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By Joe Brandt | For NJ.com

New Jersey has 550-plus police departments employing more than 33,000 officers. And while there are plenty of good cops in the state, others have been accused of violating the laws they have sworn to uphold.

At least 350 officers, to be more precise, were arrested in New Jersey from 2005 to 2013, according to the Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database, which tracks arrests of officers.

Former cop and current Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson collected the data.

"The point of the research is to improve policing," he says. And it's “an eye-opener when people look at this, they don’t realize that these kinds of things go on.”

Stinson said he found some interesting trends in the data, some contrary to some popular research. For one, a large portion of cops who get arrested are within three years of retirement, poking a hole in the belief that it was mostly young officers violating laws.

The most common charge nationwide was simple assault, followed by driving under the influence. But there were also more than 1,000 official misconduct cases.

Below, we mapped the number of cases in which cops were arrested in New Jersey. Stinson's full database is here.

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How the data on officers was collected

Stinson created the database after he and his classmates disagreed on just how often cops were arrested. Stinson, from his time on the force, knew cops committed crimes, perhaps more than the average person might think.

“I had friends who worked in law enforcement who had gotten in trouble over the years," Stinson said.

And he knew agencies were not keeping track of the issue on a larger scale. So he set up dozens of Google Alerts and started gathering data.

Today, he has 17 research assistants helping him with the project, which contains information on roughly 11,000 cases from across the country.

“People read these articles in the newspaper [about a cop being charged] and think it’s a one-off," Stinson said. "They don’t realize people are reading similar articles in their hometowns every week.”

He does get a lot of flak for keeping track of cops who get arrested, with some who think it's disrespectful or inappropriate to do so. But the comments don't distract him from the work because he believes it's beneficial work.

Here are some of the N.J. cops who have been charged in notable cases since 2015.

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Philip Seidle

Former Neptune Township Sgt. Philip Seidle is serving a 30-year sentence for fatally shooting his ex-wife on an Asbury Park street during an argument about custody of their children.

Police responded to domestic incidents at Seidle's home 21 times over a 21-year period, authorities said at a press conference. The Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office investigated the police response to the attack and determined that police could not have prevented Seidle from killing his wife.

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Lori M. Nichols | For NJ.com

Robert Marzi

Robert E. Marzi, a former cop in Monroe Township, Gloucester County, pleaded guilty to receiving sex in exchange for helping two women receive lesser charges.

He is serving two concurrent three-year sentences on official misconduct charges.

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Pedro Abad

Abad, a former Linden police officer, was sentenced to 8 1/3 to 25 years in prison after a 2015 drunk-driving crash on the way home from a strip club in Staten Island. Two of his passengers were killed and another was injured after Abad's car crashed head-on into a truck while he was going the wrong way on a highway.

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6ABC

Frank Nucera

Nucera, the former chief of the Bordentown Township police, was charged in November with hate crime assault and other civil rights offenses after federal officials learned of an arrest where he slammed a handcuffed black teenager's head into a doorframe.

A fellow police officer secretively recorded Nucera making disparaging comments about minorities while on the job.

His case is pending in federal court, and no trial date has yet been set.

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Lori M. Nichols | For NJ.com

Rafael Martinez Jr.

Martinez, a Camden County Police detective, was charged with sexual assault after he was found to have fathered a child with a 15-year-old. She gave birth to the child in August 2017.

Martinez was suspended from the force and later pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child, a spokeswoman for the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office said. Martinez is scheduled to be sentenced next month.

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Andrew Miller | For NJ Advance M

Joseph Reiman

Reiman, a cop in Carteret, was charged with assault and official misconduct after videos surfaced of him beating a teen during an arrest.

Reiman, whose brother is mayor of Carteret, made more than a fifth of the department's arrests involving force since July 2015.

Reiman had an appearance scheduled on March 16, but it was postponed, a Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office spokeswoman said. The date of his next appearance was not immediately available in court records.

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Patti Sapone

Michael Dotro

The former Edison officer was sentenced to 20 years in prison in September after admitting to firebombing a police captain's home as an act of retaliation.

The captain and his family escaped unscathed from the fire, set a day before Dotro was to appear in a trial in which he and his wife faced charges related to slashing a woman's tires.

Four other cops were charged with retaliating against a North Brunswick police officer who arrested Dotro's friend for driving drunk.

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Michael Dempsey | The Jersey Journal

Francis Styles

Styles, a Bayonne cop, was federally charged in May 2017 with helping cover up police brutality by fellow cop Domenico Lillo.

In December 2013, while arresting a suspect who had warrants out of Sussex County, Lillo hit the suspect in the face with a flashlight, according to previous reports. In September 2015, Lillo pleaded guilty to using excessive force, but his sentencing has been delayed eight times since then.

Styles' case ended in a mistrial, but a judge has denied his motion for acquittal.

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Ed Murray | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Wilfredo Guzman

Guzman, a Rockaway Township officer, was charged with sexually assaulting two teenage girls in 2014 and 2015.

According to court documents, one of the victims alleged Guzman provided the girls with alcohol and prescription medication during their encounters, some of which are alleged to have occurred on duty.

Guzman has not yet been tried but will appear in court on April 4, a spokesman for the Morris County Prosecutor's Office said.

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Todd Ritter

Ritter, a Piscataway officer, was charged in February with tampering with public records, falsifying and tampering with records and assault. Prosecutors say he hit a handcuffed suspect in custody and then tried to cover it up.

When the man tried to tell another officer about the assault, Ritter claimed the man had kicked him "in the nuts," a police video shows.

Ritter has not been tried on the charges; he has a pre-indictment conference on April 17.

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A memorial at Elmora Avenue and Vine Street in Elizabeth for Jairo Lozano, 29, who was struck and killed while on a motorcycle.

Marisa Iati | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Romulo Meneses-Alvarez

Elizabeth police officer Meneses-Alvarez was off duty when his Jeep Wrangler struck and killed a motorcyclist near Carteret Park in Elizabeth, prosecutors said.

Meneses-Alvarez was charged with DWI and vehicular homicide.

The Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office is handling his case, which will be heard in Union County, a prosecutor's office spokeswoman said. There was no date yet scheduled for the next proceeding, she added.

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Patti Sapone

William Lunger Jr.

The former Sussex County sheriff's officer pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit official misconduct after he was accused of having a sexual relationship with a woman who was admitted into drug court.

He was sentenced to 270 days in jail last March. The woman with whom he had the affair filed a civil suit against Lunger, the county and other parties.

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Tom Haydon | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Mike Jean-Baptiste

The suspended North Plainfield officer is accused of sexually assaulting a woman he met on duty at a hotel in Kenilworth last March, prosecutors say.

In January, Jean-Baptiste was charged wth second-degree sexual assault, second-degree official misconduct and fourth-degree criminal sexual contact.

Jean-Baptiste's next hearing is scheduled for May 21, a Union County Prosecutor's Office spokesman said.

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Robert Sciarrino | NJ Advance Me

Jason R. Miller

The former Newton police officer was accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old boy in a Burger King bathroom and later was offered a five-year plea deal.

Before that, he was accused of exposing himself to male drivers during traffic stops.

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Thomas McWain

The officer who was once honored with a proclamation for service in helping people with addiction was later accused of referring drug offenders to a rehab facility where he had a financial stake.

Court records did not show a next appearance listed for McWain, a trial court administrator said.

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Long Branch police Officer Jake Pascucci.

Long Branch Police Department

Jake Pascucci

Pascucci was allegedly drunk when he struck and killed a woman with his SUV while off duty. He has been charged with DWI and strict liability vehicular homicide.

Pascucci has not been tried on the charges. He has an appearance scheduled for March 29 in Middlesex County, where his case was transferred.

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Michael O'Leary, in sunglasses, leaving federal court in Newark on March 12, 2018.

Michael Dempsey | The Jersey Journal

Michael O'Leary

O'Leary, a former Jersey City cop, was recently sentenced to 18 months in prison for paying bribes to another officer authorized to give out off-duty work assignments. That officer would also sign off on vouchers indicating O'Leary completed the assignments, when he did not do the work.

He is the third cop sentenced in the bribery scheme revealed in a probe by federal prosecutors.

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Joe Warner | For NJ Advance Media

James Stuart

The former Deptford Township cop will have a new trial this year on charges that he killed his friend, David Compton, during a night of drinking and "dry-firing" guns in Stuart's home in 2013.

Stuart served 2 and a half years of a 30-year sentence before appellate judges ruled that the jury should not have convicted him of both knowing murder and manslaughter.

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Paul Pappas

Pappas, an officer in Edison, was stripped of his gun and badge after he was charged with criminal mischief for slashing someone's tires during a domestic dispute in New Brunswick.

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Joe Brandt can be reached at jbrandt@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JBrandt_NJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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