New Jersey's top prosecutor is creating a semi-autonomous team in his office to target a wide swath of government wrongdoing, from bribe-pocketing public officials to abusive police officers and wrongful convictions.

Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said the newly formed Office of Public Integrity and Accountability will be led by a longtime federal prosecutor with a record of high-profile public corruption convictions.

Thomas Eicher, the former head of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark, will answer directly to the attorney general. His first day was Monday.

He will oversee an office of detectives and prosecutors charged with routing out "criminal abuses of the public trust and handle other sensitive matters that implicate the public's confidence in both government and the criminal justice system," according to an announcement from Grewal's office.

Previously, such cases were handled by the state Division of Criminal Justice, which maintains a corruption and government crime bureau. The attorney general said the new configuration, which puts the office "outside the normal reporting chain," was meant to "ensure the independence of sensitive investigations."

A spokesman for Grewal said the new office would "absorb" the division's existing caseload as it ramps up enforcement and hires more staff in the coming months.

The public integrity office will oversee cases including:

"Sensitive matters" involving public officials at the local, state and federal level

Claims of civil rights abuses by police

Internal affairs investigations

Wrongful conviction claims

Grewal said the new office was the result of conversations he's had with members of the public since Gov. Phil Murphy appointed him in January, saying "their message is clear: We must root out the corruption and misconduct that undermines faith in our public institutions."

Grewal said recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings in federal corruption cases have also created a "void" to be filled by state attorneys general, who can go after elected officials under state law.

Eicher, a career prosecutor, was on a Justice Department task force that led the investigation that became known as the House banking scandal, which saw multiple members of Congress convicted for financial crimes in the early 1990s.

He joined the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark in 2003 and oversaw an investigation that led to the conviction of the former head of the Atlantic City council, as well as officials in Atlantic City and Camden.

His new office will not want for work in New Jersey.

In the last year alone, the mayor of Paterson, the state's third-largest city, was given a five-year sentence for using city employees to do work at a family business and a councilman in Roseland pleaded not guilty to criminal charges he traded votes for favors.

A federal trial in the corruption case of the state's senior senator, Democrat Robert Menendez, resulted in a mistrial, but the senator was "severely admonished" by his peers for advancing the "personal and business interests" of a friend and major donor. Menendez is now seeking reelection with the support of most of the state's high-profile Democrats, including Murphy.

And last year, two Paterson men who spent decades behind bars as county prosecutors fought their release despite new DNA evidence were finally released after prosecutors lost an appeal.

In the aftermath of that case, Grewal's office took over the investigation and announced it had tapped former Supreme Court justice Virginia Long and former U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman to review whether the state should establish a conviction review unit to investigate botched prosecutions.

Grewal said a panel convened by Long and Fishman would soon issue recommendations, and the new office would be in charge of implementing whatever changes come from their advice.

"We all want to do the right thing in every case, so I think if we've fallen short we want to address it," Grewal told NJ Advance Media in a recent interview.

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