By the Numbers: How Many Cops Are There In the USA?
One
question that has been confounding throughout
my research on
the relative dangers of
police work is, quite simply, how many police are there in the
United States?
Like
many of the issues raised by this series, this is not as simple as you might
think, and it’s proven surprisingly hard to answer.
First,
you need to define what counts as “law enforcement personnel.” Do we count
everyone employed by law enforcement agencies? Or only patrol officers? Or
officers, deputies, detectives, and supervisors? Or only “sworn” personnel? Do
we count part-time or full-time? Are there confounding variables (like
officers who work for multiple agencies)?
Then
you need to decide if you’re looking at state, or local, or both, or
federal, or all of the above. Then you need to decide which
organization’s numbers you’re going to use — BLS? NLEOMF? FBI? BJS? — and
trust. All of these organizations report conflicting numbers. What’s their
methodology? What’s the margin of error? And how old are the numbers?
Headaches
multiply. Simplicity is needed. Here’s the four sources I looked at when trying
to establish the number of cops in the US.
National
Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund
In
my previous posts, I used the NLEOMF
figure of “more than 900,000 sworn law enforcement officers now serving in
the United States…the highest figure ever.” I did this for several reasons.
- It was the most recent estimate that I could find, and it is the most widely cited.
- NLEOMF is dedicated full time to looking at these questions and is in touch with most law enforcement agencies in the country. “The Fund maintains the largest, most comprehensive database of line-of-duty officer deaths, which serves as a national information clearinghouse on the topic” (NLEOMF, via DOJ). If anyone would know, presumably, they would.
- It was consistent. I used the Fund’s data for officer fatalities, so I should use their data for officers, when possible, to keep definitions and data comparable.
- It was a conservative figure. I calculated my 2013 fatality rate per 100,000 officers using the estimate of 900,000 officers. Since NLEOMF estimated the true figure was actually more than 900,000, my rates would, if anything, overstate how high fatality rates were.
- Finally, the Fund counts only “sworn officers,” meaning personnel with general arrest powers, such as patrol officers, deputies, and detectives. This is the most useful and relevant category when we talk about police potentially in harm’s way.
But
it is not the only figure available. (Note: I have asked the Fund to
provide me more detailed numbers and methodology, but they have not responded.
I will update this section if and when they do.)
Bureau
of Labor Statistics
Why
didn’t I use BLS data
for law enforcement deaths? After all, BLS maintains the largest general
database of work injury and fatality rates for different professions.
The
reason, bluntly, is that their data for law enforcement is a goddamn mess.
I painstakingly compiled this chart from individual PDF files (for
god’s sake!) for each year’s survey from the BLS website:
First,
BLS relies on polling data that has an unacceptably high margin of error
(for any given profession) if we want to explore trends
or closely compare rates year to year. For instance, in 1997, BLS
estimated a fatality rate for law enforcement of 14.0 per 100,000, +/- 3.4
per 100,000. This is a margin of error of 25%. It might be the best BLS
could do given its resources, but it’s useless for our purposes. (They also
stopped listing the relative standard error for their results in 2002.)
The
next problem is that their law enforcement category definition changed in 2003,
from “police and detectives, including supervisors” (whatever exactly that may
mean), with an estimated 1.1 million workers, to “police and sheriff’s patrol
officers” with estimates in the 600,000 range. Fatality rates jumped
accordingly.
Then
in 2008, BLS stopped offering employment-based estimates (that is, fatalities
per 100,000 workers) and started using hour-based estimates (fatalities
per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, equivalent to 2,000
hours/year per FTEW). In most cases, this is a methodological improvement, but
coming in the middle of the data set, it makes it even harder to compare rates
over time.
Trying
to establish trends from this data is a fool’s errand.
Federal
Bureau of Investigation
The
FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports
includes an annual report on law enforcement officers assaulted or killed, as
well as rates of assault and injury. This data is very useful, but it has
some key limitations.
The
data on unlawful killings of police is virtually complete —
almost all homicides of any kind are reported to the FBI — but the data
set on assaults and injuries is not.
Police
departments can voluntarily submit reports to the FBI on the number of assaults
and injuries suffered by their personnel, as well as the number of officers in
their organization. But not all in fact do so. The result is that the absolute or
raw number of assaults can vary greatly from year to year simply because
of the number of law enforcement agencies that participate in the
survey also varies.
Fortunately,
the FBI also collects information about the total population policed by
the departments that reported, as well as information about the total
number of officers employed by the surveyed organizations. As a result, you
can get reliable and comparable yearly estimates of the rates of assault and
injury, based on both the number of assaults per 100,000 residents, or the
percent of officers assaulted.
Typically,
the FBI figures for assaults on law enforcement include about 8,000-11,000
out of the 16,000-18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the
US. The agencies generally cover between 70-80% of the US population,
and, in the last 15 years for which data is available, included as many as
535,000 officers and as few as 441,000.
Their
criteria and
methodology
for which officers to include is also clear and consistent:
- They were working in an official capacity, whether on or off duty.
- They had full arrest powers.
- They ordinarily wore/carried a badge and a firearm.
- They were paid from governmental funds set aside specifically for payment of sworn law enforcement representatives.
- Their agency reported data for all 12 months of the calendar year.
This
is a more than representative sample for getting annual rates per capita and
rates per officer for assault and injury, and we’re lucky to have such a robust
data set.
That
being said, there are a few issues to note. First, at least potentially, there
may be selection bias. If your agency is large, dependent on federal funding,
or has high rates of assault and injury, you are probably more likely to take
the time to fill out and submit this paperwork.
Most
departments do, but between one third and one half do not. This could be
for many different reasons, but if you are a small or understaffed
agency — half of
all police agencies in 2008 had fewer than 10 full-time staff
— serving a relatively peaceful rural area, for instance, and had
commensurately few assaults or injuries, you might not take the time. This
could skew the rates upwards, as the agencies with the lowest rates of
assault select themselves out of the pool.
But
that is not pertinent to the question of how many police there are. The
answer here is simply that the data is too incomplete. A third
or more of police agencies do not report and are not counted, so FBI doesn’t
have a full account of personnel employed, and we can’t extrapolate
from the existing data because of potential selection issues raised above.
Bureau
of Justice Statistics
The
BJS is probably the best government data I’ve been able to find, but it is also
quite limited. The last estimates they have come from 2008. (A
law enforcement census for 2012 has been commissioned to NORC, but
does not appear to have been completed yet.)
BJS estimates
that in 2008, there were 17,895 law enforcement agencies employing
1.13 million full-time workers, including over 765,000 sworn officers, as
well as about 100,000 part-time employees, including over 44,000 sworn
officers. That gives a total of full- and part-time employees with general
arrest powers of about 810,000 in 2008.
From
2004 to 2008, the number of law enforcement personnel increased 5.3
percent, and the number of sworn officers increased by about 4.6 percent.
This rate was larger than the 3.4 percent increase in sworn officers that
occurred in the last four year period, from 2000 to 2004. There are not only
more officers than previously, the rate of increase was (and perhaps is
still) accelerating.
Moreover,
the number of cops per capita is also increasing. Another BJS report
estimates that the number of sworn officers increased 25 percent between
1992 and 2008. Over the same time, the US population as a whole only grew
by 18.5 percent.
Most
of the increase in sworn officers per capita happened between 1992 and 1996,
when the number of sworn personnel jumped 9.1 percent, but the number of
civilian employees per capita has grown steadily and continuously. The number of total
police personnel per capita rose from 332 per 100,000
residents in 1992 to 373 per 100,000 in 2008.
Additionally,
these figures, including the rate of increase and rate of acceleration,
make the current NLEOMF estimate of “over 900,000 sworn officers”
seem quite plausible, if a bit high, assuming an average of 45,000
part-time sworn officers as in previous years.
The
Bottom Line
In
yet another way, the numbers show that police work is getting safer, not
more dangerous. There are more officers and support staff than ever, and they
are safer than ever, in every way we can measure.
While
the absolute number of officer fatalities is
decreasing, the absolute number of officers is increasing. While the
rate of fatalities per capita is
falling, the rate of police per capita is rising. Thus,
the rate of fatalities per officer is very likely also falling.
BJS
only conducts its law enforcement census every four years, so we are obliged to
take an annual average of the change between each data point in
order to get a figure for the intervening years. Interpolating the number
of police officers for the missing years in this way, and using fatality data
from NLEOMF and homicide data from FBI, gives us approximate fatality and
homicide rates per 100,000 full-time equivalent sworn officers. (BJS
calculates the total number of “full-time equivalent sworn officers”
as “as the sum of the number of full-time sworn officers and half the number of
part-time sworn officers.”)
Again,
the trends all point the same way: down. Whether we look at fatalities
per 100,000 residents being policed or per 100,000 sworn officers, or whether
we look at felony killings per 100,000 residents or sworn officers, it
tells the same story at every level: police work is getting safer.
Corrections and Errata
One potential issue this new data might
raise with my previous posts is that my estimated rate of officer fatalities
for 2013 may be either too high or too low.
The underestimation may come from
the fact that I used a lower bound (900,000 sworn officers) when the true
figure, according to NLEOMF, is “more than” that. If it is a lot more than
that, it could substantially affect my estimate.
The underestimation could come from
the fact that NLEOMF’s count of “sworn officers”
might include part-time officers. Of course, BLS also used employment-based
methodology for worker fatality rates, up until 2007, so there’s
nothing wrong with this method per
se. However, since then, BLS switched to the more useful
hour-based “full-time equivalent workers.” The fatality rates for other
professions, such as logging and fishing, against which I contrasted
with my estimated fatality rate for police, used the modern method of FTEW. In
order to make a more accurate comparison, one must use hour-based, not
employment based, data.
If and when NLEOMF responds to my
request and provides me with the more accurate data, I will re-check my numbers
and make updates accordingly. Please do email me if you spot any errors or have
any questions.
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