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Method & sources
Police Census publishes measured values from named sources, or nothing. This page records where every figure comes from and when it was last refreshed.
What this site is
A reference record of all 19,621 law enforcement agencies in the United States, assembled from federal open data. It is built for three readers: members of the public trying to understand who polices them, people considering a career in policing, and journalists and researchers who need the underlying figures.
Police Census is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or funded by any law enforcement agency, police union, government body or advocacy organisation.
Sources
| Data | Source | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Agency records | FBI Crime Data Explorer | Identity, ORI, type, county, coordinates and NIBRS reporting status for every agency on the FBI’s register. |
| Crime & clearances | FBI CDE, summarised agency series | Monthly offence and clearance counts, as reported by the agency itself. Not yet loaded site-wide. |
| Federal funding | USAspending.gov | COPS Hiring, Byrne JAG and DNA Backlog awards since October 2019. Reported by state only: award recipients are usually cities, not police departments. See Federal funding. |
| Deaths during encounters | Mapping Police Violence | Deaths recorded during police encounters, 2013 onward, used with permission. Attached to agencies by the identifier MPV publishes. Not official statistics. Police Census publishes counts only and does not name the people who died. See Deaths. |
| Military surplus | DLA Law Enforcement Support Office | Equipment transferred under the DoD 1033 programme, as at 30 June 2026. Recipients are named but not identified by ORI, so records are matched to agencies by name; unmatched records are left unattached rather than guessed. See Military surplus. |
| Workforce | FBI CDE, police employment series | Officer and civilian headcount by year, and the population the agency reports for. Not yet loaded site-wide. |
What the numbers do and do not mean
Reporting to the FBI is voluntary
No US agency is compelled to submit crime data to the federal government. When a page says an agency has never reported, that is a statement about its filing record — not an assertion that no crime occurs there, and not an accusation of wrongdoing.
Comparisons are per head of population, never raw counts
Agencies range from three-officer village departments to forces of tens of thousands. Any comparison uses the population an agency actually reports for, which is the denominator the FBI publishes alongside the counts. Raw totals are never presented as a ranking.
Missing data is shown as missing
Where a value has not been published, the page says so. Police Census does not estimate, model, interpolate or infer figures, and does not fill a gap in one agency’s record using another’s.
People who died are counted, never named
Records of deaths during police encounters name the person who died. Police Census publishes counts and rates only. Those names are held solely to match the same death across different sources and are never rendered, exported or indexed. Official dispositions are reproduced word for word or not at all — they are never paraphrased into a judgement about whether a death was justified.
Some pages are deliberately not indexed
An agency with nothing on record beyond its name and jurisdiction gets a page so that it is findable and so the absence is documented — but that page is marked noindex until there is substantive data behind it.
Data freshness
| Source | Last run | Rows | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| cde:agencies | 2026-08-25 14:30 | 19,621 | ok |
| cde:crime | 2026-08-25 16:26 | 2,274,444 | ok |
| cde:employment | 2026-08-25 14:57 | — | aborted |
| cde:employment-bulk | 2026-08-25 15:02 | 736,459 | ok |
| leso:1033 | 2026-08-25 16:03 | 75,087 | ok |
| mpv:deaths | 2026-08-25 16:30 | 15,550 | ok |
| usaspending:grants | 2026-08-25 16:35 | 13,585 | ok |
Corrections
If a figure here does not match your agency’s own records, the discrepancy is almost always in what was filed with the FBI rather than in this site’s arithmetic — but we want to know either way. Corrections and source challenges are welcome.