The biggest category in New Jersey's complaint data is the one that says nothing

New Jersey agencies sort every internal affairs complaint into a category. Across the 2021 to 2025 reporting years they recorded 79,923 allegations across 31 of them.^[1][2]

The largest category, by a distance nothing else comes close to, is Other Departmental Rule Violation. It accounts for 27,280 allegations: 34.1% of everything reported, and more than twice the size of the next category down.

It is also the one category that describes nothing.

What it sits above

Category	Allegations
Other Departmental Rule Violation	27,280
Demeanor	11,552
Excessive Force	5,059
Differential Treatment	3,832
Other Criminal Violation	3,603

Demeanor, the largest category that actually names a kind of conduct, is under half its size. Excessive force, the category most people would assume dominates a complaints database, is under a fifth of it.

526 of New Jersey's 548 reporting agencies used the residual category at least once. It is not an artefact of a handful of departments filing lazily. It is the default across the state.

Why a residual category is a problem

Every classification scheme needs somewhere to put the things that do not fit. The trouble starts when the overflow bin becomes the largest room in the building.

A category holding a third of all complaints cannot support any of the uses complaint categories exist for. It cannot tell a resident what people complain about at their local department. It cannot tell a chief where a training gap is. It cannot support a comparison between two agencies, because there is no way to know whether one department's residual pile looks like another's. And it cannot be tracked over time in any meaningful way, because a shift into or out of it might be a change in conduct or a change in filing habits.

The categories that do name conduct are the ones that carry information. Excessive force, improper search, differential treatment, vehicular pursuit: each of those is a specific claim about what an officer did, and each can be counted, compared and followed across years. Every complaint routed into the residual bucket instead is one that leaves the record less legible than it went in.

It varies enormously by agency

Among agencies reporting at least 100 allegations, the share landing in the residual category ranges from a small minority to more than three quarters.

At the high end, Morris County Prosecutor's Office put 77% of its 191 allegations there, and the New Jersey Department of Human Services 75% of its 151. Among large municipal departments, Atlantic City recorded 65% of 938 allegations as Other Departmental Rule Violation, West Orange 65% of 320, and East Orange 63% of 1,878.

That spread is the clearest evidence that this is a reporting practice rather than a description of what happens. Complaints against police in East Orange are not fundamentally less classifiable than complaints elsewhere. The difference is in how the paperwork is filled in.

The trend, and a caution

Reported use of the category fell sharply after the first year of this data, from 8,145 allegations in 2021 to 4,607 in 2022, then held roughly steady through 2025 at around 5,000 a year.

The obvious reading is that classification improved once agencies had a year of practice. That reading may well be right. But the first year of any new reporting requirement is the year the data is least comparable, and a drop of that size across a single year boundary is exactly what a definitional change looks like as well. This site does not have the records to distinguish the two, and says so rather than picking the flattering interpretation.

A further 2,584 allegations have no category at all

Separately from the residual bucket, 2,584 allegations arrived with the category field simply not filled in. Those are excluded from the category tables on this site rather than folded into the residual pile, because assigning them anywhere would be inventing a fact. They are reported as what they are: complaints somebody recorded without saying what they were about.

What would fix it

Nothing about this requires new legislation or new data collection. The categories already exist, the reporting mechanism already exists, and most agencies already use the specific categories some of the time. What is missing is a requirement that the residual category be a genuine remainder rather than a convenience.

A simple threshold would surface it: any agency routing more than some share of its complaints into Other Departmental Rule Violation is telling the state that its complaint data cannot be used for the purpose the state collects it for. On the current numbers that would flag a great many agencies, which is the point.

Until then, the honest way to read New Jersey's complaint categories is to read them as covering roughly two thirds of the complaints filed, and to treat the largest number in the table as a measure of record-keeping rather than of conduct.