With a year left in office, Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey is expected to outline his final priorities on Tuesday during his seventh State of the State address before a joint session of the Legislature in Trenton.
Mr. Murphy, a two-term Democrat, said on Monday that his to-do list remained long, and he indicated that it included an effort to address the alarming increase in roadway fatalities that have occurred in New Jersey during his second term.
Traffic fatalities nationwide have been declining. In New Jersey, however, they spiked by roughly 14 percent last year.
The increase coincided with a drastic reduction in traffic enforcement by State Police troopers, who in July 2023 began writing far fewer tickets for speeding, drunken driving, cellphone use and other violations.
The reduced enforcement began a week after the state’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, released a report critical of the performance of the State Police, New Jersey’s largest policing agency. Mr. Platkin has appointed Preet Bharara, a prominent former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, to lead a criminal investigation of the slowdown.
On Monday, when asked about the relationship between traffic fatalities and the reduced levels of enforcement, Mr. Murphy said, “We have to enforce the laws.”
“If we’re not enforcing the laws on the books that’s unacceptable,” he told reporters after he signed a bill adopted last month by the Legislature that creates a commission dedicated to reducing the number of traffic fatalities in New Jersey to zero by 2040.
Last year, there were 691 traffic deaths in New Jersey, up from 606 the year before. Pedestrian fatalities soared by 32 percent.
During the first quarter of last year, State Police troopers who are responsible for patrolling New Jersey’s well-traveled highways, waterways and rural roads issued far fewer tickets than the year before.
In August 2023, the first full month of the slowdown, troopers wrote 81 percent fewer tickets statewide, according to records obtained by The New York Times through public records requests.
The reduced levels of enforcement did not show signs of ending until eight months later, making it the longest and broadest slowdown in modern policing, according to academics who study traffic data and law enforcement tactics in the United States.
The report released just before the slowdown analyzed 10 years of State Police traffic stops and found glaring racial disparities in road safety enforcement. The day it became public, Mr. Platkin, the state’s top law enforcement official, announced a pilot program to address the disparate enforcement patterns. But backlash from State Police leaders was so intense that the plan was never implemented.
Mr. Murphy is the only official in New Jersey with the power to replace the State Police superintendent, Col. Patrick Callahan, who led the department during the slowdown and through several of the years highlighted by the traffic-stop report. On Monday, however, the governor worked to shift accountability for the slowdown away from himself and instead place full responsibility on Mr. Platkin and Colonel Callahan.
“It’s on their backs to get this into the right place,” Mr. Murphy said, adding that he had confidence in both men.
A spokesman for Colonel Callahan did not respond to a request for comment.
The governor also said that he anticipated making “some news” during Tuesday’s State of the State address in connection with a plan to address the uptick in traffic fatalities.
“We’re going to talk about a different approach,” he said.
He also indicated that in his final year in Trenton, the state capital, he intended to continue to tackle what he called a “huge agenda.”
“You might think that if you’re in the eighth year out of eight that the cupboard may have run dry,” he said. “I think we’re going to prove tomorrow that the opposite is true.”
The address is scheduled to start at 3 p.m.
Mr. Murphy is prohibited by law from running for more than two consecutive terms, and the race to replace him is already in full swing. Six prominent Democrats and four Republicans are competing for their party’s nomination to run for governor in the June primaries.
The list of contenders includes the mayors of the state’s two largest cities, two members of Congress and a former Republican Assembly member who came within three percentage points of beating Mr. Murphy in 2021.
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