Major discipline reports are rising. Read the trend carefully.

The number of finalized major discipline records New Jersey agencies report has climbed every year: 226 in 2020, 379 in 2021, 400 in 2022, 544 in 2023, 641 in 2024, and 816 in 2025.^[1] That is more than a threefold increase over six years. It is tempting to read it as a straight line to more police misconduct. It is not that simple.

The year is a reporting year

Major discipline appears in this data only after all appeals conclude, and it is filed under the year it became final, not the year of the underlying conduct.^[1] A record dated 2025 can describe something that happened years earlier and only just finished working through appeals.

That single fact reshapes the trend. A rise in a given year partly measures how many older cases became final that year, which is a function of appeal timelines and administrative pace, not just behavior in that year.

Where the rise comes from

Split the records by the kind of agency that reported them and the rise stops being one line. Corrections agencies, meaning the state Department of Corrections and the county jails, reported 93 records in 2020 and 419 in 2025.^[1] Municipal police departments went from 90 to 291.^[1] Sheriff's departments went from 21 to 46 and state agencies from 20 to 44.^[1]

Corrections agencies were already the largest group in 2020, at 41 percent of the year's records. By 2025 they were 51 percent, more than half of everything reported statewide.^[1] The Department of Corrections on its own went from 52 records in 2020 to 219 in 2025.^[1] So a reader who pictures the statewide rise as a rise in police discipline is picturing it wrong by about half. Municipal policing rose too, and by a lot, but the steepest part of the slope belongs to the jails. The corrections article takes that apart agency by agency.

The sanction mix shifted toward suspensions

The rise is not a rise in firings. Terminations were 51 of the 226 records in 2020, about 23 percent, and 88 of the 816 in 2025, about 11 percent.^[1] The count of terminations moved between 51 and 102 a year without a clear direction. What grew was suspensions: 181 records carried a suspension in 2020 and 646 did in 2025.^[1]

That matters for how the trend reads. If the added records were mostly firings, the rise would look like agencies drawing a harder line. Instead the added records are mostly suspensions of more than five days, which is the threshold that makes an action "major" at all. A wider net of reportable suspensions, and more agencies reporting into it, would produce exactly this shape.

Investigations rose too, but less

The internal affairs side of the data offers a check. Statewide, agencies reported 14,419 internal affairs investigations in 2021 and 17,990 in 2025, a rise of about a quarter.^[2] Over the same four years, finalized major discipline more than doubled, from 379 to 816.^[1]

If misconduct alone were driving the discipline numbers, the two series would be expected to move together, since discipline follows an investigation. They did not. Discipline grew several times faster than the investigations that precede it. That gap is what a reporting and backlog explanation predicts and what a pure-misconduct explanation does not, though the data here cannot settle the question on its own.

Three explanations, only one of them alarming

More misconduct is one possible driver. It is not the only one.

Reporting compliance is another. The statewide reporting requirement is recent, established by Attorney General directives beginning in 2020, and agencies took time to comply fully. Early years likely undercount simply because not every agency was reporting completely yet, which would make the later rise look steeper than the underlying reality.

A backlog clearing is the third. If appeals from earlier years resolved in a bunch, the records land together in a later year and lift its count without anything about that year being unusual.

The honest position is that all three are plausible and the data here cannot separate them. The trend is real. Its cause is not settled by the numbers alone.

What you can say

You can say that more finalized major discipline is being reported and published than a few years ago, which is itself a change worth noting for a state where these records were hard to get at all. You can say that half of the most recent year's records come from corrections, and that most of the growth is in suspensions rather than firings. You can compare agencies and counties within the same year, where the reporting rules applied evenly. What you cannot do is treat the slope of the line as a measure of rising misconduct, because at least two of the three things that could bend it upward have nothing to do with how officers behaved.

The rankings let you hold the year fixed and compare like with like, and the major discipline rankings compare agencies of the same type and size on that count, which is the comparison the data actually supports.