New Jersey Acting Attorney General John Jay Hoffman,

We, the citizens of Newark, N.J., are concerned about crime in our city. Newark currently has a total of 986 uniformed police officers compared with 1,131 in 2010. We feel strongly that Newark must hire additional police officers as quickly as possible to make our city streets safer. Newark's police recruits are trained at the Essex County Police Academy in Cedar Grove. But the Academy has a limited number of training positions available, greatly reducing the number of Newark recruits who can be trained at any given time. As residents of the largest city in Essex County, as well as the state, we agree with Mayor Ras Baraka and the City Council that Newark should have it's own police academy. Therefore, we are asking you, as the acting attorney general of New Jersey, to re-accredit the City of Newark's police academy, thus giving the city the ability to train more police recruits.