June 4, 2009
The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey regularly receives complaints and concerns about local police internal affairs divisions, the unit in a police department that investigates complaints made about the department itself. We hear from people who are afraid to file a complaint, from people who have received no response, and from police officers who believe they were mistreated by an unfair process.
In this report, we took a closer look at the police agencies’ records and at those agencies’ responses to our questions, and we found significant evidence that the process for citizen complaints against police officers in New Jersey is broken.