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US Police Department Comparison
A free dataset from The Basin  ·  basin.la/data/index.html#us-police-department-comparison
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The full method, the column definitions and the known limits are written up and
available on request: data@basin.la

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ABOUT THIS DATASET
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US POLICE DEPARTMENT COMPARISON PANEL
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Fifteen law enforcement agencies on one set of definitions: what each is appropriated, how many
officers it actually employs, how many people and how much ground those officers cover, and how
much crime is reported and cleared. Ten of the largest municipal police departments in the
country, four Los Angeles County city departments, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff.

Every figure traces to a primary document. Budgets come from each city's or county's own adopted
budget. Officer counts come from the FBI's Police Employee Data. Population comes from the Census
Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates. Land area comes from the Census Bureau's 2025 Gazetteer. Crime
and clearances come from the FBI's Crime Data Explorer. Nothing here is taken from an aggregator,
a news report, or a department's own web copy.


WHAT IS IN THE RELEASE
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| File | Rows | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| police_panel.csv | 15 | One row per agency: budget, staffing, denominators, crime, and every derived ratio |
| police_agency_year.csv | 225 | 2010 to 2025 by agency: officers, civilians, offenses, clearances, reporting basis |
| agency_reporting_basis.csv | 15 | The year each agency moved from summary UCR to NIBRS, which decides what can be compared to what |
| lasd_budget_units.csv | 11 | The Sheriff's budget by unit, because patrol is a quarter of it |
| agency_budget_notes.csv | 15 | Per agency: what the appropriation includes and excludes, in the researcher's own words, with sources |
| denominators.csv | 16 | Population and land area for every jurisdiction, plus unincorporated Los Angeles County |


THREE DISTINCTIONS
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Which officer count. Every city counts sworn positions its own way. Three of the fifteen
(Dallas, Pasadena, and the Sheriff) do not publish a sworn count at all, and every department in
the panel employs fewer officers than it budgets for. Los Angeles budgets 10,600 and employs
8,820. So the denominator for anything per-officer is the FBI's count of officers actually
employed on 31 October 2024, which is one definition applied to every agency. The budget book's
authorized figure ships beside it as sworn_positions_budgeted, and the gap between them is
fill_rate_pct. "Spending per officer" means something very different depending on which you
divide by, and both are here so the choice is visible.

Which budget. Ten of the fifteen agencies appropriate employer pension and health benefits
inside the police line. Five do not: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and, in part,
Seattle. Those five are the largest departments in the panel. Los Angeles appropriates $1.99
billion to the Police Department and separately appropriates $594.3 million of police pension,
$422.8 million of police health and benefits and $46.9 million of police liability claims, which
the city itself totals to a $3.33 billion cost of the police program, 68 percent above the
department line. A ranking on the published department line is therefore substantially a ranking
of accounting conventions. The panel carries the department line as published, the externally
appropriated amounts where a city states them, and a loaded total where both are known.

The Sheriff is not a police department. LASD's 8,846 officers run the largest jail system in
the United States and the county's court security as well as patrol. Custody is $995.3 million of
its budget and court services another $454.6 million, against $247.6 million for patrol of
unincorporated county and $379.0 million for patrol sold to 42 contract cities. Per-capita and
per-officer figures for the whole department are not measuring what a city police department's
figures measure, so it carries comparable_to_municipal_pd = 0, is excluded from every ranking,
and ships its budget-unit split separately instead.


REPORTING BASIS, WHICH BREAKS MOST PUBLISHED COMPARISONS
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Every agency moved from summary UCR counting to NIBRS in a different year:

| Year | Agencies |
|---|---|
| 2012 | Seattle |
| 2018 | Houston, Dallas |
| 2020 | San Antonio |
| 2021 | Chicago, San Diego, Philadelphia |
| 2022 | Long Beach, Glendale, Pasadena |
| 2023 | New York |
| 2024 | Los Angeles, Santa Monica |
| 2025 | Phoenix |
| never | Los Angeles County Sheriff |

NIBRS records more offenses per incident than summary UCR did, so an agency's own count jumps at
its own switchover for reasons that are not crime. New York's property offenses run 122,299 in
2019 and 200,417 in 2024 across a 2023 switch. Any comparison that crosses one of those lines is
measuring the switch.

Two consequences are built into the data rather than left to the reader. First, there is no year
between 2015 and 2025 in which all fifteen agencies count the same way, so crime here is taken
from 2025, the year with the most agencies on one basis (thirteen of fifteen), while staffing
is taken from 2024, the last year the FBI publishes officer counts. That one-year offset is
stated on every table. Second, crime_comparable marks the agencies that were on NIBRS for the
whole crime year, and the two that were not keep their numbers but are excluded from every
cross-agency crime comparison.


CLEARANCES ARE REPORTED WORSE THAN OFFENSES
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Chicago reported no clearances at all from 2015 through 2020, and New York reported none in 2021
or 2022. A clearance rate computed over those years is not a low clearance rate, it is an absent
one. clearances_reported marks each agency-year and clearances_comparable gates the panel
row, so no clearance-based measure silently includes an agency that did not report. Chicago's
post-2021 clearance figures are present but should be treated with suspicion given that history,
and they are flagged in agency_budget_notes.csv.


SOURCES
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- City and county adopted budget documents for the fiscal year containing 1 January 2026. Each
  agency's exact document, page and table are in agency_budget_notes.csv.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime Data Explorer: Police Employee Data and agency-level
  offense and clearance counts, via the api.data.gov Crime Data API. Data as refreshed 15 July 2026.
- US Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates, sub-est2025.csv, 1 July 2025 estimates.
- US Census Bureau, 2025 Gazetteer Files, land area in square miles, water excluded.

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TERMS: SOURCES AND RIGHTS
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LICENSING TERMS
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The underlying records are public. City and county adopted budgets are public records. FBI Crime
Data Explorer figures are US government works. Census Bureau population and area files are US
government works. None of that is ours and none of it is licensed here.

What is licensed here is the assembled product: the panel, the joins between five separate
sources, the reporting-basis flags that decide which figures may be compared with which, the
per-agency notes on what each appropriation contains, and the documented method. Attribution to The Basin is required in any published use.

Two things a licensee should not do with this data. Do not compare an agency's crime counts
across its own NIBRS switchover year, which agency_reporting_basis.csv gives for every agency.
Do not rank departments on the published budget line without saying that five of the fifteen
appropriate pension and health outside it.

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LICENCE
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Free to use, including commercially, with attribution.

    Data processing: The Basin (basin.la)

The records underneath this release are public. Federal figures are US government
works and municipal filings are public records; none of that is ours and none of
it is licensed here. What The Basin built is the assembly: the extraction, the
joins, the derived measures and the documentation. That work is given away with
this release rather than licensed, and you may redistribute it, including as part
of a commercial product, provided the attribution above travels with it.

If a source carries its own attribution requirement, that requirement survives
this grant. The source table is under "Terms" above.

No warranty. The full method and the known limits are available on request:
data@basin.la

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The Basin  ·  basin.la  ·  data@basin.la
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