How many police officers are there in the U.S.? In 2023, there were 720,652 full-time law enforcement officers employed in the United States, an increase from 708,001 the previous year. Within the provided time period, the number of full-time law enforcement officers was lowest in 2013, with 626,942 officers. Employment in law enforcement According to the source, law enforcement officers are defined as those individuals who regularly carry a firearm and an official badge on their person, have full powers of arrest, and whose salaries are paid from federal funds set aside specifically for sworn law enforcement. Law enforcement, particularly when it comes to officers, is a male-dominated field. Law enforcement employees can either be officers or civilians, and federal law enforcement agencies cover a wide area of jurisdictions -- from the National Park Service to the FBI.
Police in the United States The police in the United States have come under fire over the past few years for accusations of use of unnecessary force and for the number of people who are shot to death by police in the U.S. Police officers in the United States are regularly armed, and in comparison, 19 countries, including Iceland, New Zealand, and Ireland, do not regularly arm their police forces.

In 2024, there were approximately 170,500 police officers in the United Kingdom, compared with around 155,000 in 2003. After reaching a high of 172,000 officers in 2010, the number of police officers in the UK fell to just 150,000 officers by 2017. Although that trend has reversed since this point, there are still approximately 1,000 fewer police officers in 2023 than there were in 2010. Why did police numbers fall? The fall in police numbers can be linked to a reduction in government spending on the police. In the aftermath of the 2008 recession, the coalition government of 2010 carried out a policy of austerity, vowing to cut government spending across the board. For the police service, expenditure fell sharply, from 19.3 billion British pounds a year in 2009/10 to just 16.35 billion pounds in 2013/14, leading to cuts in personnel. Police service expenditure remained below 17 billion pounds a year until spending started to increase in 2017/18, with the most recent figure of 27.3 billion pounds for the 2023/24 year, even higher than 2009/10. Rising crime from the mid-2010s Between 2002 and 2014, crime rates fell across all four jurisdictions of the UK. Since the mid-2010s, however, there has been a substantial increase in crime, especially in England and Wales, which saw its crime rate jump from 62 crimes per 1,000 people to 89.9 by 2019/20. Although some crimes such as theft stayed at relatively low levels, the number of violent crimes has seen a sharp increase recently, rising from 634,600 offences in 2013/14 to over 2.1 million in 2022/23.

London's Metropolitan Police is by far the largest police force in the United Kingdom with 34,315 officers in 2024. At 16,356 officers, the Scottish police force has the second-largest force in terms of officer numbers, followed by Greater Manchester police force, which had 8,141 officers that year. Although the Metropolitan Police are responsible for policing most of Greater London, the City of London Police force covers the historic center of London, which is around one square mile in size, and numbered 995 officers in 2024. Crime in the UK In 2023/24 there were approximately 6.66 million crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales, compared with 6.74 million in 2022/23, which was the highest number of crimes recorded in a reporting year since 2002/03. Although crime declined from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, there has been a noticeable increase in crimes from 2014/15 onwards. In terms of the crime rate, England and Wales had the highest in the United Kingdom, at 89.7 offences per one thousand people, compared with 55 in Scotland, and 52.3 in Northern Ireland. Cuts to policing reversed in recent years Between 2010 and 2017, the number of police officers in the UK fell from 172,000 officers to just 150,000. During this same period, the London Metropolitan Police saw officer numbers decline by around 2,000 officers. The fall in police personnel was a result of UK-wide funding cuts, during this time period, with police expenditure falling from 19.3 billion in 2009/10 to 16.35 billion by 2013/14. This policy has since been reversed, with the last UK government recruiting officers and generally spending more on the police service. As of 2024, there were 170,500 police officers in the UK, and government expenditure on the police service was 27.3 billion British pounds.

Data on police personnel (police officers by gender, civilian and other personnel), police-civilian ratio, police officers and authorized strength per 100,000 population, authorized police officer strength and selected crime statistics. Data is provided for Canada, provinces, territories and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) headquarters, training academy depot division and forensic labs, 1986 to 2023.

Data on police personnel (police officers by gender, civilian and other personnel), police officers and authorized strength per 100,000 population, authorized police officer strength, population, net gain or loss from hirings and departures, police officers eligible to retire and selected crime statistics. Data is provided for municipal police services, 2000 to 2023.

This table contains 31 series, with data for years 1974 - 2001 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years), and is no longer being released. This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (15 items: Canada;Newfoundland and Labrador;Prince Edward Island;Nova Scotia; ...); Police officers (3 items: Total number of police officers;Population per police officer;Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters).

There were 147,746 police officers in England and Wales in 2024, the highest number of police officers during this provided time period. Between 2010 and 2018 the number of police officers in England and Wales fell from 143,734 to 122,405, with numbers increasing again from 2019 onwards.

Content

Police Residence

This folder contains data behind the story Most Police Don’t Live In The Cities They Serve.

Includes the cities with the 75 largest police forces, with the exception of Honolulu for which data is not available. All calculations are based on data from the U.S. Census.

The Census Bureau numbers are potentially going to differ from other counts for three reasons:

1. The census category for police officers also includes sheriffs, transit police and others who might not be under the same jurisdiction as a city’s police department proper. The census category won’t include private security officers.
2. The census data is estimated from 2006 to 2010; police forces may have changed in size since then.
3. There is always a margin of error in census numbers; they are estimates, not complete counts.

How to read police-locals.csv

Note: When a cell contains ** it means that there are fewer than 100 police officers of that race serving that city.

Context

This is a dataset from FiveThirtyEight hosted on their GitHub. Explore FiveThirtyEight data using Kaggle and all of the data sources available through the FiveThirtyEight organization page!

• Update Frequency: This dataset is updated daily.

Acknowledgements

This dataset is maintained using GitHub's API and Kaggle's API.

This dataset is distributed under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

This dataset shows the time spent by currently active Pittsburgh Police Officers in professional development training. Officers who are no longer employed in the Police Bureau are not included in this data. The data is presented in two ways: total, cumulative hours spent in training, per year, by category and total number of officers who completed training, per year, by category.

Data on police officers (by detailed ranks and gender), civilian personnel and special constables (by detailed duties and gender), and recruits (by gender). Data is provided for Canada, provinces, territories and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) headquarters, training academy depot division and forensic labs, 1986 to 2023.

This table contains 96 series, with data for years 1986 - 2009 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years), and is no longer being released. This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (16 items: Canada;Newfoundland and Labrador;Prince Edward Island;Nova Scotia; ...); Sex (3 items: Both sexes;Males;Females); Statistics (2 items: Total number of police officers;Percentage of total police officers).

This data set is no longer compiled by the Ministry of Solicitor Services Information on the number of police officers according to their rank and gender. Shows the number of male and female officers at each rank, as well as annual changes in these numbers. The data can be accessed from Statistics Canada.

In 2020, there was the full-time equivalent of ****** state and local police officers in the state of California. In that same year, there were ****** state and local police officers in the state of New York.

This data collection was undertaken to gather information on the extent of police officers' knowledge of search and seizure law, an issue with important consequences for law enforcement. A specially-produced videotape depicting line duty situations that uniformed police officers frequently encounter was viewed by 478 line uniformed police officers from 52 randomly-selected cities in which search and seizure laws were determined to be no more restrictive than applicable United States Supreme Court decisions. Testing of the police officers occurred in all regions as established by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, except for the Pacific region (California, Oregon, and Washington), since search and seizure laws in these states are, in some instances, more restrictive than United States Supreme Court decisions. No testing occurred in cities with populations under 10,000 because of budget limitations. Fourteen questions to which the officers responded were presented in the videotape. Each police officer also completed a questionnaire that included questions on demographics, training, and work experience, covering their age, sex, race, shift worked, years of police experience, education, training on search and seizure law, effectiveness of various types of training instructors and methods, how easily they could obtain advice about search and seizure questions they encountered, and court outcomes of search and seizure cases in which they were involved. Police department representatives completed a separate questionnaire providing department characteristics and information on search and seizure training and procedures, such as the number of sworn officers, existence of general training and the number of hours required, existence of in-service search and seizure training and the number of hours and testing required, existence of policies and procedures on search and seizure, and means of advice available to officers about search and seizure questions. These data comprise Part 1. For purposes of comparison and interpretation of the police officer test scores, question responses were also obtained from other sources. Part 2 contains responses from 36 judges from states with search and seizure laws no more restrictive than the United States Supreme Court decisions, as well as responses from a demographic and work-experience questionnaire inquiring about their age, law school attendance, general judicial experience, and judicial experience and education specific to search and seizure laws. All geographic regions except New England and the Pacific were represented by the judges. Part 3, Comparison Data, contains answers to the 14 test questions only, from 15 elected district attorneys, 6 assistant district attorneys, the district attorney in another city and 11 of his assistant district attorneys, a police attorney with expertise in search and seizure law, 24 police academy trainees with no previous police work experience who were tested before search and seizure law training, a second group of 17 police academy trainees -- some with police work experience but no search and seizure law training, 55 law enforcement officer trainees from a third academy tested immediately after search and seizure training, 7 technical college students with no previous education or training on search and seizure law, and 27 university criminal justice course students, also with no search and seizure law education or training.

There were ****** police officers in London in 2024, a decline when compared with the previous year. The majority of police officers in London work for the Metropolitan Police service, which is responsible for policing most of the UK capital, with the City of London Police only responsible for policing the historical center of the city, an area the size of around one square mile.