What counts as major discipline in New Jersey

Since 2020, every law enforcement agency in New Jersey has been required to report its most serious officer discipline to the Attorney General and publish it on the agency's own website. The requirement comes from a series of Attorney General directives (2020-5, 2021-6, and 2022-14), and the reports are collected at least once a year.^[1] The result is the state's most detailed public record of police discipline: a spreadsheet of named officers, their sanctions, and a brief synopsis of what happened.

This site is built on that record. Reading it correctly takes some care.

The bar is high

"Major discipline" has a specific meaning. An officer appears in this data when they were terminated, demoted, or suspended for more than five days.^[1] A written reprimand never shows up here. Neither does a three-day suspension. When a department's page on this site lists two records, that means two instances of serious, finalized discipline, not two complaints.

The sanction columns are independent flags. A single record can show a termination and a suspension together, because an officer can be suspended pending a termination that later becomes final.^[1]

Nothing appears until the appeals end

Agencies report discipline only after it is final. If an officer appeals, the case stays out of the data until the appeal is resolved, and it is then listed in the year the discipline became final rather than the year of the underlying conduct.^[1]

That has two practical consequences. First, everything in this dataset is adjudicated: these are sustained outcomes, not allegations. Second, the year on a record is a reporting year. A 2024 record can describe conduct from years earlier, so year-over-year counts say as much about the pace of appeals as about behavior in that year.

What a blank means

Agencies fill out the reporting form themselves, and some fields come back empty. The Attorney General's notes are explicit: a blank means the information was not provided by the submitting agency.^[1] A blank is not a "no."

Two fields also simply did not exist for the early years. Sustained charges were only collected from 2021 on, and the flag for officers who resigned, retired, or transferred while their internal affairs case was pending was collected from 2023 on.^[1] This site renders those cases as "not applicable" rather than treating them as missing answers.

The scale of the record

The 2020-2025 release contains 3,006 major discipline records naming 2,298 officers across 340 agencies. In 471 of those records the officer was terminated.^[2] The same officer can appear more than once: each record is one disciplinary action, and repeat entries are part of what the record shows.^[1]

Annual volume has grown every year, from 226 records in 2020 to 816 in 2025.^[2] That growth should be read cautiously. It may reflect more discipline, better reporting compliance, or appeals from earlier years finally becoming final.

What this data is not

Major discipline data is one of two public windows into police accountability in New Jersey. The other is internal affairs data: agency-level counts of complaints and investigations, which are not officer-named and which include many allegations that end unfounded, exonerated, or not sustained. The two datasets answer different questions and this site keeps them separate. Named officers on this site come only from the major discipline record, where the discipline is final.

If you find an error in how a record is presented here, the corrections page explains how to request a fix against the official record.

This article covers what the record shows. For what these same discipline rules mean to the employee going through them (notice, hearing, appeal, and back pay), see NJCSNavigator's guide to N.J.A.C. 4A:2.