This N.J. county has the fewest number of homicides over the last decade. Here’s why. – NJ.com

A 38-year-old New Jersey native was killed in Delaware Township on Sunday, her death marking the first homicide in Hunterdon County in 2020.

Murders in New Jersey are especially rare in this county, which between 2010 and September 2020 held the fewest number of homicides of any county in New Jersey, according to New Jersey State Police records.

Prior to Sunday, seven murders have taken place in Hunterdon County since 2010. These occurred in 2012, 2013, 2018 and 2019 — meaning that there were no homicides in the county for four consecutive years: 2014 through to 2017.

The New Jersey counties with the next lowest rate of homicides are Warren and Sussex, which have each had nine killings between 2010 and September of this year. In the same span of time, Essex County, which regularly has the most homicides in the state on an annual basis, has had 1,227 murders, state police records show.

Hunterdon County, ranked as the safest place in the country to raise a child earlier this year by the Save the Children organization, is one of the more agrarian and less populated counties in New Jersey. Hunterdon has a population of approximately 125,000 people — over six times fewer than Essex, the state’s third-most populated county.

“Hunterdon is in large part a bedroom community,” Anthony Kearns, the Hunterdon County prosecutor from 2010 to 2019, said. “People go out to work, and then they come back into the county.”

Kearns, who had been the county’s longest serving prosecutor, also acknowledged that the county’s relatively small population and bucolic character play a role in its comparatively low murder rate, adding it was also because of “great police departments” and “great relationships” with both state and federal law enforcement.

He largely credited the few incidents of homicide in the county to the prosecutor’s office being active in the community through outreach programs. According to Kearns, in helping to minimize the rate of crime, these initiatives can help prevent crimes.

“The efforts helped to reduce all crime because if you have a high rate of burglaries, the chance of someone being killed, someone being surprised in the house, etcetera, can lead to a homicide,” Kearns said. “It wasn’t intended, but it happens.”

Kearns said all of the murders that happened while he was prosecutor involved victims who knew their killers.

“If you look at the homicides in Hunterdon County over that time period (2010 to 2019), there’s not one that … was a stranger,” he said. “They always knew each other. So I think that’s significant too; they were ultimately crimes of passion or there was some type of relationship.”

One of the programs launched by the prosecutor’s office over the last decade was Operation Day-Tripper, established in 2012 to stem the flow of heroin into Hunterdon County in response to the burgeoning opioid epidemic.

The 10-month-long undercover operation resulted in the arrest of approximately 49 individuals.

“We were aware of who had issues through intelligence and etcetera, and we were able to know who was coming out of the county and coming back into the county,” Kearns said. “And when they got back into the county we would be able to stop them, and the drugs were there — readily present — and we arrested them.”

The prosecutor’s office also regularly collaborated with Prevention Resources, Inc. and Safe Communities Coalition to spearhead a number of other initiatives. These include START (Steps to Action and Recovery Treatment), through which police would provide certain people in custody and their families with literature and information about treatment and recovery, and One Voice, for which the office held symposiums and monthly meetings with local clergy to discuss prevalent issues in the county.

The prosecutor’s office also developed the STaR (Specialized Training and Registration) program, through which parents or legal guardians of people with developmental disabilities, autism spectrum disorder and other disabilities could could voluntarily provide information about their wards to first responders.

“Anyone that had concerns about someone in their household that had these difficulties and might not respond appropriately to police when they came, the police would approach that house with that understanding … which helps avoid violence and a potential homicide and police-involved shooting,” Kearns said.

All police departments in the county were also enrolled to complete crisis intervention training to learn “how to appropriately and effectively deal with somebody with an emotional disability,” Kearns added.

Still, while reflecting on the myriad of efforts taken by the prosecutor’s office to protect and improve the Hunterdon community, Kearns simultaneously credited the residents of the county for its success in remaining safe.

“The people of Hunterdon County care about the county, they respect the police and the police respect them. And it’s a good relationship. It really is,” Kearns said. “We were able to implement all of these programs because we had the cooperation and participation of all the people that I talked about.”

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Caroline Fassett may be reached at cfassett@njadvancemedia.com