Sustained, not sustained, exonerated, unfounded: what the five dispositions mean

When a New Jersey law enforcement agency finishes an internal affairs investigation, it assigns each allegation a disposition. The Attorney General's statewide policy defines the categories, and every agency reports its counts in the same terms.^[3] The words are short and they sound alike. They do not mean alike, and the difference between two of them is the difference between an officer who did what was alleged and an officer who did not.

This is what each one means, in the order they are most often misread.

Sustained

A sustained allegation is one the investigation found to be true: the evidence showed the officer did what was alleged and that it violated a rule, a policy, or the law. This is the only disposition that is a finding against the officer, and it is the one that can lead to discipline. Across 2021 to 2025, New Jersey agencies reported about 18,600 sustained allegations, the largest of the named categories.^[1][2]

Sustained does not mean disciplined. Discipline is a separate decision that follows a sustained finding, and it ranges from counseling to termination. Only discipline at the major level, a suspension of more than five days or worse, becomes a named public record, and only after appeals. A department with a high sustained count and few major discipline records may be resolving most of its sustained cases with minor discipline, or may have cases still under appeal. The count of sustained allegations and the count of final discipline records measure two different points in one process.

Not sustained

A not sustained allegation is one the investigation could not resolve either way: there was not enough evidence to prove the allegation, and not enough to disprove it. It is not a finding that the officer did nothing. It is a finding that the question could not be answered. Agencies reported about 11,300 not sustained allegations over the five years.^[1][2]

This is the disposition most often confused with the two that follow, and the confusion runs in both directions. A reader who treats not sustained as an exoneration is overreading it; a reader who treats it as a near-miss for the officer is overreading it the other way. It means the record is silent.

Exonerated

An exonerated allegation is one where the investigation found that the act occurred, but that it was proper: the officer did the thing complained of, and the thing was within policy and law. A complaint that an officer used force, where the investigation finds the force was justified, is exonerated. Agencies reported about 13,900 exonerated allegations from 2021 to 2025.^[1][2]

Exonerated is a finding for the officer, and the only one of the five that says so explicitly. It also carries information about the agency: an exoneration is a statement that the conduct matched policy, so a pattern of exonerations on one allegation type says as much about the policy as about the officers.

Unfounded

An unfounded allegation is one where the investigation found that the act did not occur, or that the complaint had no factual basis. Where exonerated says "it happened and it was proper," unfounded says "it did not happen as alleged." Agencies reported about 8,500 unfounded allegations over the five years.^[1][2]

Unfounded is also a finding for the officer, but a different one from exonerated, and the two should not be added together as "cleared" without noticing that they say different things about what happened.

Administratively closed

An administratively closed allegation was ended without a finding on the merits: the complainant withdrew, the officer left the agency before the investigation finished, the matter was referred elsewhere, or it was otherwise closed for a procedural reason. Agencies reported about 8,000 of these from 2021 to 2025.^[1][2]

An administrative closure is the disposition to watch for alongside the separation flag in the discipline data. An officer who resigns while a matter is pending can leave the allegation administratively closed, unresolved, and the officer's file clean of a finding. The record does not say why each closure happened; it says only that no finding was made.

The sixth column: no disposition at all

The largest single category in the data is none of the above. Roughly 22,200 allegation entries across the five years carry no disposition, reported as not provided.^[1][2] That is more than a quarter of the roughly 82,500 disposition entries agencies reported in total.^[1][2]

Some of that is timing: an investigation open at the end of the reporting year has no disposition yet. Some of it is reporting: an agency that filed its counts without classifying every outcome. The data does not distinguish the two. This site shows the not-provided figure on every department page as its own row rather than folding it into any named category, because an allegation without a recorded outcome is a real reporting fact and not a finding of anything.

How often each is used, and how it moves

The statewide share of investigations with at least one sustained finding is the figure most people reach for, and the site tracks it by year.

The disposition mix is not fixed. Reported not sustained allegations, for example, roughly doubled from about 1,600 in 2024 to about 3,500 in 2025, while the other categories moved little.^[2] A shift like that can reflect a change in how a few large agencies classify their outcomes as much as a change in what happened, and it is a reason to read a single year's mix with some care.

Reading a department's mix

Every department page on this site shows the latest year's allegations with their dispositions, in these categories, and traces them across years. The useful questions are the ones the categories were built to answer. How many allegations were sustained, and did discipline follow? How many were exonerated, and on what allegation types? How many were left without a disposition, and is that share growing? The article on how sustained rates vary shows why the sustained share differs so much from agency to agency, and the complaint explainer walks through the process from the moment a complaint is filed to the moment one of these words is attached to it.

One rule holds across all of them. An allegation is not a finding, a sustained allegation is the agency's own finding and not a court's, and the only disposition that reaches an officer's public record by name is a sustained one that ended in major discipline after appeal.