One year after Jeff Chiesa became New Jersey’s attorney general, he says progress has been made in several areas. He told NJ Today Managing Editor Mike Schneider that his office is working to reduce the amount of human trafficking, gun violence and drugs in the state and said he is honored to serve as attorney general.
Chiesa said he loves his job and sees it as a way to impact the state through criminal work, consumer protection and civil rights work. “It’s a wonderful opportunity and one I’m very grateful to the governor for,” he said.
Human trafficking has been a focus of Chiesa’s. He said New Jersey has a problem with the practice partly because of its location between Philadelphia and New York City and also because it is a coastal state. “There’s a lot of ways to get into New Jersey and we have a very diverse population and we have a lot of citizens who are vulnerable to this because they’re being taken advantage of by predators,” he said.
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Last summer, Chiesa issued a directive requiring county prosecutors to allocate resources to stop human trafficking. “I’ve created a standalone division within my department to address human trafficking and we’re already starting to do cases. We have an ongoing case in Atlantic City that we brought about two months ago,” he said. “And we continue to do these cases because what you’re talking about are younger people who are new to the country or people who may not have a community or family supporting them and they’re drawn in under lies and false pretenses into something that may be for their educational benefit they’re told or for their financial benefit.”
Getting guns off the street is another initiative Chiesa supports and he touted the gun buyback program as a good way to spend forfeiture money, which is collected from violent criminals. A recent gun buyback in Camden yielded a record number of collected weapons. Chiesa said the program brought in 1,137 weapons, including five fully automatic assault rifles, dozens of sawed-off shotguns and semi-automatic weapons. He said some of the guns were used to kill Camden police officers in the past. One interesting anecdote Chiesa shared was of one man who brought an elephant shotgun — a weapon used to kill elephants — to the buyback program.
“He was told at the time it was a $15,000 gun. The most we could pay was $250. And he felt so strongly about not having this gun laying around after he was gone, he said, ‘I’ll take whatever you give me.’ And he left us with that gun that day,” Chiesa said, explaining that the man had the gun legally but no longer used it for recreational purposes.
Chiesa said there are plans in the works to expand the guy buyback program to other communities in New Jersey. “I think it’s a great way of spending our forfeiture money,” he said.
Cracking down on drug trafficking in the state has been another project of Chiesa’s. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure that we’re combating it relentlessly,” he said, calling it a multi-step process. Part of the process is targeting drug dealers who fund gang activity and terrorize communities, he explained. Another component is educating individuals about the dangers of drug abuse, including the misuse of prescription drugs.
“We’ve gotta be relentless in our aggressive enforcement of the law seeking harsh sentences and also educating people so they understand the harm that can come from inappropriate use of prescription drugs which can lead to drug abuse,” Chiesa said.
The Star-Ledger recently wrote a story about how the state police still has problems as an agency despite improvements. Chiesa disagrees that there has been back-sliding with the state police, citing his work with the agency on aggressive child pornography cases and drug issues that put troopers in harm’s way. He also praised their work during and after Hurricane Sandy.
“We call them to do so many things every day. I understand that there are a small few that don’t do the right thing and create problems for the state police, but my experience in the first year has been it’s an incredibly professional organization,” Chiesa said. “The work and the impact that they have on the state is enormous and it’s one that I’m proud to work with.”