When New Jersey officers appeal discipline to the Civil Service Commission

In a civil service town, a police officer who is fired or suspended for more than five working days can appeal to the New Jersey Civil Service Commission. So can a sheriff's officer and a county or State corrections officer. The appeal usually goes first to an Administrative Law Judge, who hears witnesses and writes a recommendation. The Commission then accepts, modifies or rejects it at one of its public meetings, and the minutes record what it did.^[2]

Those minutes are a different record from the one most of this site is built on. The Attorney General's major discipline file lists penalties after every appeal is over. The Commission's minutes show the appeals themselves, including the ones that changed the penalty.

Between January 16, 2019 and September 2, 2026, the minutes record 278 decisions on a discipline appeal by someone in a law enforcement title.^[1] This piece reads all of them.

The overall result

Result	Appeals
Penalty upheld	144
Penalty modified	51
Penalty reversed	31
Another outcome	52

The Commission upheld the penalty in 144 of the 278, a little over half. It changed it in 82: 51 modified and 31 reversed. The remaining 52 ended some other way: a remand to the Office of Administrative Law, a dismissal, a settlement the Commission acknowledged, or a ruling on a request rather than on the penalty.

That last row is large enough to read carefully. A remand settles nothing, and a matter sent back in 2021 can return years later under the same docket. Here each docket gets one row, led by the hearing that disposed of it, so a matter that came back counts once.

Police, sheriff's officers and corrections

More of these decisions concern corrections officers than police. The State Department of Corrections alone accounts for 62.

Group	Appeals	Upheld	Modified	Reversed
Police	103	50	17	12
Sheriff's officers	18	15	1	1
Corrections	143	73	33	16

Police (50 of 103) and corrections (73 of 143) had their penalties upheld at about the same rate. Corrections penalties were modified more often, 33 of 143 against 17 of 103 for police. Sheriff's officers are a small group, and 15 of their 18 penalties stood.

The departments with the most appeals are the Department of Corrections, Hudson County Corrections with 15 and the Jersey City Police Department with 11. Each department page lists its own decisions.

Removals

Removal is the penalty most often appealed, in 165 of the 278. The Commission upheld 96 removals and reversed 21. It modified 24, and in 21 of those the officer was suspended instead of fired. Another 24 ended some other way.

Some of the reductions, by caption as the Commission printed it:

• In the Matter of Michael Emmert, Garden State Correctional Facility, Department of Corrections, May 20, 2026: removal modified to a 30 working day suspension.^[3]
• In the Matter of Dennis Turner, Bayside State Prison, Department of Corrections, June 29, 2022: removal modified to a 30 working day suspension.^[3]
• In the Matter of Rashon Tyson- Butler, Hudson County, Department of Corrections, August 23, 2023: removal modified to a 30 working day suspension.^[3]

Suspensions are appealed less often, 77 times. The Commission upheld 36, modified 22 and reversed 8, so a suspension came back changed in 30 of 77 appeals, against 45 of 165 for removals.

The judge's recommendation

In 234 of the appeals, the minutes print an Administrative Law Judge's recommendation. The Commission adopted it in 214, modified or rejected it in 16, and in 4 a tie vote left the recommendation adopted by default.

Departing from the judge can cut either way. In 6 of the cases where the Commission rejected the recommendation, it kept the penalty the employer had imposed after the judge recommended a lighter one. One is the Czezre Adams matter from the Newark Police Department, decided April 7, 2021: the judge recommended a suspension and the Commission upheld the removal.^[3]

In most appeals, then, the result is the one the judge recommended after hearing the witnesses.

What the officers were charged with

For 241 of the appeals, the minutes print the charges. Read against the causes listed in N.J.A.C. 4A:2-2.3, these are the most common:

Cause	Appeals naming it
Other sufficient cause	202
Conduct unbecoming a public employee	199
Neglect of duty	95
Incompetency, inefficiency or failure to perform duties	80
Inability to perform duties	41
Insubordination	40

Nearly every appeal carries more than one charge, and "other sufficient cause" and "conduct unbecoming" usually appear together. Both are broad. The minutes often name a violation of departmental rules as the other sufficient cause, so the specific rule is found in the decision itself. A charge list records how a department framed the case, which can differ from what the judge found.

How long it takes

This section is analysis, not a measured interval. A Commission docket number begins with a year. Treating it as the year the matter was docketed and comparing it with the year of the decision, for the 273 appeals where the comparison holds, 191 were decided in the same or the following calendar year. Forty-one were decided three or more years later. N.J.A.C. 4A:2-2.13 sets a 180-day limit on the Commission's final determination in a law enforcement removal appeal, counted from the officer's suspension without pay, with exceptions for charges tied to criminal conduct and several kinds of delay left out of the count.^[2] A year prefix is too rough to test that limit.

What this record cannot tell you

The minutes show what reached a meeting. An appeal that settled before the judge ruled, or that the officer withdrew, may never appear. A town outside civil service sends its officers' appeals to the Superior Court, not the Commission, so its officers are absent here entirely; each department page says which track applies.

The outcome labels are NJ Civil Service Navigator's reading of each ACTION sentence in the minutes, and every one links to the decision it summarizes. Where a label and a decision disagree, the decision controls. Nothing in this piece is matched to an officer record on this site, and a caption here does not mean the person appears in the Attorney General's file.

Every appeal behind these figures is listed, with its outcome, on discipline appeals at the Civil Service Commission. The wider record, including list removals and pending agenda items, starts at the Civil Service Commission hub.