It’s the most serious decision a police officer will ever have to make: the decision to use deadly force.

Since 2020, any police encounter that ends in death in New Jersey is required to be investigated by the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General and logged into a public database that anyone can access.

But a Kane In Your Corner investigation finds there are serious problems with the accuracy of the database. Since the state began collecting data, about one in four uses of deadly force are missing.

Attorney C.J. Griffin, a well-known advocate for government transparency, says the Kane In Your Corner investigation raises important questions.

“If the deaths are missing, which are the ones that are really high profile, it really makes me question how many others are missing,” Griffin says.

Griffin argues it’s vital for the data in those records to be complete because, “ultimately, that database is what history is. We'll look at that and say…there were a certain number of uses of force, and it becomes the truth.”

Among the cases that are missing from the database: the May 2023 shooting of Everett Rand, a murder suspect in Newark; the April 2022 shooting of an axe-wielding man in Edison; and the 2021 incident where police officers in Buena Vista shot and killed Roy Jackel after they say he acted erratically following a motor vehicle accident.

Also missing is the only use of deadly force since 2020 that resulted in an indictment: the shooting of Charles Sharp in Mantua in 2021.

Kane In Your Corner asked NJOAG what, if anything, it does to ensure that police departments file mandatory use-of-force reports. A spokesperson did not answer directly but said that when it comes to tracking deadly force, New Jersey is ahead of the curve.

“New Jersey was the first state to standardize the reporting of all uses of force and to put details on a public dashboard,” the spokesperson says, “and to this day, fewer than half of states collect data on such incidents.”

Richard Rivera, the police director of Penns Grove and a long-time law enforcement analyst, says that’s not much consolation if the data is incomplete.

“How are we supposed to gauge the actions of officers?” Rivera says. “How are we going to change training? How are we going to increase supervision? How are we going to guide them better if we don't have anything concrete to go based on?”