Gurbir S. Grewal, Attorney General of the State of New Jersey (Photo by David Handschuh/NYLJ)

New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said his department is all about doing more with less: holding more community forums, encouraging more inter-agency dialogue, and creating more task forces.

He also testified in Trenton Tuesday that he wants more transparency and law enforcement officers made accountable for their actions, and that's why he issued a directive requiring law enforcement agencies to promptly release video footage of officer-involved shootings and created the Office of Public Integrity and Accountability last fall.

Grewal told the Senate Budget Committee that he wanted to accomplish all of those objectives while trimming his department's budget by 8.4 percent from fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2020, with a proposed $45.5 million budget.

He said the trimmed budget was a  result of “less overtime and it was a lapse in some supplemental funding for outside counsel that we're not requesting for the coming year,” he said. “There were other reductions in one-time lapses in other programs that we already had enough money for in the budget.

“It's just being responsible,” he told the Senate panel on Tuesday in Committee Room 4 in the State House Annex. “It was just doing a deep dive and finding savings where we can find savings.”

Other ways, he said, included “suing the [Trump] Administration when we need to, or writing comment letters to push back against rule-making at the federal level in collaboration with other states, and we haven't increased the total number of lawyers across our department. We are just re-purposing our folks.”

The department has about 7,700 employees and directly oversees nearly 3,000 law enforcement officers within the department, including members of the New Jersey State Police and the Division of Criminal Justice, and indirectly supervises more than 30,000 state, county and local officers across New Jersey, according to Grewal.

The new fiscal year starts July 1, and the Legislature is charged with coming up with a balanced budget in Trenton by June 30. The budget committees for the Senate and Assembly are engaged in budget hearings over the next several weeks to get there.

In his testimony, Grewal outlined his agency's accomplishments over the past year and what he was most proud of.

He cited the AG's office joining with the state Department of Environmental Protection in filing lawsuits to take polluters to task, including three “natural resource damage” cases , or “NRDs,” the first such cases filed in a decade in New Jersey.

“As of last week, we have now filed nine NRDs … for leaving a toxic legacy in the Garden State,” he said.

He also pointed to historic multi-state settlements with two major financial institutions: Wells Fargo, which Grewal said will result in $17 million for the state, and another with UBS, which will bring $5 million back to the state.

Grewal said his department has repeatedly taken on the federal government when it violated the rights of individual residents and immigrants.

“We have stood up, for example, to protect the rights of women, to ensure worker safety, to prevent oil drilling off our coast, to protect DREAMers from deportation, to allow transgender officers to serve in our military; and to prevent a back-door tax increase on property owners,” he testified.

When asked by the panel to elaborate on problems, such as the growing opioid addiction and gun violence, Grewal—the first Sikh-American attorney general in the U.S.—often drew from his experiences as former Bergen County prosecutor.

“As a career prosecutor, I've seen how gun violence can destroy lives and tear apart communities,” Grewal said in his testimony. “Our country's gun violence epidemic is a full-blown public health crisis and we must respond to it using the same playbook we're deploying against the opioid epidemic—a multi-pronged approach that incorporates prevention, treatment and enforcement.

“With respect to enforcement, we are aggressively prosecuting violent criminals by taking down rings that traffic in guns and drugs,” he said.

Senate Budget Chairman Paul Sarlo, D-Bergen, remarked about Grewal's “very busy and successful past year” at the start of Tuesday's hearing.

The AG said his four priority areas during his first year under Gov. Phil Murphy remain the same for the coming fiscal year:

• Standing up for the rights of New Jersey residents in court—meaning, pushing back against federal authorities when the rule of law is violated;
• Fighting the state's opioid crisis;
• Reducing gun violence; and
• Promoting police-community relations.

Said Grewal: “More with less, more task forces, more collaborations with other agencies that relieve the burden that we would have to face individually if we didn't work collaboratively.”

As part of this approach, Grewal last year launched the “21 County, 21st Century Community Policing Project,” or simply “21/21,” where prosecutors host quarterly community events on issues of public concern in each of the state's 21 counties.

Campus sexual assault is one such topic that will be tackled this fall.

Grewal drew praise from another committee member.

“My district office has worked really well with his office in his first year,” said Declan O'Scanlon, R-Monmouth, during a break in the hearing. O'Scanlon last year introduced a package of bills aimed at municipal court reform. “On criminal justice reform, municipal court reform, on looking at police use of force reform—we are very close on those things.

“I think we have a shot with this attorney general helping lead the charge of making really serious changes in those areas that will give the public justifiably more confidence in our judicial system and great police forces throughout New Jersey,” he added.