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
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 226 | 379 | 400 | 544 | 641 | 816 |
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. Most are not sustained, and the totals below say nothing about whether any particular one was true. [2]
| Year | Investigations | Incidents |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 14,419 | 11,484 |
| 2022 | 16,451 | 12,428 |
| 2023 | 17,380 | 12,921 |
| 2024 | 16,261 | 12,055 |
| 2025 | 17,996 | 12,594 |
"Officers involved" counts officers named in internal affairs investigations that year. It is not a staffing figure and must not be read as one: the number of sworn officers a department employs comes from a separate FBI census, on the staffing page.