Department profile · Mercer County
Pennington Borough Police Department
Reported as: Pennington Boro PDMunicipal police
Jurisdiction context
Not a civil service jurisdiction
This department is not among the NJCSC Appendix A jurisdictions, so major discipline here follows a different statutory track (generally N.J.S.A. 40A:14 for municipal police), with appeals that usually go to the Superior Court rather than the Civil Service Commission.
See the context on non-civil-service departments.
Reflects the NJCSC Appendix A roster as of 2026-07-04. Context only, not legal advice.
Officers named in IA cases, 2025
3[1]
Distinct officers in that year's IA investigations, not total staffing
IA investigations, 2025
4[1]
Incidents, 2025
2[1]
Major discipline records
1
All years, 2020-2025
Staffing
As reported by the department to the FBI's Law Enforcement Employees (LEE) census, full-time personnel as of October 31 each year. This is a different measurement from the "officers named in IA cases" figure above; see the methodology.
Sworn officers, 2025
6[4]
54 years reported
| Year | sworn officers |
|---|---|
| 1968 | 1 |
| 1969 | 1 |
| 1970 | 1 |
| 1971 | 1 |
| 1972 | 1 |
| 1973 | 1 |
| 1974 | 1 |
| 1975 | 1 |
| 1976 | 1 |
| 1977 | 1 |
| 1978 | 1 |
| 1979 | 1 |
| 1980 | 1 |
| 1981 | 1 |
| 1982 | 1 |
| 1983 | 1 |
| 1984 | 1 |
| 1985 | 2 |
| 1986 | 2 |
| 1987 | 2 |
| 1988 | 2 |
| 1989 | 2 |
| 1990 | 3 |
| 1991 | 4 |
| 1992 | 4 |
| 1993 | 4 |
| 1994 | not reported |
| 1995 | not reported |
| 1996 | not reported |
| 1997 | not reported |
| 1998 | 6 |
| 1999 | 6 |
| 2000 | 6 |
| 2001 | 6 |
| 2002 | 6 |
| 2003 | 6 |
| 2004 | 6 |
| 2005 | 6 |
| 2006 | 6 |
| 2007 | 6 |
| 2008 | 6 |
| 2009 | 6 |
| 2010 | 6 |
| 2011 | 4 |
| 2012 | 4 |
| 2013 | 4 |
| 2014 | 5 |
| 2015 | 5 |
| 2016 | 5 |
| 2017 | 5 |
| 2018 | 5 |
| 2019 | 5 |
| 2020 | 6 |
| 2021 | 7 |
| 2022 | 7 |
| 2023 | 6 |
| 2024 | 6 |
| 2025 | 6 |
How Pennington Borough Police Department's sworn staffing compares with its real peer group (same agency type, similar size band), not an assumed bell curve.
Peer group: Municipal police, 1-14 officers (n=100)
| Range | Agencies |
|---|---|
| 0–2 | 13 |
| 2–4 | 3 |
| 4–6 | 1 |
| 6–8 | 16 |
| 8–10 | 11 |
| 10–12 | 15 |
| 12–14 | 41 |
Pennington Borough Police Department: 6 sworn officers: 20th percentile among Municipal police, 1-14 officers (n=100).
The match between this FBI record and this department is this site's inference, not a certified mapping. If it is wrong, we will remove it: corrections.
Officer pay and school-staff pay
No median officer salary is published for Pennington Borough Police Department. A department needs at least 10 active officers resolved to it in the NJ Treasury pension file before this site shows a median. That threshold is about the stability of the figure, not about the department. The county-level comparison is on the Mercer County pay page.
Military surplus equipment (1033 program)
No 1033 transfers recorded. No surplus-equipment transfers appear for this agency under a high-confidence name match in the Defense Logistics Agency's file as of 2026-06-30. That can mean the agency received nothing through the program, or that a recipient name in the federal file did not confidently match this department. See the methodology for how the match is made, or the statewide 1033 overview for how the program spreads across New Jersey.
Internal affairs investigations by year
counts
| Category | counts |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 2 |
| 2023 | 3 |
| 2025 | 4 |
Incidents
2 in 2025
| Year | counts |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 2 |
| 2023 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2 |
Computed by this site from the two figures the agency reports each year. Not a misconduct rate: it describes how an agency resolved what it investigated.
share of total · 3 reported years
| Year | share of total |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 0 |
| 2023 | 33.333 |
| 2025 | 50 |
Statewide, 19.5 percent of investigations reported a sustained complaint in 2025. How dispositions break down statewide.
Complaint mix, 2025
Most serious allegation per investigation, as categorized by the reporting agency. Officer-level rows list 4 officers involved.
Most serious allegation
| Other Departmental Rule Violation | 3 |
|---|---|
| Improper Supervision/Failure To Supervise | 1 |
Statewide category pages: Other Departmental Rule Violation · Improper Supervision/Failure To Supervise
Internal disposition
| Sustained | 2 |
|---|---|
| Not Sustained | 2 |
Allegations by year, 2022 to 2025
Other Departmental Rule Violation
4 of 9
| Year | counts |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 0 |
| 2023 | 1 |
| 2024 | not reported |
| 2025 | 3 |
Excessive Force
1 of 9
| Year | counts |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 1 |
| 2023 | 0 |
| 2024 | not reported |
| 2025 | 0 |
Improper Supervision/Failure To Supervise
1 of 9
| Year | counts |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 0 |
| 2023 | 0 |
| 2024 | not reported |
| 2025 | 1 |
Insubordination/Disobeying An Order
1 of 9
| Year | counts |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 0 |
| 2023 | 1 |
| 2024 | not reported |
| 2025 | 0 |
Other (2 categories)
2 of 9
| Year | counts |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 1 |
| 2023 | 1 |
| 2024 | not reported |
| 2025 | 0 |
Against peers, 2025
How this grade was built →| Pennington Borough Police Department | 133.3 |
|---|---|
| County median, municipal police (13) | 133.3 |
| NJ median, municipal police (445) | 125.9 |
Investigations per 100 officers named in that year's IA investigations (the Attorney General's own "Number of Officers" field, a distinct-officer count drawn from the IA case data itself, not a department headcount). A higher number is ambiguous on its own: it can reflect more misconduct, or a stronger internal reporting culture. Medians are computed within the same agency type only.
4 investigations reported for 2025[1] ÷ 6 sworn officers the department reported to the FBI for 2025[15] = 66.7 per 100 FBI-reported sworn officers. This is a genuinely different denominator from the rate above, not a correction of it; the two should not be added or averaged together. See the methodology for why these two officer counts diverge.
Report card
Grade C: Middle fifth of peers
On reported IA volume and discipline severity; see methodology
- Combined standing
- 52nd percentile of 100 peers
- Confidence
- Medium confidence
- small agency; per-officer rates swing widely on a handful of cases
Where this agency falls among its peers
The actual spread of discipline severity across Pennington Borough Police Department's real peer group, not an assumed bell curve. If the group is skewed, it is shown skewed.
Peer group: Municipal police, 1-14 officers (n=100)
| Range | Agencies |
|---|---|
| 0–50 | 74 |
| 50–100 | 6 |
| 100–150 | 8 |
| 150–200 | 2 |
| 200–250 | 4 |
| 250–300 | 2 |
| 300–350 | 4 |
Pennington Borough Police Department: 75 severity-weighted discipline per 100 IA-investigated officers: 77th percentile among Municipal police, 1-14 officers (n=100).
How the grade is built
Three components, each a percentile within the peer group. The combined standing is their weighted mean, re-ranked among peers; the grade is the fifth of the peer group it lands in.
IA volumeweight 40%
111.1 investigations per 100 officers (multi-year mean)
Internal affairs investigations per 100 reported officers, averaged over the years where the agency reported both figures.
Discipline severityweight 40%
75.0 severity-weighted discipline per 100 officers, 2020-2025
Major discipline records weighted by sanction (termination 4, demotion 3, suspension 2, other 1) per 100 officers.
Allegation severityweight 20%
1.75 mean severity tier (1 low - 4 critical)
Mean severity tier of IA allegations across 2021-2025, using the published tier map; unknown values excluded.
What this grade can and can't tell you
- The underlying data is self-reported by agencies, one yearly snapshot at a time.
- Allegations are not findings; many complaints end unfounded, exonerated, or not sustained.
- There is no arrest or call-volume denominator in this data, so nothing here is a per-capita misconduct rate. A genuinely independent staffing-based rate, sourced from the FBI rather than this grade's own data, appears above when available. It is a different measurement, not a more accurate version of the grade.
- A higher internal affairs volume is ambiguous: it can indicate more misconduct, or a more robust oversight and reporting culture. The grade weighs it anyway, because volume is what the record offers; that choice is published, not hidden.
- The grade is one lens. The records it reads are on this page above.
Where this agency ranks
| Metric | Value | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| IA per 100 investigated officers2025 | 133.3 | 183rd of 445 municipal police |
| IA investigations2025 | 4 | 330th of 445 municipal police |
| IA incidents2025 | 2 | 364th of 445 municipal police |
| Major discipline2020-2025 | 1 | 184th of 282 municipal police |
| Sworn per 1,000 residentslatest reported census year | 2.05 | 304th of 460 municipal police |
| OPRA requests recordedOPRAmachine, 2017 to present | 10 | 414th of 458 municipal police |
Major discipline records
| Year | major discipline records |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 0 |
| 2021 | 0 |
| 2022 | 0 |
| 2023 | 0 |
| 2024 | 0 |
| 2025 | 1 |
1 major discipline records in 2025, up from 0 in 2020.
Every name links to the officer's record page with the agency's full synopsis and citation.
Public records requests
Records requests about this department filed through OPRAmachine, an independent site that files Open Public Records Act requests in public and publishes the responses.[2] This is a third-party, user-generated source, separate in origin from the Attorney General records elsewhere on this page.
Current as of 12 July 2026. These figures are a point-in-time snapshot and do not update: requests filed to OPRAmachine after that date do not appear here. For live activity, see this body on OPRAmachine.
This department has no separate listing on OPRAmachine. Records requests for it are handled through Pennington Borough, the municipal records custodian, which also fields requests about permits, property, and code enforcement. Only the 10 requests whose subject line indicates it concerns the police department are counted below. The other 82 filed to Pennington Borough are about something else and are not shown.
What happened to those requests
Statuses as recorded on OPRAmachine. They are set by the person who filed the request when they classify what came back, not by the agency and not by any court. They describe the fate of a records request and nothing else.
| Awaiting agency response | 10 |
|---|
Recent requests
The 10 most recent police-related requests to Pennington Borough, by date and recorded status. Each was written by a member of the public. A request is a question somebody asked. It is not a finding, not an allegation this site makes, and not evidence that anything happened.
- 2025-09-16Awaiting agency response
- 2025-03-05Awaiting agency response
- 2025-02-13Awaiting agency response
- 2023-08-31Awaiting agency response
- 2023-08-31Awaiting agency response
- 2020-05-28Awaiting agency response
- 2020-05-28Awaiting agency response
- 2020-05-28Awaiting agency response
- 2020-05-27Awaiting agency response
- 2020-05-27Awaiting agency response
Show what each request asked for, as the requester wrote it
These titles are quoted from OPRAmachine exactly as the requester typed them. They are the requester's words, not this site's, and some describe what the requester believed or suspected. Nothing here has been established as fact.
A member of the public requested: “BWC Footage”
2025-09-16 · Awaiting agency response
A member of the public requested: “Police Chief information”
2025-03-05 · Awaiting agency response
A member of the public requested: “Synopses of Officer Misconduct and Major Discipline”
2025-02-13 · Awaiting agency response
A member of the public requested: “Invoice of Body Camera Purchase in the Police Department”
2023-08-31 · Awaiting agency response
A member of the public requested: “Purchase order history for the police department from 2020 - 2023”
2023-08-31 · Awaiting agency response
A member of the public requested: “OPRA request: police payroll records 2012-2019”
2020-05-28 · Awaiting agency response
A member of the public requested: “OPRA request -- use of force reports 2017-2019”
2020-05-28 · Awaiting agency response
A member of the public requested: “OPRA - police officer-involved lawsuits 2012-2019”
2020-05-28 · Awaiting agency response
A member of the public requested: “OPRA: Purchase order history for the police department from 2012 to 2019”
2020-05-27 · Awaiting agency response
A member of the public requested: “OPRA: Purchase invoice of body worn cameras for the police department”
2020-05-27 · Awaiting agency response
File your own records request
Anyone can request records from this municipality under the Open Public Records Act. This link opens a request on OPRAmachine, pre-filled with a neutral starting point you can edit or replace before you send it. The request, and any response, will be published there.
File an OPRA request about this department
See every request filed to Pennington Borough on OPRAmachine.
What this section can and can't tell you
- A request is not a finding. Every entry records what a member of the public asked for. None of it establishes that an agency did anything, and none of it is an allegation this site is making.
- Statuses come from the requester, not the agency. On OPRAmachine the person who filed the request classifies the response they got, so “successful” means they said they got what they asked for. It is not the agency's word and not an adjudication.
- Request volume is not a measure of misconduct. A long list usually reflects public interest, local journalism, or one determined requester. A short list usually means few people have asked.
- This covers OPRAmachine only. Most OPRA requests in New Jersey are filed directly with agencies and never appear here, so this is a floor, not a total.
- It is frozen at 12 July 2026. The figures come from a snapshot of OPRAmachine taken on that date and nothing refreshes them, so anything filed since is missing. Treat every number here as a lower bound that is only getting further out of date.
- The count is an undercount, by design. Requests to Pennington Borough are sorted by subject line, because that custodian also handles permits, property, and code enforcement. A request that is genuinely about the police but carries a vague subject line, and many do read only “OPRA Request,” is not counted here. The sorting is this site's own reading of the request titles, not a fact from the source, and it is deliberately cautious: it would rather miss a police request than show you somebody's building permit.
The match between this OPRAmachine body and this department is this site's inference, not a certified mapping. If it is wrong, we will remove it: corrections.
Questions and answers
How many internal affairs investigations did Pennington Borough Police Department report in 2025?
Pennington Borough Police Department reported 4 internal affairs investigations in 2025, according to New Jersey Attorney General data. 3 distinct officers were named in that year's IA investigations.
How many major discipline records does Pennington Borough Police Department have?
Pennington Borough Police Department has 1 major discipline records in the Attorney General's 2020-2025 releases, of which 0 were terminations. These are final, adjudicated actions, not allegations.
How many officers does Pennington Borough Police Department have?
Pennington Borough Police Department reported 6 full-time sworn officers to the FBI's Law Enforcement Employees census for 2025, 0% of them female. That is 2.05 sworn officers per 1,000 residents. This is a different measurement from the "officers named in IA cases" figure elsewhere on this page, which counts distinct officers in that year's internal affairs investigations, not total staffing.
Sources
- [1]New Jersey Internal Affairs Agency Totals, 2021-2025. New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Sheet "Sheet1", row 2296. Snapshot retrieved 2026-06-09. ↩
- [2]Records-request activity for Pennington Borough. OPRAmachine (opramachine.com), an independent public-records platform. Publicly visible requests only. Point-in-time snapshot taken 2026-07-12 from a database export dated 2026-07-11. Not updated after that date; see opramachine.com for current activity. ↩
- [3]New Jersey county boundaries. New Jersey Office of Information Technology, Office of GIS (NJOGIS). NJ_Counties_3857 (FeatureServer layer 0), https://services2.arcgis.com/XVOqAjTOJ5P6ngMu/arcgis/rest/services/NJ_Counties_3857/FeatureServer/0. 2020 boundary delineation. Retrieved 2026-07-27. Boundaries are generalized for display. This data set is not a survey document and must not be used as such. The polygons do not represent legal boundaries.
- [4]FBI Law Enforcement Employees (LEE), New Jersey subset. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Row 8377. Derived from the public Law Enforcement Employees (LEE) / Police Employee Data dataset (1960-2025), https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/. ↩
- [5]FBI Law Enforcement Employees (LEE), New Jersey subset. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Row 8377. Derived from the public Law Enforcement Employees (LEE) / Police Employee Data dataset (1960-2025), https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/. ↩
- [6]FBI Law Enforcement Employees (LEE), New Jersey subset. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Row 8377. Derived from the public Law Enforcement Employees (LEE) / Police Employee Data dataset (1960-2025), https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/. ↩
- [7]FBI Law Enforcement Employees (LEE), New Jersey subset. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Row 8377. Derived from the public Law Enforcement Employees (LEE) / Police Employee Data dataset (1960-2025), https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/. ↩
- [8]New Jersey Internal Affairs Agency Totals, 2021-2025. New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Sheet "Sheet1", row 1281. Snapshot retrieved 2026-06-09. ↩
- [9]New Jersey Internal Affairs Agency Totals, 2021-2025. New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Sheet "Sheet1", row 1784. Snapshot retrieved 2026-06-09. ↩
- [10]New Jersey Internal Affairs Agency Totals, 2021-2025. New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Sheet "Sheet1", row 2296. Snapshot retrieved 2026-06-09. ↩
- [11]New Jersey Internal Affairs Investigations, 2024-2025. New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Sheet "Sheet1", row 1. Snapshot retrieved 2026-06-09. Aggregated from every Pennington Boro PD row for 2025; row 1 is the header. ↩
- [12]New Jersey Internal Affairs Data Download, 2021-2023. New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Sheet "Sheet1", row 1. Snapshot retrieved 2026-06-09. Aggregated from every Pennington Boro PD row for 2022. ↩
- [13]New Jersey Internal Affairs Data Download, 2021-2023. New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Sheet "Sheet1", row 1. Snapshot retrieved 2026-06-09. Aggregated from every Pennington Boro PD row for 2023. ↩
- [14]New Jersey Internal Affairs Investigations, 2024-2025. New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Sheet "Sheet1", row 1. Snapshot retrieved 2026-06-09. Aggregated from every Pennington Boro PD row for 2025. ↩
- [15]FBI Law Enforcement Employees (LEE), New Jersey subset. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Row 8377. Derived from the public Law Enforcement Employees (LEE) / Police Employee Data dataset (1960-2025), https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/. ↩
- [16]Ranks computed by this site over the Attorney General internal affairs agency totals and major discipline releases, within agency type. Each ranking page lists every agency and its source rows. ↩
- [17]New Jersey Major Discipline Data, 2020-2025. New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Sheet "Major Discipline Data", row 420. Snapshot retrieved 2026-07-03. ↩