Plainfield Police Logs Collection

The Plainfield Police Logs are housed in the Local History Department of the Plainfield Public Library. They are a collection of police records, dating from 1884 to 1971, which document local arrests, accident reports, criminal dockets, stolen articles, and more. The ledgers were utilized by Police Department staff to record these events, and show wear and tear from heavy, daily use. Many books were repaired on the fly by Police Department staff with masking tape and other non-archival supplies (as shown in the Daily Arrest Record from 1902, book 9, on left). Many of the books are made of leather, which discolored, faded or began to rot, over time. All of the ledgers are being stored in the Library's environment-controlled archive space, which will prevent further damage and lengthen their overall lifetime. The Library's book conservator is repairing and conserving these important ledgers to preserve them for future historians and researchers. The materials for conservation were funded, in part, by a 2015 grant from the Plainfield Cultural & Heritage Commission.

In 2020, the Library began a multi-year digitization project to provide easier public access to this historical collection. Funding for the project has been provided, in part, by grants from the New Jersey Historical Commission, a division of the Department of State; and by the Plainfield Foundation. The digitization work is being performed by Innovation Document Imaging (East Brunswick, NJ). Indexes to the logs are created by staff and volunteers on an on-going basis. If you are interested in volunteering or donating funds towards this project, please contact the Local History Department.

The following list of police logs is organized by subject. Not all ledgers are indexed. Due to fragility or content, access is restricted to some of these ledgers. Please contact the Local History Department for information about the access and use of these volumes. For a detailed list of the Tax Receipt Ledgers, dating from 1883 to 1904, click here.

** The digitized are currently not accessible online as we migrate the data to a new content manager. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please note, (once available again) download time will vary depending on the size of the log and the speed of your internet connection. Most log files require at least two minutes to complete download. A PDF reader is required to view the files. Due to the hand-written nature of the texts, the PDFs are not searchable. Please refer the indexes for assistance in locating names.

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