A census of American policing
Every law enforcement agency in the United States
19,645 United States law enforcement agencies are recorded here — city departments, sheriffs’ offices, state police, tribal, campus and special-jurisdiction forces. This is a public record of what each one reports, and what it doesn’t.
Why the gap matters. Reporting crime to the FBI is voluntary. When an agency files nothing, its jurisdiction simply disappears from the national picture — no crime counts, no clearance rates, no use-of-force returns. Police Census records that absence as a fact about the agency rather than leaving the page blank.
Browse by state
How to read this site
Every figure here is a measured value published by a named source, with the source linked on the page it appears. Police Census does not estimate missing values, rank agencies by raw counts, or infer anything about an agency from the behaviour of its neighbours.
Agencies vary enormously in size — from forces of three officers to the NYPD — so comparisons are made per head of the population an agency actually reports for, never by raw totals. Where an agency publishes nothing, the page says so plainly. Read the full method.