Every NJ department, one record.

What this site is

Since 2020, New Jersey has published detailed data on police discipline and internal affairs. The records are public, but the official releases are spreadsheets and dashboards that few people can comfortably read. Police Transparency NJ turns those releases into pages: one for every department, every county, and every officer named in the major discipline record.

Much of New Jersey no longer has a standing local press corps. Records like these used to get read, checked, and written about by beat reporters. This project does a piece of that work at scale, from primary sources, with the receipts attached: every factual claim on every page carries a citation to the exact row of the official file it came from.

The site adds context the raw files lack, like peer benchmarks and department report cards. Where it does, that interpretation is visibly labeled as analysis, its method is published on the methodology page, and the underlying records stay one click away. The records do the arguing.

Who it is for

Residents who want to know what their own town's department has reported. Reporters who need a sourced figure fast and a way back to the row it came from. Researchers and students who want the whole dataset in one machine-readable place. Attorneys checking a record before a hearing. Officers checking what the public record says about them, and asking for a correction if it is wrong. The pages are written so that none of those readers has to open a spreadsheet to get an answer.

How it is built

The site is a set of static pages regenerated from the official releases each time one changes. There is no database behind it that could drift from the source; the source files are the database. Each page is assembled from records that carry a reference to their file, sheet, and row, and a page that cannot trace a claim does not build. The complete data, in the form the pages are built from, is available on the downloads page with a data dictionary, and the method behind every computed figure is on the methodology page.

Beyond the Attorney General's releases, the site joins in a small number of other public sources where they add context: the FBI's staffing census, New Jersey Treasury pension data, the federal 1033 surplus equipment program, and the Fatal Encounters project. Each is named where it is used, with the same citation treatment, and each join is described in the methodology so its limits are clear.

How it is funded

The project is self-funded. It takes no money from any government body, police department, police union, or advocacy organization, and none of them has any say in what is published. The site may carry advertising to help cover hosting and data costs; ads are sold by a third-party network, and advertising revenue has no path into editorial decisions. The editorial standards page states that separation in full.

Who runs it

Police Transparency NJ is published under a project identity, Police Transparency New Jersey Project, rather than a personal byline. That is a deliberate choice for a site that names police officers, and it puts the burden of trust on the record rather than on an author: every claim can be checked against its cited source, and the full data can be downloaded and re-run. The project answers to its editorial standards and its corrections policy, both public. It can be reached at [email protected].

How to use it

Start with the search box on any page: it finds departments, officers, counties, and articles. The departments index lists every reporting agency; each department page carries its staffing, its internal affairs figures by year, its major discipline records, and a report card that compares it with agencies like it. The county pages roll those up. The articles explain what the figures mean and how to read them, and the discipline explainer walks through how a complaint becomes a record. If a page gets a record wrong, the corrections page is the way to say so.