New Jersey's sheriffs and county jails have no staffing figure

To say whether a police department has a lot of complaints, you need to know how many officers it has. A hundred internal affairs investigations at a department of forty officers means something different from a hundred at a department of a thousand.

New Jersey's own complaint data does not carry a headcount. It carries a field the Attorney General calls Number of Officers, which counts officers named in that year's internal affairs investigations, not officers employed. For a staffing figure you have to go to the FBI's Law Enforcement Employees census, which has collected annual headcounts from American police agencies since 1960.^[1]

For most of New Jersey, that works. For an entire class of agency, it does not.

The coverage gap

Municipal policing is covered essentially completely. County prosecutors are covered completely. Sheriff's offices are covered not at all, and county corrections almost not at all.^[2]

This is not a matching failure on this site's part. The FBI census is built around agencies with general police responsibilities in a defined jurisdiction, and New Jersey's sheriffs and county jails sit outside how that census is structured. The figures do not exist to be matched.

What that costs

Every rate this site can compute for a municipal department is unavailable for a sheriff's office.

There is no officers-per-thousand-residents figure, no civilian-to-sworn ratio, no share of sworn officers who are women, and no independent complaint rate computed against actual staffing rather than against the Attorney General's own investigated-officer count. The peer bands that group departments by size for the report cards fall back to a different basis entirely for these agencies.

The practical effect is that the agencies holding people in custody, running courthouse security and serving process across 21 counties can be described in absolute numbers and compared with each other, but cannot be placed against a denominator the way a municipal department can.

Corrections is the sharper case. County jails are closed institutions where the people affected by staff conduct cannot leave, and where complaint volumes are shaped by a population that is fixed rather than passing through. That is precisely the setting where a per-staff rate would carry the most information, and it is the setting where none is available.

What this site does about it

It says so, on every affected page, rather than leaving the section out.

The alternative would be to omit the staffing block silently, which is what a page generator does by default when a field is missing. A reader would then see a sheriff's office page with no staffing section and a municipal page with one, and would have no way to tell whether the agency failed to report, whether the site failed to find it, or whether the measurement does not exist for that kind of agency.

Those are three different facts and only one of them is true here. So the page states the third: the FBI's national staffing census does not separately track county corrections facilities, sheriff's offices, or other county agencies in New Jersey.

This is a small thing that matters more than it looks. A blank on a transparency site is read as an accusation by some readers and as an oversight by others. Naming the reason for the blank removes both readings.

What would close it

The data exists somewhere. Sheriff's offices and county corrections departments know their own headcounts, and county budgets are public documents. What is missing is any single place that publishes them in a comparable annual form.

New Jersey already requires these agencies to report internal affairs activity to the Attorney General. Requiring a headcount alongside it would be a one-column change to an existing filing, and it would make the complaint data those agencies already submit substantially more usable, including by the agencies themselves.

Until then, the honest position is the one this site takes: for 41 of New Jersey's 548 reporting agencies, the denominator is not available, and no rate computed for them should be treated as comparable to a municipal department's. Twenty-one of those are sheriff's offices and fourteen are county corrections.