This data set, created as part of a two-year investigation by NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, includes the 2019 earnings of of 21,000 local officers and 2,900 state troopers in New Jersey, including overtime, off-duty jobs and contractual perks that can add tens of thousands of dollars to the average officer’s paycheck. It is a comprehensive look at police compensation that researchers said has few parallels in the nation.
The effort required more than 700 public records requests and hundreds of hours of data inputting, since many municipalities provided only paper records that had to be broken down by hand. The resulting interactive database can be found at https://projects.nj.com/paycheck/. For more details on how we cleaned and analyzed the data, see our methodology.
This data is based on payroll records provided to the media outlet through public records requests to 463 municipal police departments and New Jersey State Police. To establish uniformity in the salary figures for each officer, state pension data was overlaid onto those records. (See our methodology).
NJ Advance Media has standardized officer names. The data covers earnings for 2019.
What’s Included
The master file (paycheck-data.csv) contains earnings figures of every local and state police officer by name and department in New Jersey. Descriptions of each column can be found in the data dictionary. Also included are pc_notes.docx, which has notes to the data; and pc_data_diary.xlsx, which defines the breakdown of pay at each department.
Provided in collaboration with NJ Advance Media
