Major discipline in review: 2025

New Jersey's law enforcement agencies reported 816 final major discipline records for 2025.^[1] That is the largest single year in the six the data covers, ahead of 641 in 2024 and more than three times the 226 reported for 2020.^[1] Those 816 records name 653 officers at 168 agencies.^[1]

A year in review is a natural thing to want, and a reasonable thing to publish, as long as it comes with the caveat that governs every number here: 2025 is the year these actions became final, not the year the conduct occurred. A record in this file can describe something from 2022 that finished its appeals last year. What follows describes what was reported, and it should be read that way.

Who reported it

Corrections agencies reported 419 of the 816 records, just over half.^[1] Municipal police departments reported 291, sheriff's departments 46, state agencies 44, county prosecutors 9, and other agencies 7.^[1] It is the first year in the data in which corrections agencies account for more than half of the total, up from 41 percent in 2020 and 46 percent in 2024.^[1]

The agency list follows from that. The Department of Corrections reported 219 records, more than a quarter of the state's total on its own, and Camden County Corrections reported 112.^[1] Between them, two corrections agencies produced 331 of the year's 816 records. Atlantic County Corrections followed with 33.^[1]

The first police departments on the list are the New Jersey State Police with 24, Camden with 22, and Jersey City and Newark with 21 each.^[1] Then Essex County Corrections with 17, Atlantic City and Hudson County Corrections with 14 each, the Bergen County Sheriff's Department with 12, and the Youth Justice Commission with 10.^[1]

By county, and setting aside the 263 records from state and other agencies that belong to no county, Camden led with 157, then Hudson with 62, Essex with 59, Atlantic with 54, and Bergen with 30.^[1] Camden's total is mostly its county jail, a pattern the corrections article explains.

What the sanctions were

Of the 816 records, 646 involved a suspension, 88 a termination, and 10 a demotion; the flags can overlap on one record, so they do not sum to the total.^[1] Terminations were 11 percent of the year's records, down from 23 percent in 2020 and 16 percent in 2024, which means the growth in the total is almost entirely growth in suspensions.^[1]

The suspensions were short. Of the 632 with a reported day count, the median was 15 days, lower than the 19-day median across all six years.^[1] A year that adds many six-to-twenty-day suspensions will pull the median down even as the count rises, and that is what 2025 looks like.

One further outcome: 116 of the records note that the officer separated from the agency, by resignation, retirement, or transfer, while an internal affairs matter was still pending.^[1] That is a departure recorded alongside the discipline rather than a sanction in itself, and the article on what major discipline looks like describes why it is tracked.

The internal affairs side

Discipline is the end of a process that starts with a complaint, so the year's internal affairs figures are the other half of the picture. Agencies reported 17,990 internal affairs investigations for 2025, involving 12,588 incidents and naming 10,979 officers, across 514 reporting agencies.^[2] That investigation count is the highest in the five years the internal affairs data covers, but only by a little: it was 17,380 in 2023 and 16,259 in 2024.^[2]

The Department of Corrections reported 2,943 investigations, more than any other agency, and named 1,548 officers in them.^[2] Camden Police Department reported 1,495, Newark 978, the State Police 761, East Orange 462, Jersey City 445, Irvington 310, and Paterson 292.^[2]

Set the two series side by side and the gap is the story. Investigations rose about 11 percent from 2024 to 2025. Final discipline rose 27 percent.^[1][2] Discipline can grow faster than investigations for a year or two when a backlog of appeals resolves, or when agencies report more completely than they used to, and the data cannot say which of those, or how much actual conduct, produced 2025's total. The article on the rising trend lays out the three explanations and why they cannot be told apart from the counts.

How to use this

The year pages of the rankings hold the year fixed and compare agencies of the same type and size on 2025 alone, which is the comparison the data supports. Each department's page shows its own 2025 records with the sanction, the charges, and the agency's synopsis, and each named officer's page groups that person's records across years. The statewide count is a headline; the records underneath it are the substance, and every one of them is cited to its row.