The New Jersey agencies that report no internal affairs investigations

Alongside its internal affairs data, the New Jersey Attorney General publishes a quieter document: a list, by year, of the law enforcement agencies that reported no internal affairs investigations at all.^[1] The counts are small and steady. Thirty-five agencies appeared on the 2021 list, 31 in 2022, 35 in 2023, and 27 in each of 2024 and 2025.^[1]

A zero is a data point, and it is worth reading with some care.

What a zero can mean

For a small department, a year with no internal affairs investigations is entirely plausible. A borough force with a handful of officers can go a year without a complaint that opens a formal review. Nothing about a single zero implies a problem.

The reason to publish the list at all is that a zero is also the shape a reporting gap takes. An agency that never files does not show up as missing. It shows up as a clean record. The list is the mechanism that keeps the absence visible, and this site carries that signal onto the page: any department the Attorney General lists for a given year is flagged on its own profile and in its county, with the year noted.

The pattern over time

Most agencies that appear do so once. Of the 108 agencies that could be matched to this site's records, 81 were listed in a single year across the five years, 20 in two years, 6 in three, and 1 in four.^[2] That is roughly what you would expect if most zeros are ordinary quiet years at small agencies.

The 155 rows across the five lists include 12 that could not be matched to a registered agency at all, because the listed name is a state office, a college, or a spelling that maps to no department here: the Division of Taxation appears three times, Stevens Institute of Technology three, and single entries name a bridge authority, two university forces, and a county jail under a name this site does not carry.^[1] They are left unmatched rather than guessed, and they are why the matched count is smaller than the list.

The agencies listed three times or more

Seven agencies appear in at least three of the five years.

Agency	County	Years listed
Midland Park Police Department	Bergen	2021, 2022, 2023, 2025
Bayhead Borough Police Department	Ocean	2021, 2022, 2024
Haworth Police Department	Bergen	2021, 2023, 2025
Stanhope Police Department	Sussex	2021, 2022, 2023
Allentown Borough Police Department	Monmouth	2022, 2024, 2025
Warren County Sheriff's Department	Warren	2021, 2022, 2024
Essex County Prosecutor's Office	Essex	2021, 2022, 2023

Source: the Attorney General's annual lists, matched to this site's agencies.^[2]

Midland Park, in Bergen County, is the one agency listed in four of the five years.^[2] A repeated appearance is not evidence of misconduct, and it is not an accusation. It is a reason to look, which is the entire point of publishing the list. Two of the seven are not municipal police at all: a county sheriff's department and a county prosecutor's office, agencies whose work generates fewer citizen complaints than street policing does and whose zeros may be exactly what they look like.

What kind of agency lands on the list

Of the 108 matched agencies, 97 are municipal police departments. The rest are 5 county prosecutor's offices, 3 corrections agencies, 2 sheriff's departments, and 1 other agency.^[2] By county, Bergen leads with 18 listed agencies, then Monmouth with 13, Ocean with 9, Morris with 8, and Hunterdon with 7.^[2]

That geography is the geography of small boroughs. Bergen County has more municipalities than any other county in the state and most of them run their own small force; Monmouth and Ocean line the shore with one-square-mile boroughs that police themselves. The list is, to a first approximation, a list of the state's smallest police departments having a quiet year.

How small they are

The FBI's staffing census puts a number on that. Of the listed municipal departments that match an FBI record, 96 have a sworn-officer count for a year since 2021. The median is 14.5 officers; 29 of the 96 have ten or fewer, and the largest has 63.^[3]

A department of ten officers handles a few thousand calls a year. A year with no complaint that rises to a formal internal affairs investigation is not remarkable at that scale, and the site's report cards say as much: a non-reporting year lowers a card's confidence, never its grade, because a grade built partly on internal affairs volume means less when the agency reported none. The report-card explainer walks through how that confidence note works.

Listed, yet with investigations in the census

One cross-check the two documents allow is to ask whether an agency listed as reporting no investigations in a year nonetheless shows investigations for that year in the agency totals. Across all 155 listed rows, that happens once: Brooklawn Police Department is on the 2024 list while the agency totals record 8 investigations for it in 2024.^[2] That is one disagreement in 155, small enough to read as a filing quirk rather than a pattern, and it is noted on the department's page rather than resolved by guessing which document is right.

How this site treats it

Non-reporting lowers confidence rather than lowering a grade. On a department's report card, years on the non-reporting list appear as a stated confidence note, not as a mark against the department, because a grade built partly on internal affairs volume means less when the agency reported none.

The bright line is the same one that governs the rest of the site. A zero is a fact, shown as reported. What it signals is a matter of reading, and the reading offered here is modest: a single zero is usually nothing, a repeated one is worth a second look, and neither is a finding on its own.

Every agency's page lists the years it appears, sourced to the Attorney General's own document. The methodology page explains how the flag is matched and applied.