Women are 11% of New Jersey's sworn officers

Most of what this site publishes is about conduct. This is about composition, which is a different question with a much longer record behind it.

The FBI has collected annual staffing counts from American police agencies since 1960, broken down by sworn and civilian and by sex. For New Jersey the matched series runs to 507 agencies and 29,718 agency-year rows.^[1] It is the longest continuous dataset this site carries by a wide margin, and it answers a question the discipline data cannot: who has been doing this job, and how has that changed?

The headline

In 2025, New Jersey agencies reported 31,409 sworn officers, of whom 3,474 were women: 11.1%.

In 1990, the same agencies reported 22,975 sworn officers, of whom 659 were women: 2.9%.

So the share has roughly quadrupled across thirty-five years, from about one sworn officer in thirty-five to about one in nine.

Both readings of that are available and both are true. It is a substantial change over a generation, and it leaves policing in New Jersey considerably less representative of the state than most other public professions.

Why this is measured, and what it is not

This site treats the composition figures the way it treats everything else: as reported numbers, with no claim attached about what they cause.

There is a body of research linking the representation of women in police forces to outcomes including use of force and complaint rates. This site does not reproduce those claims, because it has no data with which to test them and no way to control for the many things that differ between departments. A department with more women officers is not thereby a better department in anything this record can show.

What the figures do support is a description. Policing in New Jersey has been overwhelmingly male for the whole period the FBI has been counting, it has become less so at a steady rather than dramatic rate, and the change has not finished.

The sworn and civilian distinction matters

The FBI counts sworn officers and civilian employees separately, and the two look quite different by sex. Civilian staff in police agencies, which includes dispatch, records, forensics and administration, have a substantially higher share of women than sworn ranks do.

This site publishes the sworn share on department pages because it is the figure that describes who holds police powers. The civilian breakdown is carried in the underlying data and is available in the JSON mirror for anyone who wants it, but it answers a different question and mixing the two produces a number that flatters the sworn figure without meaning anything.

What the long series is good for

Sixty-five years of annual headcounts by agency is unusual data to have, and this site currently renders very little of it: the most recent year on each department page, plus a small trend line.

The series can support questions nothing else here can. Which departments have grown and which have shrunk across decades. Whether a department's staffing tracked its municipality's population. How the 1990s expansion in police hiring played out across the state, and whether it reversed.

Those are real analyses and they are not built yet. The data is published at the site's data page in full, agency by agency and year by year, for anyone who wants to get there first.

Caveats worth carrying

The coverage is good but not universal. Every municipal police department in New Jersey but one appears in this series. Not one of the state's 21 sheriff's offices does, and county corrections is almost entirely absent, because the FBI census is not structured to cover them. Any statewide total computed from this data is therefore a total for the agencies the census covers, not for every officer in New Jersey.

Year-to-year changes at a single agency should also be read carefully. A department that reported through two separate identifiers in one year and one in the next will show an apparent drop that is an artefact of reporting rather than a real change in staffing. This site tracks how many identifiers contributed to each year's figure for exactly this reason, and treats a year with fewer than usual as a partial-coverage year rather than a decline.

The figures above are sums across agencies reporting in each year, so the 1990 and 2025 comparisons rest on slightly different sets of agencies. The direction of the change is not in doubt at this magnitude, but the precise percentages carry that caveat with them.