Authorities are investigating multiple New Jersey police officers who reported using high rates of physical force against suspects following NJ.com’s release of a statewide database of police use of force, according to the state’s top law enforcement official.

Attorney General Gurbir Grewal on Monday acknowledged that his Office of Public Integrity and Accountability had launched the probes after obtaining the dataset that formed The Force Report, an NJ Advance Media investigation published last year.

The attorney general declined to name the officers or departments the office was examining, saying a statewide review was ongoing. The Attorney General’s Office as a matter of policy does not typically confirm or deny the existence of investigations into specific people or entities.

“I will say this: We have identified individuals that we’re investigating … based on the dataset from the Force Report,” Grewal said during a wide-ranging interview with The Star-Ledger editorial board in Newark.

His comments on Monday were the first public acknowledgment that state authorities were investigating specific law enforcement officers.

“If their conduct is criminal, we’ll hold them accountable criminally," he said. "If their conduct could be fixed with re-training, we’ll do it that way.”

The Force Report, a 16-month investigation, found major disparities in how police officers use force and who they use it against, as well as paltry oversight and no standard reporting practices. The database included every reported instance of use of force between 2012 and 2016 turned over by police departments in response to hundreds of Open Public Records Act requests.

The attorney general said the series highlighted “serious issues,” including widespread racial disparities and departments and individual officers that used high rates of force during arrests. But he stressed that the data also showed that the overwhelming majority of police officers reported using force at or below the average rate.

“What gets lost in this is the vast majority … of police interactions go off without a hitch,” Grewal said. “It is a rare, rare instance where force is used. It’s even more rare when that force is used without justification.

Shortly after the investigation was published, Grewal and other New Jersey law enforcement leaders pledged to overhaul how the state tracks and monitors police use of force. On Monday, Grewal acknowledged the investigation’s finding that police officers have been required to log every compliance hold, punch, kick and baton blow since the early 2000s but the documents were not being used for oversight.

“We had 17 years of data, more or less just sitting there,” he said.

The state is now developing an online portal for departments to report use-of-force data into a central tracking system. Grewal said he hoped New Jersey’s new system would become “a national model.”

Last month, Grewal told state lawmakers his office purchased the data from NJ Advance Media, which spent more than $30,000 compiling it from 72,000 paper records. The data was made available for sale through ProPublica, a nonprofit, investigative news organization, for $2,000 to academic institutions and government agencies.

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter.

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