Policing Statistics

Here are some numbers for you.

There are 12,501 local law enforcement agencies, 3,063 sheriff departments, 49 state police agencies (Hawaii doesn’t really have a state police department per se.  State policing is done through the Hawaii County Sheriff.  Their Department of Justice is primarily focused on corrections and narcotics investigations.)  Additionally, there are 1,733 are special jurisdiction law enforcement agencies such as transit police, railroad police, campus police, housing authority police, park police, etc.  There are another 683 “other” police agencies.  These are typically identified as constables.

Federal law enforcement consists of a patchwork of agencies, some with thousands of agents, inspectors, and police officers (Homeland Security and FBI, DEA, IRS, U.S. Marshal).  No single federal agency has general federal jurisdiction.  Each federal agency is restricted by law to specific duties related to the branch of government they work for.  The closest agencies we have to general federal jurisdiction are the FBI and U.S. Marshal.  Federal policing agencies would include Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Postal Inspectors, Capitol Police, Supreme Court Police, Forest Service Police, National Park Service Police and National Park Service Rangers, US Mint Police, Bureau of Land Management, and a whole lot of other agencies you never heard of.

There are about 1.14 million full-time law enforcement employees.  Of those, 765,000 have arrest authority and are authorized to carry a firearm as part of their duty.  There are about 115,000 federal law enforcement officers working within the United States.  This does not include federal law enforcement working in the U.S. Territories or detached to overseas offices.  Fully 45% of all federal law enforcement officers work for the Department of Homeland Security.  This brings the total number of state, local, county, and federal law enforcement officers to about 880,000.  This number does not include corrections officers or detention officers whose sole job description is restricted to institutional settings.  These 880,000 sworn officers work approximately 1.83 billion hours a year, not including overtime.  If overtime was included the number worked by these officers would be in excess of 2 billion hours.  This amounts to one sworn state, local, county, or federal officer for every 363 people in the United States.

Half of all local police departments employ 10 or fewer sworn police officers.  The Library of Congress employs two sworn officers.  Two-thirds of all state, local, and county law enforcement officers work for departments with 100 or more full-time sworn officers.

Congress passed a law in 1994 giving the Department of Justice the authority to investigate any law enforcement agency.  They investigate allegations of brutality, abuse of authority, civil rights violations, and functions within police departments that may trigger civil rights violations.  Those trigger functions might include narcotics investigations, special tasks forces, etc.  They also initiate investigations where they believe there are patterns of singling out minorities for unfair treatment, such as an overrepresentation of traffic stops, stop and frisk, etc.

The Department of Justice utilizes consent decrees as a means of reigning police departments back in that it deems as having engaged in any of the areas they investigate, such as the activities mentioned above.  Between 1994 and 2013 about 20 state and local police agencies entered into consent decrees.  Most were from large departments such as the Los Angeles Police Department, Pittsburg Police Department, Washington, D.C. Police Department, Buffalo PD, Detroit, New Orleans, Seattle, and Cincinnati Police Departments.  The New Jersey State Police Department and the University of Montana Police Department are also under consent decree.  The Stubenville, Ohio Police Department that was recently in the news was already under a consent decree.  Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands departments are also under consent decree.

These consent decrees generally consist of terms that a department agrees to with the federal government, and is filed in court, and monitored by the federal government.  They may require departments to hire a certain number of minorities, participate in specific training, demand that certain practices stop, keep track of all traffic stops they make while recording the offense and the race and sex of the offender, and so forth.  It would not be unheard of for a department to lose a few top administrators in consent decree situations.  In other cases, top administrators recognize that there is a problem within their departments and welcome the strong arm of the Department of Justice to come in, make recommendations, and place the department on a corrective course of action in the form of a consent decree.

Now, with over 15,000 police agencies and over 880,000 full-time sworn police officers, would you suspect that a handful of them don’t belong in police work?  Suppose we have one event a day such has been reported in the media since the summer of 2014 and that each one of those events was unjustified, that would mean that 0.041% of our officers are involved in some sort of egregious conduct.

I bet that is a better track record than our clergy in the United States.