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.

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 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, which is the comparison the data actually supports.