewed the spotlight on this issue.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and what you were able to uncover?

Yeah, Bri, what we know right now is that Deborah Terrell, a 68 year-old resident of the John P. Fricano Towers senior high rise in New Brunswick was shot and killed by a New Brunswick police officer during a mental health crisis earlier this month.

It was the second time that police were called to that apartment complex that morning, the first time around 5 a.m., the time the shooting took place was around 8 a.m., according to other news reports.

So that's what we've learned initially.

The investigation is still ongoing from the attorney general's office, and we still have not seen a release of the body cam footage from that office.

The remaining outstanding question so far is really whether the state's Arrive Together program, that program that pairs police officers with mental health professionals, was on the scene at the time of the shooting.

We have not heard that either yet from the attorney general's office.

Yeah, And I want to get to that program.

But in your reporting, you noted, you know, this was not an isolated case.

What type of patterns did you note through your investigating, emerged from the way the state handles police-involved shootings when there are folks who are having a mental health crisis?

Yes, that's right.

We know that these types of shootings automatically go under the investigation from the attorney general's office.

And then that relates to an investigation that takes place ultimately leading to a straight state grand jury decision.

It should be noted that this latest shooting in New Brunswick really comes on the heels of the indictment, and the lack of indictment, rather, against the Fort Lee police officer earlier this summer who shot and killed Victoria Lee during a mental health crisis in July of last year.

In addition to that, there has been two previous no indictment charges, criminal charges against police officers.

The first one against the officer who shot and killed Andrew Washington in July excuse me, in August of 2023.

In addition to that, against the officer who shot and killed Najee Seabrooks in Paterson a few years ago.

So this is a disturbing trend that advocates have told me often leads to no indictment charges.

And they're really calling on the state Legislature right now to pass reforms beyond just talking points and lip service, to really get to the heart of the matter, which would often be revising the state's use of force policy every other year, as well as kind of developing these what they call civilian complaint review boards to be able to review police conduct in municipalities and counties throughout the state.

I mean, at least one reform, Colleen, came from the attorney general's office in 2019, which put them, as Bobby mentioned, in charge of keeping track of any police-involved fatality.

That could be obviously a shooting.

But also when there's a high speed pursuit, a chase, something of that nature.

I know you combed through a lot of data.

What did you find about how accessible that is?

And are we able to really track a lot of this now?

Yeah.

So first, I do want to note that, you know, it was a law passed in 2019, kind of because legislators were really very concerned that there were very, very few indictments in any of these cases.

So when you say very few, can you give us an example?

We didn't have numbers back then, but we were told, almost none.

So what we know today is and this is from looking through essentially press releases and then corresponding those or correlating those with use of force documents.

We know that there have been more than 100 deaths either in custody due to shootings due to high speed chases since late January of 2019, which is when the change in the law took effect.

Of those, there have been three indictments, one of which was later thrown out by a judge.

So there were only two indictments that stood, one in a shooting case.

And we're in a high speed chase.

So advocates are saying that this system really has not proven to be any better than than the previous system where county prosecutors used to investigate these and then bring them to grand juries.

Yeah, I mean, why haven't they created a public centralized database?

You said you combed through documents, you reported you combed through hundreds of press releases, which, I mean, not everybody has access to.

It's a really good question.

And the way that the attorney general's website is, is set up, it's not easy.

Once you read, you can go back, you know, several pages to find an old press release.

Once you read it, it puts you back on the first page.

So you've got to kind of work your way back.

It's not an easy thing to do, and it's a very good question.

You know, we have the use of force database, which has been in effect for several years now.

And that tells us by Department of how many officers have used excessive force.

And that can be anything from using your arms or a punch using a taser to, you know, discharging a weapon.

The only way looking at that database to know if someone was fatally shot is by looking under a column that is called Reason Suspect Not Arrested, and then it will say deceased.

And even all of those do not correlate completely with the number of fatal shootings that we've been looking at.

So even that's an imperfect measure.

Wow.

I mean, Bobby, I know you spoke with a number of advocates and families.

What are they saying needs to happen?

You know, I spoke to the nephew of Deborah Terrell, and he had spoken about the fact that he would like to see a shift in the culture of the police force in New Jersey.

He had said that while directives and laws and rules recently have been effective, at least to some degree, at raising awareness, he said an underlying cultural shift needs to happen not just in New Brunswick, but also throughout the state.

He said until that happens, there's really going to be a repeated pattern of these instances.

And unfortunately, this is the fourth shooting incident that we've seen here in the state in which police have shot and killed somebody in a mental health crisis in recent years.

So his issue is more with the culture rather than the rules and regulations themselves.

Colleen, are there talks about reforming this further?

I mean, you mentioned that tab, the Reason Subject Not Arrested tab it's an obscure category and I imagine that it really prevents folks from getting the real picture of what the real numbers are, what's being done at the state or the legislative level.

So right now, nothing, because the Legislature is in recess.

We certainly I don't think we will see the Senate or Assembly fully back in until after the election.

We see this in election years, you know, but certainly the legislators who put this in place years ago and there are a number of legislators who are very supportive of greater transparency.

So we'll have to see what comes out of that.

We have also seen, by the way, though, in recent years, the last couple of years, that, you know, we are a Democratic-controlled Legislature, that that the Democrats have been leery to put forth any additional, I guess you'd say, you know, legislation that would seem to look like it is anti-police or so.

I'm not sure what else we will.

We'll see.

You know, they're looking for more tough on crime kind of legislation, or at least that's the way they've been trending in the last couple of years.

All right.

Colleen O'Dea and Bobby Brier for us.

You can read all of their reporting on our website, NJSpotlightNews.org Thanks to you both.

Thanks, Bri.

Thanks, Bri.