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 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.

To ensure an accurate sampling frame for its Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics periodically sponsors a census of the nation's state and local law enforcement agencies. This census, known as the Directory Survey, includes all state and local law enforcement agencies that are publicly funded and employ at least one full-time or part-time sworn officer with general arrest powers. As in previous years, the 2000 Directory Survey collected data on the number of sworn and nonsworn personnel employed by each agency, including both full-time and part-time employees. The pay period that included June 30, 2000, was the reference date for all personnel data. A 97.4 percent response rate was obtained from the 17,784 state and local law enforcement agencies operating in the United States. This data collection contains June 2000 data from the fourth Directory Survey. Previous directory censuses were conducted in 1986 (DIRECTORY OF LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES, 1986: [UNITED STATES] [ICPSR 8696]), 1992 (DIRECTORY OF LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES, 1992: [UNITED STATES] [ICPSR 2266]), and 1996 (DIRECTORY OF LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES, 1996: [UNITED STATES] [ICPSR 2260]). Variables include personnel totals, type of government, type of agency, and whether the agency had the legal authority to hold a person beyond arraignment for 48 or more hours.

These data on 19th- and early 20th-century police department and arrest behavior were collected between 1975 and 1978 for a study of police and crime in the United States. Raw and aggregated time-series data are presented in Parts 1 and 3 on 23 American cities for most years during the period 1860-1920. The data were drawn from annual reports of police departments found in the Library of Congress or in newspapers and legislative reports located elsewhere. Variables in Part 1, for which the city is the unit of analysis, include arrests for drunkenness, conditional offenses and homicides, persons dismissed or held, police personnel, and population. Part 3 aggregates the data by year and reports some of these variables on a per capita basis, using a linear interpolation from the last decennial census to estimate population. Part 2 contains data for 267 United States cities for the period 1880-1890 and was generated from the 1880 federal census volume, REPORT ON THE DEFECTIVE, DEPENDENT, AND DELINQUENT CLASSES, published in 1888, and from the 1890 federal census volume, SOCIAL STATISTICS OF CITIES. Information includes police personnel and expenditures, arrests, persons held overnight, trains entering town, and population.

In 2020, **** percent of full-time sworn officers in local police departments in the United States were white, followed by **** percent who were Hispanic.

Between 2008 and 2009, the research team gathered survey data from 458 members of the community (Part 1), 312 police officers (Part 2), and 804 individuals who had voluntary contact (Part 3), and 761 individuals who had involuntary contact (Part 4) with police departments in Dallas, Texas, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Kettering, Ohio, and the Broward County, Florida Sheriff's Office. The surveys were designed to look at nine dimensions of police performance: delivering quality services; fear, safety, and order; ethics and values; legitimacy and customer satisfaction; organizational competence and commitment to high standards; reducing crime and victimization; resource use; responding to offenders; and use of authority. The community surveys included questions about police effectiveness, police professionalism, neighborhood problems, and victimization. The officer surveys had three parts: job satisfaction items, procedural knowledge items, and questions about the culture of integrity. The voluntary police contact and involuntary police contact surveys included questions on satisfaction with the way the police officer or deputy sheriff handled the encounter.

Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has compiled the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to serve as a periodic nationwide assessment of reported crimes not available elsewhere in the criminal justice system. Each year, this information is reported in four types of files: (1) Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest, (2) Property Stolen and Recovered, (3) Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), and (4) Police Employee (LEOKA) Data. The Police Employee (LEOKA) Data provide information about law enforcement officers killed or assaulted (hence the acronym, LEOKA) in the line of duty. The variables created from the LEOKA forms provide in-depth information on the circumstances surrounding killings or assaults, including type of call answered, type of weapon used, and type of patrol the officers were on.

This study examined the amount of force used by and against law enforcement officers and more than 50 characteristics of officers, civilians, and arrest situations associated with the use of different levels of force. An important component of this multijurisdiction project was to employ a common measurement of elements of force and predictors of force. Data were gathered about suspects' and police officers' behaviors from adult custody arrests in six urban law enforcement agencies. The participating agencies were the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) Police Department, Colorado Springs (Colorado) Police Department, Dallas (Texas) Police Department, St. Petersburg (Florida) Police Department, San Diego (California) Police Department, and San Diego County (California) Sheriff's Department. Data collection began at different times in the participating departments, so the total sample included arrests during the summer, fall, and winter of 1996-1997. Forms were completed and coded for 7,512 adult custody arrests (Part 1). This form was used to record officer self-reports on the characteristics of the arrest situation, the suspects, and the officers, and the specific behavioral acts of officers, suspects, and bystanders in a particular arrest. Similar items were asked of 1,156 suspects interviewed in local jails at the time they were booked following arrest to obtain an independent assessment of officer and suspect use of force (Part 2). Officers were informed that some suspects would be interviewed, but they did not know which would be interviewed or when. Using the items included on the police survey, the research team constructed four measures of force used by police officers -- physical force, physical force plus threats, continuum of force, and maximum force. Four comparable measures of force used by arrested suspects were also developed. These measures are included in the data for Part 1. Each measure was derived by combining specific actions by law enforcement officers or by suspects in various ways. The first measure was a traditional conceptual dichotomy of arrests in which physical force was or was not used. For both the police and for suspects, the definition of physical force included any arrest in which a weapon or weaponless tactic was used. In addition, police arrests in which officers used a severe restraint were included. The second measure, physical force plus threats, was similar to physical force but added the use of threats and displays of weapons. To address the potential limitations of these two dichotomous measures, two other measures were developed. The continuum-of-force measure captured the levels of force commonly used in official policies by the participating law enforcement agencies. To construct the fourth measure, maximum force, 503 experienced officers in five of the six jurisdictions ranked a variety of hypothetical types of force by officers and by suspects on a scale from 1 (least forceful) to 100 (most forceful). Officers were asked to rank these items based on their own personal experience, not official policy. These rankings of police and suspect use of force, which appear in Part 3, were averaged for each jurisdiction and used in Part 1 to weight the behaviors that occurred in the sampled arrests. Variables for Parts 1 and 2 include nature of the arrest, features of the arrest location, mobilization of the police, and officer and suspect characteristics. Part 3 provides officer rankings on 54 items that suspects might do or say during an arrest. Separately, officers ranked a series of 44 items that a police officer might do or say during an arrest. These items include spitting, shouting or cursing, hitting, wrestling, pushing, resisting, fleeing, commanding, using conversational voice, and using pressure point holds, as well as possession, display, threat of use, or use of several weapons (e.g., knife, chemical agent, dog, blunt object, handgun, motor vehicle).

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This study sought to examine community policing from a street-level officer's point of view. Active community police officers and sheriff's deputies from law enforcement agencies were interviewed about their opinions, experiences with, and attitudes toward community policing. For the study 90 rank-and-file community policing officers from 30 law enforcement agencies throughout the United States were selected to participate in a 40- to 60-minute telephone interview. The survey was comprised of six sections, providing information on: (1) demographics, including the race, gender, age, job title, highest level of education, and union membership of each respondent, (2) a description of the community policing program and daily tasks, with questions regarding the size of the neighborhood in terms of geography and population, work with citizens and community leaders, patrol methods, activities with youth/juveniles, traditional police duties, and agency and supervisor support of community policing, (3) interaction between community policing and non-community policing officers, (4) hours, safety, and job satisfaction, (5) police training, and (6) perceived effectiveness of community policing.

The efficiency of any police action depends on the relative magnitude of its crime reducing benefits and legitimacy costs. Policing strategies that are socially efficient at the city level may be harmful at the local level, because the distribution of direct costs and benefits of police actions that reduce victimization is not the same as the distribution of indirect benefits of feeling safe. In the United States, the local misallocation of police resources is disproportionately borne by Black and Hispanic people. Despite the complexity of this particular problem, we point out that the incentives facing both police departments and police officers tend to be structured as if the goals of policing were simple - to reduce crime by as much as possible. Data collection on the crime reducing benefits of policing, and not the legitimacy costs, produce further incentives to provide more engagement than may be efficient in any specific encounter, at both the officer and departmental level. There is currently little evidence as to what screening, training, or monitoring strategies are most effective at encouraging individual officers to balance the crime reducing benefits and legitimacy costs of their actions.

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.

Graph and download economic data for Employed full time: Wage and salary workers: Police and sheriff's patrol officers occupations: 16 years and over: Men (LEU0254598700A) from 2000 to 2019 about police, occupation, males, full-time, salaries, workers, 16 years +, wages, employment, and USA.

In 2023, 59.9 percent of full-time civilian law enforcement employees in the United States were female. Only 13.8 percent of full-time law enforcement officers were female, while 86.2 percent of law enforcement officers were male. The gender divide Law enforcement in the United States is an indisputably male-dominated profession, particularly in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). However, research has shown that female officers can have a positive impact on communities and the overall performance of a law enforcement department. For example, female officers are less likely to have to face allegations of excessive force and can reduce the use of force among other officers in the department. Law enforcement in the U.S. The number of law enforcement officers in the United States has fluctuated over the years and, and hit a low in 2013. Despite the violent crime rate in the U.S. being much lower than its high point in the 1990s, the majority of Americans report being dissatisfied with national crime control and reduction policies.

Law Enforcement Locations:Any location where sworn officers of a law enforcement agency are regularly based or stationed. Law Enforcement agencies "are publicly funded and employ at least one full-time or part-time sworn officer with general arrest powers". This is the definition used by the US Department of Justice - Bureau of Justice Statistics (DOJ-BJS) for their Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey. Although LEMAS only includes non Federal Agencies, this dataset includes locations for federal, state, local, and special jurisdiction law enforcement agencies.

Law enforcement agencies include, but are not limited to, municipal police, county sheriffs, state police, school police, park police, railroad police, federal law enforcement agencies, departments within non law enforcement federal agencies charged with law enforcement (e.g., US Postal Inspectors), and cross jurisdictional authorities (e.g., Port Authority Police).

In general, the requirements and training for becoming a sworn law enforcement officer are set by each state. Law Enforcement agencies themselves are not chartered or licensed by their state. County, city, and other government authorities within each state are usually empowered by their state law to setup or disband Law Enforcement agencies. Generally, sworn Law Enforcement officers must report which agency they are employed by to the state.

Although TGS's intention is to only include locations associated with agencies that meet the above definition, TGS has discovered a few locations that are associated with agencies that are not publicly funded. TGS deleted these locations as we became aware of them, but some may still exist in this dataset.

Personal homes, administrative offices, and temporary locations are intended to be excluded from this dataset; however, some personal homes of constables are included due to the fact that many constables work out of their homes.

TGS has made a concerted effort to include all local police; county sheriffs; state police and/or highway patrol; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Bureau of Land Management; Bureau of Reclamation; U.S. Park Police; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; National Park Service; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

This dataset is comprised completely of license free data.

FBI entities are intended to be excluded from this dataset, but a few may be included.

The Law Enforcement dataset and the Correctional Institutions dataset were merged into one working file. TGS processed as one file and then separated for delivery purposes.

With the merge of the Law Enforcement and the Correctional Institutions datasets, the NAICS Codes & Descriptions were assigned based on the facility's main function which was determined by the entity's name, facility type, web research, and state supplied data. In instances where the entity's primary function is both law enforcement and corrections, the NAICS Codes and Descriptions are assigned based on the dataset in which the record is located (i.e., a facility that serves as both a Sheriff's Office and as a jail is designated as [NAICSDESCR]="SHERIFFS' OFFICES (EXCEPT COURT FUNCTIONS ONLY)" in the Law Enforcement layer and as [NAICSDESCR]="JAILS (EXCEPT PRIVATE OPERATION OF)" in the Correctional Institutions layer).

Records with "-DOD" appended to the end of the [NAME] value are located on a military base, as defined by the Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) military installations and military range boundaries.

"#" and "*" characters were automatically removed from standard fields that TGS populated. Double spaces were replaced by single spaces in these same fields.

Text fields in this dataset have been set to all upper case to facilitate consistent database engine search results.

All diacritics (e.g., the German umlaut or the Spanish tilde) have been replaced with their closest equivalent English character to facilitate use with database systems that may not support diacritics.

The currentness of this dataset is indicated by the [CONTDATE] field. Based on the values in this field, the oldest record dates from 12/07/2006 and the newest record dates from 10/23/2009Use Cases: 1. An assessment of whether or not the total police capability in a given area is adequate.

1. A list of resources to draw upon in surrounding areas when local resources have temporarily been overwhelmed by a disaster - route analysis can help to determine those entities who are able to respond the quickest.

2. A resource for emergency management planning purposes.

3. A resource for catastrophe response to aid in the retrieval of equipment by outside responders in order to deal with the disaster.

4. A resource for situational awareness planning and response for federal government events.

The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015 and 2016, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.

The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities. The Counted is the most thorough public accounting for deadly use of force in the US, but it will operate as an imperfect work in progress – and will be updated by Guardian reporters and interactive journalists frequently.

Any deaths arising directly from encounters with law enforcement will be included in the database. This will inevitably include, but will likely not be limited to, people who were shot, tasered and struck by police vehicles as well those who died in police custody. Self-inflicted deaths during encounters with law enforcement or in police custody or detention facilities will not be included.

The US government has no comprehensive record of the number of people killed by law enforcement. This lack of basic data has been glaring amid the protests, riots and worldwide debate set in motion by the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014. The Guardian agrees with those analysts, campaign groups, activists and authorities who argue that such accounting is a prerequisite for an informed public discussion about the use of force by police.

Contributions of any information that may improve the quality of our data will be greatly welcomed as we work toward better accountability. Please contact us at thecounted@theguardian.com.

CREDITS
Research and Reporting: Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, Jamiles Lartey
Design and Production: Kenan Davis, Rich Harris, Nadja Popovich, Kenton Powell

To ensure an accurate sampling frame for its Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics sponsors a census of the nation's state and local law enforcement agencies, known as the Directory Surve

The BJS Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies (CSLLEA) is conducted every 4 years to provide a complete enumeration of agencies and their employees. Employment data are reported by agencies for sworn and nonsworn (civilian) personnel and, within these categories, by full-time or part-time status. The pay period that included June 30, 2018, was the reference date for personnel data. Agencies also complete a checklist of functions they regularly perform, or have primary responsibility for, within the following areas: patrol and response, criminal investigation, traffic and vehicle-related functions, detention-related functions, court-related functions, forensic services, special public safety functions (e.g., animal control), task force participation, and specialized functions (e.g., search and rescue). The CSLLEA provides national data on the number of state and local law enforcement agencies and employees for local police departments, sheriffs' offices, state law enforcement agencies, and special jurisdiction agencies. It also serves as the sampling frame for BJS surveys of law enforcement agencies.

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Under what conditions can citizens hold government officials accountable for their behavior? I examine accountability over the police, a pervasive face of the state as experienced by most people. Like elected politicians, police enjoy significant discretion, limited oversight, power, and corruptibility. Continued problems of police violence and disparate treatment, especially against Black Americans, have shown the importance of accountable policing. Using calls for service records, election returns, survey data, and case studies, I explore challenges of political accountability across the highly varied 18,000 police department in the United States. The police are both a nationally salient social group – evaluated differently by partisans in a national media environment – as well as a locally-provided government function that tens of millions of Americans encounter regularly. This decentralization complicates improvements to policing policies by limiting the impacts of reform activism to particular cities and by misaligning activism with local conditions (Chapter 1). Millions of Americans regularly call the police to manage a swathe of urgent problems. Examining whether citizens punish street-level bureaucrats for misbehavior by withdrawing from demands for police intervention, I find that daily demands for policing services remain steady after well-publicized police abuse (Chapter 2). Absent exit, change requires political action. One manifestation of the varieties of American policing is between elected and appointed police leadership. I show that each approach has problems: elected sheriffs seem too steady in their offices – over which they enjoy almost unfettered control and significant incumbency advantage – while appointed police chiefs are constrained by unions, politicians, and the public (Chapter 3). Drawing on case studies of immigration enforcement in county jails, I show that nationally salient issues can impinge on the domains of county Sheriffs and increase interest and energy in local elections – aligning policies with preferences through a process I term “redirected nationalization” (Chapter 4). An additional problem is that police officers are themselves political agents who can resist change. By analyzing their nearly universal support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and the status of police as a salient cleavage in American electoral politics, I show a strong affinity between police union and right-wing politics rooted in the sense that police are “under siege” by Black Lives Matter and calls for reform (Chapter 5). This uniform conservative orientation of police culture clashes with the array of problems the police manage, which frequently include homelessness and mental illness (Chapter 6, co-authored with Jacob Brown). I conclude that, where possible, it is better to unbundle the multifaceted police role, with specialized civil servants responding to classes of problems (Chapter 7). However, the decentralization of policing in the United States and the ambiguity of many calls for services will complicate unbundling. Hence, there remains a need to cultivate a police culture sensitive to the range of problems police encounter and, longer term, to ameliorate the social conditions which drive reliance on police services.