Essex County: the most investigations in the state, and Newark is a third of them

Essex County's law enforcement agencies reported 2,953 internal affairs investigations for 2025, the most of any county in New Jersey and about 550 more than Camden, the county in second place.^[1] Twenty-six agencies contributed to that total, naming 1,593 officers between them.^[1] On the county's page the number sits at the top. This piece is about what is underneath it.

Newark, and the two next door

Newark Police Department reported 978 of the county's investigations, exactly a third, naming 527 officers.^[1] It is the largest municipal department in the state, with 1,119 sworn officers in its most recent FBI staffing report, and it reports more investigations than any police department in New Jersey except Camden's.^[1]

East Orange reported 462 investigations and Irvington 310, the second and third largest counts in the county and among the largest in the state.^[1] The three cities share a border and together account for 1,750 investigations, 59 percent of the county total. Then the numbers fall away: the Essex County Sheriff's Office reported 176, Essex County Corrections 164, Bloomfield 115, Orange 109, and Nutley 105.^[1] The county's other eighteen reporting agencies, most of them suburban departments of a few dozen officers, reported the remaining few hundred between them.

That shape is the first thing to know about Essex. Its county total is not a county-wide condition. It is three cities, one of them very large, plus a long tail.

Per resident, second in the state

Essex is the state's second most populous county, at about 864,000 residents in the 2020 Census, so its raw count partly reflects its size.^[3] Divide the investigations by the population and Essex reported 3.42 for every 1,000 residents in 2025, second only to Camden's 4.59 and well ahead of Hudson, the next urban county, at 1.66.^[1][3]

A per-resident rate is a fairer comparison than a raw count, and it is still not a misconduct rate. Newark polices a daytime population far larger than its resident count, and an active complaint process produces investigations that a passive one would not. The rate says Essex agencies open more internal reviews per resident than almost anywhere in New Jersey. It does not say why.

Five years of the county total

The county figure has not moved in one direction. Essex agencies reported 2,233 investigations for 2021, 2,720 for 2022, and 3,051 for 2023, the county's peak.^[1] The total dropped to 2,564 for 2024 and rose again to 2,953 for 2025.^[1] Over the five years that is a rise of about a third, with most of it in the first three.

Major discipline: a different map

Final major discipline follows a different pattern from investigations. Essex County agencies reported 252 major discipline records from 2020 to 2025, with 39 terminations.^[2] That is the second-highest county count, behind Camden's 455 and just ahead of Hudson's 244, despite Essex leading on investigations.^[2] By year, the county reported 19 records for 2020, 45 for each of 2021 and 2022, 50 for 2023, 34 for 2024, and 59 for 2025.^[2]

Newark leads here too, with 87 records, but the second place belongs to the county jail. Essex County Corrections reported 62 major discipline records, and 25 of them were terminations, more firings than the rest of the county's agencies combined.^[2] Newark reported 5 terminations in its 87 records.^[2] After those two, Irvington reported 14 records, Orange 12, and Belleville and Bloomfield 11 each.^[2]

Two agencies with the most discipline in the county, then, resolve it in opposite ways: the city department almost entirely through suspension, the jail through termination four times in ten. The article on county jails puts Essex County Corrections beside the other thirteen.

The agencies that reported nothing

Six Essex agencies appear on the Attorney General's list of agencies reporting no internal affairs investigations in at least one year.^[4] The Essex County Prosecutor's Office is listed for 2021, 2022, and 2023, one of only seven agencies statewide listed in three or more years; it reported 67 investigations for 2025.^[4][1] Essex Fells, a borough force, is listed for 2022 and 2023.^[4] Essex County Corrections is listed for 2023, the same jail that reported 164 investigations for 2025.^[4] Montclair State University's police, Essex County College's, and Glen Ridge each appear once.^[4]

A zero from a prosecutor's office or a campus force is plausible on its face. A zero from a county jail in the year between two years of well over a hundred investigations is the kind of entry the list exists to make visible, and it lowers the confidence on that agency's report card without changing its grade.

Eight departments the public cannot hear

Eight Essex departments encrypt their radio communications, according to the matched database this site uses: Bloomfield, Caldwell, Livingston, Maplewood, Millburn, Roseland, South Orange, and Verona.^[5] They are the county's suburban ring, not its cities; Newark, East Orange, and Irvington are not in the matched set. The encryption article explains why this site treats encryption as a transparency signal and keeps it separate from the discipline record.

How Essex grades

On the report cards, which compare each department only with agencies of its own type and size, Essex is spread across the range like every county. Newark and Orange are graded F among the largest municipal departments; Caldwell and West Caldwell are graded F among the smallest.^[2] Cedar Grove, North Caldwell, Roseland, and Verona are graded A, and so is Essex County Corrections, among the fourteen county jails.^[2] A grade is a position among peers on reported volume and severity, labeled as this site's analysis; the report-card explainer sets out what it can and cannot say.

Reading the county

The Essex number is a Newark number, an East Orange number, and an Irvington number, with two dozen smaller ones behind them. The county page lists every agency with its own figures so that a reader can see which is which, and each department's page carries its investigations by year, its complaint mix, its discipline records, and the source of every one. The county total is where to start. It is not where the record lives.