Sources, definitions, and limits

• Major discipline means termination, demotion, or a suspension of more than five days. Reporting is required of every NJ law enforcement agency by AG Directives 2020-5, 2021-6, and 2022-14.
• Records are final. Discipline is listed only after all appeals conclude, in the year it became final. It is the adjudicated record, not a log of allegations.
• Blanks mean not provided.The AG's notes state that blank fields were not provided by the submitting agency. This site renders them as "not reported," never as "no" or zero.
• Some fields did not exist in early years.Sustained charges were collected from 2021 on; the resigned-while-IA-pending flag from 2023 on. Earlier records show "not applicable" for those fields.
• Internal affairs totals are aggregate. The IA files count investigations and incidents per agency per year. They name no officers, and allegations in them are not findings: many end unfounded, exonerated, or not sustained.

• As reported, always. Values are shown exactly as the AG data reports them. The site never infers a value the agency did not report.
• Provenance on every record. Each ingested record carries the file, sheet, and row it came from; the footnotes on every page render directly from that data.
• One agency, many spellings. The AG files key agencies differently across releases. Spelling variants are joined only through an explicit, hand-reviewed alias list; nothing is merged on a guess. Municipal names that repeat across counties (several townships share names) get county-qualified page addresses.
• Officer pages group records. Rows with the same name at the same agency appear on one page, each entry cited separately. Officer pages are built only from the major discipline record, never from the un-named IA data.
• Normalized comparisons are labeled analysis.Where the site computes a rate (like investigations per 100 officers), the raw values and the denominator's source are stated, and the comparison stays within one agency type. There is no arrest or population denominator in this data, so no per-capita misconduct rate is possible or offered.
• Higher IA volume is ambiguous. More investigations can mean more misconduct or a stronger reporting culture. Every comparative surface on this site repeats that caveat.

Under the Internal Affairs Policy and Procedures (AG Directive 2022-14), every law enforcement agency files an annual internal affairs summary with the Office of Public Integrity and Accountability. The files cover all investigations open at any point in the reporting year, and the data is a yearly snapshot: a single case cannot be tracked across years. The complaint mix shown on department pages uses the "most serious allegation" each agency assigned to an investigation.

An investigation's internal disposition is what the agency concluded. These are the Attorney General's own definitions, and they are the reason this site repeats that allegations are not findings:

• Sustained. A preponderance of the evidence shows an officer violated a law, regulation, directive, policy, or procedure.
• Not sustained. The investigation failed to disclose sufficient evidence to clearly prove or disprove the allegation.
• Exonerated. The conduct did occur but did not violate any law, regulation, directive, policy, or rule.
• Unfounded. A preponderance of the evidence shows the alleged conduct did not occur.
• Administratively closed. There was insufficient information to move the investigation forward.

Only sustained findings mean a rule was broken. A high count of investigations includes complaints that ended unfounded, exonerated, or not sustained, which is why investigation volume is not a count of misconduct.

The Title 4A glossary, the discipline explainer, and the X-ray annotations that appear inside officer records all draw on one primary source: the text of N.J.A.C. 4A:2 Subchapter 2, Major Discipline, current through New Jersey Register, Vol. 58 No. 12, June 15, 2026, retrieved 2026-07-04. That file is committed to this repository, checksummed, and verified at build.

Each glossary entry pairs a plain-language summary, labeled as this site's explanatory paraphrase, with key points quoted from the regulation. A build gate confirms that every quoted point is a verbatim substring of the source text and that the summary passed the humanizer style rules, so the rule's own words are never mixed with the paraphrase.

The X-ray annotations fire only on confident matches: an explicit N.J.A.C. 4A:2-2.x citation, or one of the canonical general-cause phrases whose meaning is unambiguous. Free-form, agency-specific, or non-4A charge language is left un-annotated rather than guessed. Matches are precomputed at build from the same glossary they link to, so an annotation can never point at a section the glossary does not define.

The civil service jurisdiction flag on each department matches the agency's parent municipality or county against the New Jersey Civil Service Commission roster (Appendix A), as of 2026-07-04. Matching is keyed on county, so a municipality name that repeats across counties can only match the county whose roster lists it. Municipal police departments match a municipality; county agencies match the county. An agency that does not resolve cleanly is marked "not verified" rather than asserted either way. The flag reflects the roster as of its date and is context, not legal advice. The full roster of local civil service jurisdictions is browsable on NJCSNavigator's jurisdiction directory.

If a page here misstates what the official record says, that is a bug in this site and it will be fixed against the source file. The corrections page explains the process, including what to do when the dispute is with the underlying government record itself.