COL. JOSEPH R. FUENTES (NJSP – Retired)

  • Deputy Director

Biography

Colonel Joseph R. Fuentes is the Deputy Director at the Center on Policing.

Col. Fuentes has had a dynamic and extensive career. He retired in November 2017 after spending forty years in the New Jersey State Police, the last fifteen of which as colonel and superintendent.  Fuentes has served four governors and eight state attorneys general. The majority of his career was spent in intelligence work against violent organized criminal groups. Assigned to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force for five years and then followed by fifteen years conducting operations, Fuentes targeted narcotics and criminal street gangs. During his term as superintendent, Fuentes created the Regional Operations and Intelligence Center (ROIC), Real Time Crimes Centers (RTCC) in north and south New Jersey, and instituted the monthly CorrStat corridor meetings that services the crime fighting needs of the triangle enclosing Newark, Paterson and Jersey City. In addition, Fuentes instituted the crime gun protocols, which significantly reduced the ballistics evidence backlog from ten months to 24-48 hours. This allowed detectives investigating gun crimes to continue those investigations in earnest with all possible lead value information extracted from the crime gun or shell casings.

Fuentes served on a variety of law enforcement boards and as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the general chair of the IACP State and Provincial Division, and chair of the IACP Homeland Security Committee. He served six years as a member of the Second Executive Session on Policing at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. During 2015-2016, Fuentes was selected to participate on the DHS’s Homeland Security Advisory Council Customs and Border Patrol Integrity Advisory Council. Fuentes has also served as a charter member of two main law enforcement advisory bodies to the United States Attorney General: the Global Advisory Working Group and the Criminal Intelligence Coordinating Council. For five years, Fuentes was a seated charter member of the Director of National Intelligence’s Law Enforcement Partner’s Board.