What a suspension actually means in New Jersey police discipline

New Jersey publishes police discipline only when it crosses a threshold: a termination, a demotion, or a suspension of more than five days, and only after every appeal has finished. Everything below that line stays out of the public record.

That makes the published set a narrow one, and it makes the shape of what is in it worth examining. Across 3,006 records from 2020 through 2025, the sanctions break down like this.^[1]

Sanction	Records
Suspension	2,326
Termination	471
Separated while internal affairs pending	282
Demotion	58

Suspensions dominate. Understanding this data mostly means understanding them.

The distribution

Of the 2,294 suspensions with a length recorded, the median is 15 days.

Length	Suspensions	Share
6 to 10 days	821	36%
11 to 30 days	828	36%
31 to 60 days	257	11%
61 to 90 days	143	6%
91 to 180 days	178	8%
181 days or more	67	3%

Nearly three quarters sit at 30 days or fewer. The threshold for publication is six days, so a large share of the published record consists of suspensions that cleared the bar by a small margin.

At the other end, 36 suspensions run a year or longer, and the longest is 2,205 days: roughly six years. A suspension measured in years is a different kind of event from one measured in days, and averaging the two together produces a number that describes neither.

This is why the median matters more than the mean here. A distribution with a long tail and a heavy cluster near the floor is badly summarised by a single average, and any statement of the form "the typical suspension in New Jersey is X days" should be checked against which statistic X came from.

The threshold shapes what you can see

Because five days is the cutoff, the data has a floor rather than a natural distribution. There is no way to know from this record how many suspensions of one, two or five days were issued, or whether an agency that issues many short suspensions is handling misconduct differently from one that issues fewer long ones.

That has a practical consequence for comparison. Two departments with identical conduct problems could produce very different published records depending on how their disciplinary practice sits relative to the threshold. A department that favours a five-day suspension publishes nothing. A department that favours a seven-day suspension for the same conduct publishes everything.

Nothing in the data lets you correct for this, and it is one of the reasons this site does not treat a count of published records as a measure of how much misconduct occurred.

Separated while internal affairs was pending

The 282 records marked as separation while an internal affairs matter was pending deserve their own note, because they are the category most easily misread.

This field records that an officer left the agency before the investigation concluded. It does not record why. Resignation, retirement, a move to another department and a negotiated departure all look identical here. It is not a finding of misconduct, and it is not a termination.

It is worth publishing anyway, because an officer leaving mid-investigation is the mechanism by which a disciplinary record can fail to exist at all. The field is a marker for where the record stops, not a conclusion about the person.

Demotions are rare

At 58 records across six years, demotion is the least used of the published sanctions by a wide margin, roughly one for every forty suspensions.

That is not surprising given how police rank structures work. Demotion requires a rank to demote from, and the overwhelming majority of officers in this data are patrol officers. It does mean that when a demotion does appear, it usually involves a supervisor, and reading it alongside the officer's rank is what makes it legible.

Reading a single record

Start with the sanction and the year, then read the agency's own synopsis. A 10-day suspension with a detailed synopsis describing a specific failure is a more informative record than a 60-day suspension with no synopsis at all, even though the second looks more serious in a table.

The synopsis field is where agencies vary most. Some write several sentences describing what happened. Some write nothing. Where a field is blank on this site it reads "not reported", never zero and never an inference, because the difference between an agency that reported nothing and an agency that reported an absence is exactly the difference this data is prone to losing.