In an effort to increase the transparency of complaints about police behavior, New Jersey’s attorney general released a website that aggregates data of internal affairs investigations across hundreds of statewide law enforcement agencies.

Internal affairs investigations information is already available to the public, but it is only available at each individual agency. The dashboard made public Wednesday aggregates all of that information to make it more readily available. It’s believed that this dashboard is one of the first of its kind in the country and joins the use-of-force dashboardreleased in 2021 under former Attorney General Gurbir Grewal.

The dashboard offers access to details about complaints, investigations or actions taken against police or correctional officers over 500 law enforcement agencies. Users can search for details on investigations by county, municipality, race or ethnicity of the officers and complainants and more. However, the identities of those involved in these investigations will not be shown.

The internal affairs investigations dashboard follows a multiyear effort by the Murphy administration and the attorney general’s office to heal the fractured trust between communities and the criminal justice system, which culminated in 2020’s “racial reckoning” after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. The dashboard is a first step into how complaints and allegations made against law enforcement are handled, as well as how they vary from location to location.

“Our state’s new dashboard testifies to the profound understanding of our law enforcement officers that such trust is forged by meaningful actions that reflect the crucial importance of this profession. Every effort to improve accountability among our esteemed law enforcement officers today will help better protect our community members tomorrow,” Murphy said in a news release.

The big picture

The first tab of the dashboard provides an overall look of internal affairs investigations. It shows that there were 14,416 total investigations involving 10,389 different officers, for example. Around 56% of officers involved in those investigations were white. Another tab shows data on closed investigations — what types of allegations were made, what disciplinary action was taken, what the race of the officer was and more.

Credit: New Jersey Office of the Attorney General

But the dashboard also shows that over half the allegations prompting these investigations —  whether for use of excessive force or improper search, for example — involve “other rule violations,” which is a vague, catch-all category.

The attorney general’s office’s goal is to continue improving the dashboard and data collected from agencies, with changes already underway for 2022’s dashboard. The office said it will also review the data to “identify any patterns that might raise concerns warranting further investigation,” said Tom Eicher, executive director of the attorney general’s office of public integrity and accountability, in a news release.

Learning from the data

“We are always looking at this data as a way to improve internal affairs policies, procedures and oversight,” said Eicher.

While data is available from over 565 agencies, about 35 reported they did not have any internal affairs investigations in 2021.

Criminal Justice Reform Chair of the Latino Action Network Cuqui Rivera applauded the dashboard but said that all agencies need decrease complaints against them.

“We need all municipalities to work toward the goal of decreasing internal affairs complaints,” she said in a press release.

And compliance from agencies is also important to help the dashboard achieve the Murphy administration’s goal of accountability — whether or not they investigate complaints and whether or not they are fairly investigated for everyone involved. More data will help with transparency, say advocates.

“We are encouraged to see New Jersey becoming more transparent about law enforcement internal affairs investigations. Transparency is a critical part of accountability,” said Emily Schwartz, senior counsel in the Criminal Justice Reform Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, in the attorney general’s press release. “We hope the new dashboard will become even more robust and inclusive of additional identifying information.”