The officers disciplined more than once

New Jersey's major discipline data names 2,298 officers across 3,006 records. The gap between those two numbers is the story here: some officers appear more than once. 385 of them do, and one appears fifteen times.^[1]

A repeat record is worth understanding before it is worth reacting to.

What a second record means, and what it doesn't

Each row in this data is one finalized disciplinary action, counted as the Attorney General counts it: one record per action, regardless of how many times a name appears.^[1] An officer with three records had three separate actions become final, which is not the same as three separate incidents in three separate years. Discipline is listed in the year it became final after appeals, so a cluster of records in one year can reflect several matters resolving at once.

So a higher count is not a tidy measure of how troubled an officer is. It is a count of finalized actions, and the reasons behind them are in the individual records, not in the number.

Where the repeats concentrate

Repeat records are more common at the largest agencies, which is what you would expect: more officers, more actions, more chances for any one name to recur. The officer pages on this site group every record under one person, each entry shown with its own year, sanction, and the agency's own synopsis, so a repeat is legible as a sequence rather than a single damning figure.

This grouping is deliberate. Presenting the same officer's records as one page, cited separately, is how the site avoids both errors: hiding that a name recurs, and inflating a recurrence into something the record does not support.

How to read an officer page

Start with the sanctions and the years. A person with several short suspensions across years is a different record from one with a termination, even if the raw count is similar. Read the agency's synopsis for each. And hold the standing caveat in mind: these are sustained, final actions, but they are the actions the employing agency chose to report, in the form it reported them.

Every officer named on this site comes from this major discipline data alone. The site never builds an individual's record from the un-named internal affairs files, and it never tracks a single case across years. A repeat record is a set of finalized actions, shown as reported, and left for you to read.