Editorial standards

What the site is for

New Jersey publishes detailed data on police discipline and internal affairs, but the official releases are spreadsheets that few people read. This site turns them into pages a resident, a reporter, or an officer can read, with the source of every figure attached. Its job is to make the public record legible, not to argue a case. Where the record supports a conclusion, the record makes it.

The sourcing rule

Every factual statement on every page traces to a specific record: a row and field in an official data release, or a named document. That reference is carried with the statement and rendered as a numbered source note on the page. A statement that cannot be tied to a record does not appear on a factual surface. This is enforced in the build, not by habit: a page that fails the check does not publish.

Values are shown as reported. A blank field reads "not reported", never "none" or zero. The site does not correct, reinterpret, or fill gaps in the official record; when the record is silent, so is the page.

Fact and analysis are kept apart

Some pages add interpretation: department report cards, peer benchmarks, rankings, and the reading of trends in the articles. Each of those is labeled on the page as this site's analysis, its method is published in full on the methodology page, and the records it is built from stay one click away. The label is text, not a color, so it survives any screen. A grade or a rank is an opinion computed from reported figures. It is never presented as a finding about a person.

How the plain-language summaries are written

Department, county, and officer pages carry a short summary in plain language. Each is written from a fact sheet containing only the figures already shown on that page, with drafting assistance from a language model, and then passed through an automated gate before it can publish. The gate rejects a summary that contains a number not present in its source, that speculates about motive or intent, that mismatches the person or agency it describes, or that breaks the site's style rules. A summary whose underlying figures have changed is withheld until it is rewritten. Every summary is labeled on the page as written by this site from the figures on that page.

Use of AI tools

Language models assist with drafting summaries and with copy-editing passes on articles; each article records the passes it went through in its metadata. Those tools never supply a fact, a figure, or an image, and nothing they touch is published without review against the cited records. Where a tool and the record disagree, the record wins and the text is corrected.

Named individuals

Officers are named only where the Attorney General's major discipline releases name them. Those releases cover final discipline, after appeals have concluded. The site does not name officers from internal affairs data, which counts complaints and investigations without identifying anyone, and it does not add names from any other source. Every page about a named officer carries the same standing statement about what the record is and is not, and a link to the record it was built from. Requests to correct a record that misstates the official release are handled on the corrections page, which also explains when a removal is granted.

Independence and funding

The project takes no money from any government body, police department, police union, or advocacy organization, and none of them has any say in what is published. It is self-funded. The site may carry advertising to help cover its costs; ads are sold by a third-party network, advertisers do not choose the pages they appear on, and advertising revenue has no path into editorial decisions. If that ever changes, this page will say so.

Police Transparency NJ is an independent research project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by any government agency, police department, or law enforcement body. All analysis is compiled from public records.

Why there is no byline

The site is published under a project identity rather than a personal name. That is a deliberate choice for a site that names police officers, and it puts the burden of trust where it belongs: on the record. Every claim can be checked against its cited source, the complete data is available for download, and the method behind every computed figure is public. A reader does not have to take the author's word for anything, because nothing here rests on it.

Corrections

Errors are corrected, and a note recording the correction is added to the page. The process, including what happens when the official record itself is wrong, is on the corrections page.

Contact

Questions about these standards go to [email protected] or the contact page.