Allegations
What New Jersey police are accused of
Agencies report every internal affairs complaint they receive, sorted into categories. Between 2021 and 2025 they recorded 79,923 allegations across 31 categories.
An allegation is something a person said happened. It is not a finding, and most complaints are never sustained.
Every category
Reading these numbers
The largest category by a wide margin is a residual one. Other Departmental Rule Violation absorbs anything an agency did not classify further, so it says more about how complaints are recorded than about what happened. A further 2,584 allegations arrived with no category at all, and are left out of the table above rather than assigned to one.
Categories are not comparable in weight. A demeanour complaint and an excessive-force complaint both count as one allegation here, which is why the report cards weight them differently and why a raw total should not be read as a measure of harm.