Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

More Than Two of Every Three New Hampshire Police Agencies Reported 10 or Fewer Full-Time Officers. State Law Requires Each One to Run an Internal Affairs Program.

FBI staffing figures for 2024 give a full-time officer count for 200 New Hampshire law enforcement agencies. The median is six. Since 2023, a state law has required every agency to keep written rules for investigating complaints against its own officers and to report certain cases to a state review committee.

Each year the FBI asks every law enforcement agency in the country how many full-time sworn officers it employs on Oct. 31. For 2024, 200 New Hampshire agencies answered with a number. Of those, 138 reported 10 or fewer full-time officers. Seventy-six reported between one and five. Six reported none. The median agency had six.

The weight of the state’s full-time police force sits in a handful of places. The eight largest agencies in the 2024 figures, the State Police and the police departments of Manchester, Nashua, Concord, Londonderry, Salem, Portsmouth and Derry, reported 1,052 of the 2,830 full-time officers counted statewide, or 37 percent. The 138 agencies with 10 or fewer reported 633, or 22 percent.

That spread matters because of a law that took effect on Jan. 1, 2023. House Bill 1682, signed by Gov. Chris Sununu on July 1, 2022 and enacted as Chapter 312 of the Laws of 2022, created a Law Enforcement Conduct Review Committee inside the Police Standards and Training Council, the state body that certifies police officers. Its new RSA 106-L:19 applies to “each law enforcement agency,” with no exception for size. The act put the same duties on all of them: adopt an internal affairs program, investigate complaints of misconduct against its own officers, and report certain cases to the committee.

The departments, by size

The FBI publishes the counts agency by agency through its Crime Data Explorer. As published in October 2026, the explorer listed 211 New Hampshire agencies. Eleven entries carried no 2024 officer figure: ten county-level entries for the State Police, which reported a single statewide figure of 313 full-time officers, and the Nelson Police Department. The remaining 200 are 189 municipal police departments, nine county sheriff’s offices, the University of New Hampshire police and the State Police.

Twenty-two agencies reported exactly one full-time officer. The six that reported none were the police departments of Bridgewater, Danbury, Goshen, Groton, Madbury and Roxbury. The FBI’s tables count full-time employees only, so a department staffed by part-time officers can appear in them with none.

What the 2022 law requires of every agency

Section 19 of the new subdivision, codified at RSA 106-L:19, says that within nine months of its effective date “each law enforcement agency shall adopt an internal affairs program in order to conduct internal investigations and manage complaints regarding their agency’s law enforcement officers.” The section lists five parts the program must have: a written policy defining misconduct and the investigation process; a written procedure for accepting a properly filed complaint; a written procedure for assigning an investigator; a written policy, or provisions in the applicable collective bargaining agreement, laying out the acts of misconduct, the agency’s expectations and officers’ due process rights; and due process for the accused officer, including discipline based on just cause and a set range of discipline.

The section makes the agency’s chief executive officer responsible and says the chief “shall file copies of all written policies required by this section with the police standards and training council.” It also directs the council to write a model internal affairs policy that agencies may use.

Section 21 adds the core duty: “Each law enforcement agency shall conduct or cause a valid investigation of any complaint alleging that a law enforcement officer employed by the agency committed an act or acts of misconduct.” Section 20 says the chief must report to the committee within 15 business days when the agency has a valid complaint and an investigation is under way, finished or requested from the council’s investigators, when an investigation ends in a sustained finding of misconduct, or when an officer resigns while under investigation. The documents sent with that report “shall not be subject to RSA 91-A,” the state’s Right-to-Know law, except as the chapter provides.

The law gives an agency three routes for the investigation itself. It can investigate in house, have an outside law enforcement agency do it, or ask that investigators designated by the council’s director or the committee do it. If the committee decides an agency does not have a valid internal affairs program, the statute says it “may recommend a separate investigation be conducted by police standards and training investigators.”

When the accused officer is the chief

The statute treats one case separately. Section 21 says an agency or its governing body “shall refer to the committee any misconduct complaints made against a law enforcement officer who is the executive officer of that agency,” and that a staff attorney, at the direction of the committee or the director, “shall cause an investigation to be conducted” in that case.

The committee itself has seven members appointed by the governor. Under the 2022 act, it is “composed of 4 law enforcement members and 3 public members,” and the public members may not be employed as certified police officers, lawyers or judges. When a complaint describes a crime committed by an officer acting as an officer, Section 18 sends it, through the council’s director, to the attorney general’s public integrity unit. The committee cannot review conduct alleged to have happened before Jan. 1, 2023, and a complaint generally must be filed within two years.

What the public can see

Section 22 states its own purpose: “both to protect the reputation of law enforcement officers from public disclosure of unwarranted complaints against them and to fulfill the public right to know of any action taken against a law enforcement officer when that action is based on a sustained finding of misconduct.”

The committee’s meetings on individual complaints are closed, and its records and investigations are not public under RSA 91-A except as the section provides. The section does require the council to keep a register of every complaint the committee reviews, open to public inspection and copying. Each entry gives “the date and the nature of the complaint, but not including the identity of the law enforcement officer or employing agency,” and “a summary of the disposition of the completed investigation.”

A recommendation to sustain a finding of misconduct is public, and the council must schedule a public hearing on it. At the hearing, the committee’s investigative report and the records it relied on are open to inspection. After the council’s final decision, the decision and the records behind it are public, unless the council finds with specificity that a record would reveal confidential information creating a compelling interest that outweighs the public’s presumed right of access.

What the council can do to a certification

The same act gave the council the power to act on an officer’s certification after a finding, on clear and convincing evidence, that the officer committed misconduct or violated an administrative rule. RSA 106-L:5, XXV lists four sanctions: a written warning; a suspension that may run alongside one imposed by the employing agency; a suspension independent of any local one, with recertification at the council’s discretion; or “a permanent revocation.” Paragraph XXIII directs the council to assess whether agencies comply with the chapter and “whether they have sufficient policies and procedures to handle internal affairs investigations governing allegations of misconduct.” The act appropriated $175,000 to the council for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2023.

County by county

In seven of the ten counties, most agencies in the FBI figures reported 10 or fewer full-time officers. In Grafton County, 28 of 32 did. In Cheshire County it was 15 of 16. Hillsborough County, home to Manchester and Nashua, had the most full-time officers of any county, 764, and also the lowest share of small agencies.

Reading the FBI numbers

The FBI counts sworn officers and civilian staff as of Oct. 31 each year, and its definition of a law enforcement officer is someone who ordinarily carries a firearm and a badge, has full arrest powers and is paid from government funds set aside for sworn officers. Its published tables describe the counts as full-time employees. The FBI warns that “readers should use caution when drawing comparisons between agencies’ staffing levels based on police employment data,” because agencies serve different places with different demands.

The figures are what each agency reports. The number of New Hampshire agencies with a figure has changed from year to year, from 167 for 2015 to 200 for 2024, so a statewide total built from them does not make a clean trend line, and this article does not draw one. The FBI figures also do not show whether a given agency has filed its internal affairs policies with the council.

Granite State Report has written before about who can become a police officer in New Hampshire and how the council certifies them, in “New Hampshire Licenses a Cosmetologist Slower Than It Certifies a Cop.” The 2022 act governs what happens after an officer is certified and hired, when a complaint comes in.

— Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Staffing figures are drawn from the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer agency data for New Hampshire and the FBI’s published definitions for its police employee counts. The law is drawn from RSA chapter 106-L and the chaptered text of HB 1682, Chapter 312 of the Laws of 2022. Size groups, medians, shares and county totals are Granite State Report arithmetic from the FBI figures. Nothing in this article is legal advice.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.