# Police Census (policecensus.com)

> A public record of US law enforcement agencies — identity, workforce, FBI reporting status,
> federal oversight and military-surplus receipts — assembled from federal open-data sources and
> published per-agency, not modelled or estimated.

## What this is

Police Census answers one question per agency: what has actually been reported about it to a
federal government source, and what has not. Every figure is a measured value copied from a
named source, or the page/export says the value is missing — never an estimate, an
interpolation, or one agency's numbers inferred from another's. See /about for the full method
and /sources for a live, per-dataset row count and last-refresh timestamp.

## What is published

- **Agency identity**: ORI, name, type, state, county, coordinates, FBI/NIBRS reporting status.
  Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer. Public domain (US government work).
- **Workforce**: officer and civilian headcount by year, and the population the agency itself
  reports for, 1960-2025. Source: FBI CDE bulk employment file. Public domain.
- **Military surplus (1033 programme)**: equipment transferred to police under the Department of
  Defense 1033 programme, matched to agencies by name (~89% match rate; unmatched records are
  left unattached, never guessed). Source: DLA Law Enforcement Support Office. Public domain.
- **Federal oversight**: DOJ Civil Rights Division pattern-or-practice matters under 34 U.S.C.
  § 12601, human-verified before publication. Source: DOJ Special Litigation Section. Public
  domain; case-type labels and document titles are reproduced verbatim, not paraphrased.
- **Officers assaulted**: FBI LEOKA weapon-type breakdown, 1995-2025, matched to agencies by
  name (~79% match rate). Source: FBI LEOKA bulk file. Public domain. The programme's own
  officers-killed columns are empty in the source file for every row — this site reports
  assaults only and states no officers-killed figure, because the data to state one does not
  exist in the source.

## What is deliberately NOT published, and why

- **No estimates or modelled figures.** If a source does not report a number for an agency, the
  page and every export say so; nothing is interpolated or inferred from a peer agency.
- **No derived cross-source ratios.** Figures reported directly by a source (e.g. an agency's
  own officers-per-1,000 rate, as filed with the FBI) are published as-is. A ratio this site
  would have to COMPUTE by combining figures from different sources or different years — for
  example dividing a multi-year death count by a single year's reported population — is not
  included in any export file, because the two halves of that ratio do not share a reporting
  basis and computing it would manufacture precision the underlying data does not support.
- **No names.** `deaths.victim_name` and `deaths.agency_text` exist in the database only as
  cross-source dedupe keys and are never selected by any page or export query. This is
  enforced by an automated gate against the live site and its export endpoints, not by
  convention alone: scripts/gate-no-name-leak.sh.
- **Deaths-during-encounters data is excluded from every export (as of 2026-08-30).** Mapping
  Police Violence data is used on this site's pages under written permission. Whether that
  permission extends to redistributing derived counts in a downloadable file — as opposed to
  displaying them on a web page — has not been settled with the source. Excluding it from
  exports is reversible once that is answered; publishing it and having to retract a
  downloadable file that many copies may already exist of is not. See /downloads.

## Downloads and API

- Human index of everything available, with coverage notes: /downloads
- Per-agency JSON (identity + workforce + military surplus + federal oversight + assaults on
  officers): /api/agencies/{ori} — e.g. /api/agencies/CA0010100
- Per-agency CSV (identity + full workforce history, one row per reported year):
  /api/agencies/{ori}/csv
- Per-state agency roster, JSON: /api/states/{two-letter-code}
- Per-state agency roster, CSV: /api/states/{two-letter-code}/csv
- All API endpoints fail closed: a database read that does not complete returns HTTP 503 with
  an explanatory JSON body, never a shortened or partial file. A 200 response is always the
  complete, current record for what it claims to cover.
- Bulk export is bounded to one state per request by design — there is no single endpoint that
  returns all ~19,600 agencies in one response.

## Licence and attribution

Attribute as "Police Census (policecensus.com)" when citing or redistributing figures from this
site. The underlying source data is US federal government work and is public domain; Police
Census's compilation, cleaning and per-agency joins are original work. Corrections are welcomed
at corrections@policecensus.com and published, with the prior value shown, at /corrections —
never silently edited.