What happens when you ask New Jersey police for records

New Jersey's Open Public Records Act gives anyone the right to ask a government body for its records. OPRAmachine is an independent platform where people file those requests in public, and where the correspondence that follows is published alongside them.

That makes it one of the few places you can see not just what the state releases, but what happens when somebody asks. A snapshot of the platform taken on 12 July 2026 contains 12,883 police-related requests across 481 matched New Jersey agencies.^[1]

Before the numbers, three cautions that change how they should be read.

Read the statuses carefully

The status on an OPRAmachine request is set by the requester, not by the agency and not by any court. It records what the person who filed it thought had happened, at whatever point they last updated it. It is not an adjudication and it is not an agency's own characterisation of its response.

The largest category by a wide margin is a request still marked as waiting.

That number is the one most likely to be misused, so it is worth being precise about what it can mean. A request sits in the waiting state if the agency has not responded. It also sits there if the agency responded and the requester never came back to update the status, which is extremely common on platforms of this kind: people file, get their answer, and never return to the website. A single figure cannot separate an unanswered request from an unrecorded answer.

So 52.6% is a ceiling on the non-response rate, not an estimate of it. Read as "no recorded response", it is accurate. Read as "the agency ignored it", it is not supported.

A request is not a finding

Nothing in this dataset records anything an agency was found to have done. Each entry records what a member of the public asked for. A department with many requests filed against it is a department people are curious about, which can follow from a news story, a local dispute, or one determined requester filing repeatedly.

This site publishes request counts on department pages for the same reason it publishes the rest: it is part of the public record about an agency. It draws no line from request volume to conduct, and neither should a reader.

Most of these are not the department's own listing

Of the 481 matched agencies, only 56 have a dedicated listing for the police department itself. The other 425 are linked to their municipal records custodian, because that is who holds the records and who receives the requests.

This matters for interpretation. Where the link is to a municipal body, the requests counted are those whose subject line indicates policing, filtered from everything else that municipality received. That filter is conservative: a police-related request phrased without an obvious keyword is not counted. Every figure here is therefore a floor.

The full picture is larger still. Those 481 bodies received 59,098 requests in total across all subjects. The 12,883 counted here are the police-related subset.

The snapshot is frozen

This is a hand-taken snapshot from 12 July 2026, and nothing refreshes it. Every count above goes further out of date from that day onward, and the waiting share in particular will overstate reality more as time passes, since requests filed shortly before the snapshot had not yet had time to be answered.

The site says so on every page carrying these figures rather than presenting them as current. For live activity, OPRAmachine itself is the place to look.

Why publish it at all

Because the alternative is a transparency site that describes what New Jersey released without describing what it is like to ask.

The discipline data on this site exists because the state chose to publish it. The internal affairs summaries exist because the Attorney General requires them. Everything else about a police department, the policies, the contracts, the body camera footage, the settlement agreements, has to be requested one document at a time by somebody willing to file and follow up.

The request record is the part of the transparency picture that shows the cost of the rest of it. It is worth having in view alongside the datasets that arrived without anyone having to ask.