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 93,682 state and local police officers in the state of California. In that same year, there were 61,886 state and local police officers in the state of New York.

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

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 are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed expect for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) is further information is needed. This collection is composed of archived news articles and court records reporting (n=6,724) on the arrest(s) of law enforcement officers in the United States from 2005-2011. Police crimes are those crimes committed by sworn law enforcement officers given the general powers of arrest at the time the offense was committed. These crimes can occur while the officer is on or off duty and include offenses committed by state, county, municipal, tribal, or special law enforcement agencies.Three distinct but related research questions are addressed in this collection:What is the incidence and prevalence of police officers arrested across the United States? How do law enforcement agencies discipline officers who are arrested?To what degree do police crime arrests correlate with other forms of police misconduct?

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.

In 2023, there were ******* full-time law enforcement employees in California, the most out of any state in the United States.

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.

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 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.

In 2020, there was the full-time equivalent of 718,217 state and local police officers in the United States. This is a slight decrease from the previous year, when there were 719,255 state and local police officers in the United States.

The study was a comprehensive analysis of felonious killings of officers. The purposes of the study were (1) to analyze the nature and circumstances of incidents of felonious police killings and (2) to analyze trends in the numbers and rates of killings across different types of agencies and to explain these differences. For Part 1, Incident-Level Data, an incident-level database was created to capture all incidents involving the death of a police officer from 1983 through 1992. Data on officers and incidents were collected from the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data collection as coded by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. In addition to the UCR data, the Police Foundation also coded information from the LEOKA narratives that are not part of the computerized LEOKA database from the FBI. For Part 2, Agency-Level Data, the researchers created an agency-level database to research systematic differences among rates at which law enforcement officers had been feloniously killed from 1977 through 1992. The investigators focused on the 56 largest law enforcement agencies because of the availability of data for explanatory variables. Variables in Part 1 include year of killing, involvement of other officers, if the officer was killed with his/her own weapon, circumstances of the killing, location of fatal wounds, distance between officer and offender, if the victim was wearing body armor, if different officers were killed in the same incident, if the officer was in uniform, actions of the killer and of the officer at entry and final stage, if the killer was visible at first, if the officer thought the killer was a felon suspect, if the officer was shot at entry, and circumstances at anticipation, entry, and final stages. Demographic variables for Part 1 include victim's sex, age, race, type of assignment, rank, years of experience, agency, population group, and if the officer was working a security job. Part 2 contains variables describing the general municipal environment, such as whether the agency is located in the South, level of poverty according to a poverty index, population density, percent of population that was Hispanic or Black, and population aged 15-34 years old. Variables capturing the crime environment include the violent crime rate, property crime rate, and a gun-related crime index. Lastly, variables on the environment of the police agencies include violent and property crime arrests per 1,000 sworn officers, percentage of officers injured in assaults, and number of sworn officers.

Comprehensive dataset of 19,858 Police departments in United States as of June, 2025. Includes verified contact information (email, phone), geocoded addresses, customer ratings, reviews, business categories, and operational details. Perfect for market research, lead generation, competitive analysis, and business intelligence. Download a complimentary sample to evaluate data quality and completeness.

The Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data, Police Employee Data, 2021 file contains monthly data on felonious or accidental killings and assaults upon United States law enforcement officers acting in the line of duty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assembled the data and processed them from UCR Master Police Employee (LEOKA) data tapes. Each agency record in the file includes the following summary variables: state code, population group code, geographic division, Metropolitan Statistical Area code, and agency name. These variables afford considerable flexibility in creating subsets or aggregations of the data. 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 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.

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.

A list of all NYPD officers, as reported to CCRB by NYPD based on NYPD's roster, and a count of any complaints they have received since the year 2000.

The dataset is part of a database of all public police misconduct records the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) maintains on complaints against New York Police Department uniformed members of service received in CCRB's jurisdiction since the year 2000, when CCRB's database was first built. This data is published as four tables:

Civilian Complaint Review Board: Police Officers Civilian Complaint Review Board: Complaints Against Police Officers Civilian Complaint Review Board: Allegations Against Police Officers Civilian Complaint Review Board: Penalties

A single complaint can include multiple allegations, and those allegations may include multiple subject officers and multiple complainants.

Public records exclude complaints and allegations that were closed as Mediated, Mediation Attempted, Administrative Closure, Conciliated (for some complaints prior to the year 2000), or closed as Other Possible Misconduct Noted.

This database is inclusive of prior datasets held on Open Data (previously maintained as "Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) - Complaints Received," "Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) - Complaints Closed," and "Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) - Allegations Closed") but includes information and records made public by the June 2020 repeal of New York Civil Rights law 50-a, which precipitated a full revision of what CCRB data could be considered public.

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, full-time, males, salaries, workers, 16 years +, wages, employment, and USA.

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.

The rate of fatal police shootings in the United States shows large differences based on ethnicity. Among Black Americans, the rate of fatal police shootings between 2015 and December 2024 stood at 6.1 per million of the population per year, while for white Americans, the rate stood at 2.4 fatal police shootings per million of the population per year. Police brutality in the United States Police brutality is a major issue in the United States, but recently saw a spike in online awareness and protests following the murder of George Floyd, an African American who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Just a few months before, Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her apartment when Louisville police officers forced entry into her apartment. Despite the repeated fatal police shootings across the country, police accountability has not been adequate according to many Americans. A majority of Black Americans thought that police officers were not held accountable for their misconduct, while less than half of White Americans thought the same. Political opinions Not only are there differences in opinion between ethnicities on police brutality, but there are also major differences between political parties. A majority of Democrats in the United States thought that police officers were not held accountable for their misconduct, while a majority of Republicans that they were held accountable. Despite opposing views on police accountability, both Democrats and Republicans agree that police should be required to be trained in nonviolent alternatives to deadly force.