Statewide
Police discipline in New Jersey
Two separate things are reported, and they are easy to confuse. Major discipline is a small set of final outcomes: a termination, a demotion, or a suspension of more than five days, published once every appeal is finished. Internal affairs figures are complaint volumes, most of which are never sustained and none of which are findings against anyone.
Major discipline
Reported by agencies for 2020 through 2025. Each record names an officer, and every one of them appears on this site with its own source citation.
Officers named
2,298
Some appear more than once
Terminations
471
Records recording a termination
Agencies
340
With at least one record
Reporting years
2020 to 2025
Scopes the chart below and the internal affairs table beneath it. Nothing is removed: every year stays in each chart's data table, and table rows outside the range recede rather than disappear.
counts · 2020 to 2025 · 6 reported years
| Year | counts |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 226 |
| 2021 | 379 |
| 2022 | 400 |
| 2023 | 544 |
| 2024 | 641 |
| 2025 | 816 |
Selected range 2020 to 2025: 3,006 records.
Reported records go up every year across this period, from 226 in 2020 to 816 in 2025. That is a fact about reporting, and it does not establish that misconduct rose. Statewide publication of major discipline began with the 2020 reporting year, agencies took different amounts of time to comply, and a record only appears once its appeal is exhausted, so recent years keep filling in after publication. A department reporting more may be a department reporting properly.
Internal affairs
Complaint and investigation volumes agencies reported for 2021 through 2025. These are allegations, not findings against anyone.
Dispositions and sustained investigations
Of the 17,996 investigations 514 agencies reported for 2025, 3,514 reported at least one sustained complaint: 19.5 percent. The rest ended unfounded, exonerated, not sustained, or without a classified outcome.
share of total · 5 reported years
| Year | share of total |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 0 |
| 2022 | 19.968 |
| 2023 | 21.099 |
| 2024 | 23.855 |
| 2025 | 19.527 |
Internal dispositions by year
Internal affairs investigations per 1,000 residents, 2025
Per 1,000 residents · 21 counties
Counties are grouped by rank into 6 equal-sized groups, compared against the other 20 shown here only. Shading is rate per 1,000 residents, not a grade or a judgment. Boundary values are printed above the ramp.
County outlines are generalized for display and are not legal boundaries. Population is from the 2020 Census. Internal affairs figures are more recent, so a per-resident rate mixes vintages.
| County | rate per 1,000 residents |
|---|---|
| Atlantic | 1.88 |
| Bergen | 0.81 |
| Burlington | 1.08 |
| Camden | 4.59 |
| Cape May | 1.80 |
| Cumberland | 1.92 |
| Essex | 3.42 |
| Gloucester | 0.90 |
| Hudson | 1.66 |
| Hunterdon | 0.85 |
| Mercer | 0.93 |
| Middlesex | 0.72 |
| Monmouth | 1.03 |
| Morris | 0.87 |
| Ocean | 0.55 |
| Passaic | 1.27 |
| Salem | 1.02 |
| Somerset | 0.89 |
| Sussex | 1.07 |
| Union | 1.29 |
| Warren | 0.89 |
Counties ranked
- 1Camden4.59 (group 6 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 2Essex3.42 (group 6 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 3Cumberland1.92 (group 6 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 4Atlantic1.88 (group 6 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 5Cape May1.80 (group 5 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 6Hudson1.66 (group 5 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 7Union1.29 (group 5 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 8Passaic1.27 (group 4 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 9Burlington1.08 (group 4 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 10Sussex1.07 (group 4 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 11Monmouth1.03 (group 3 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 12Salem1.02 (group 3 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 13Mercer0.93 (group 3 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 14Gloucester0.90 (group 3 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 15Warren0.89 (group 2 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 16Somerset0.89 (group 2 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 17Morris0.87 (group 2 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 18Hunterdon0.85 (group 1 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 19Bergen0.81 (group 1 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 20Middlesex0.72 (group 1 of 6, lowest to highest)
- 21Ocean0.55 (group 1 of 6, lowest to highest)
Per 1,000 residents, 2025.
Not on this map: the State Police, the Department of Corrections, Transit Police, and other state-level agencies. They operate across county lines and the Attorney General reports them outside the county system, so their activity appears in no county here. They are in the rankings.
Sources
- [1]New Jersey Attorney General, Major Discipline Data 2020-2025. Derived by counting rows in the cited source files; see /methodology. ↩
- [2]New Jersey Attorney General, Internal Affairs Agency Totals 2021-2025. ↩
- [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]County population: 2020 Decennial Census, as republished by NJOGIS, carried on NJ_Counties_3857 (FeatureServer layer 0). New Jersey Office of Information Technology, Office of GIS (NJOGIS), https://services2.arcgis.com/XVOqAjTOJ5P6ngMu/arcgis/rest/services/NJ_Counties_3857/FeatureServer/0. Retrieved 2026-07-27.
- [5]New Jersey Attorney General internal affairs data downloads, 2021-2023 and 2024-2025 files, disposition and sustained-investigation columns summed over every agency detail row by this site. ↩