18,000 Police forces in the US, and you wonder why there's an issue ?

[OnDoutside]

It was mentioned yesterday by a retired Police Chief (possibly of Washington), that there are 18,000 police forces in the US. That's just staggering. How can you hope to have standards in how your police deal with the public, when they all could have different (or no) interpretations ?

Wiki says

In 2008, state and local law enforcement agencies employed more than 1.1 million persons on a full-time basis, including about 765,000 sworn personnel (defined as those with general arrest powers). Agencies also employed approximately 100,000 part-time employees, including 44,000 sworn officers

In somewhere comparable like the UK,

There were 129,584 full-time equivalent ( FTE ) police officers in the 43 police forces of England and Wales as at 31 March 2013.

[Duckhunter935]

1. What's the per capita number?

We are just a tad bigger and have a lot of small remote towns.

[OnDoutside]

2. 1 per 432 people in UK, 1 per 289 in US however in terms of Police forces it is

3023 police officers per Police force

61 police officers per Police force

On average of course. That's nuts.

Populations :


64m in UK

318m in US

[cherokeeprogressive]

6. 3023 officers per force?

Even in places like Mayberry?

I live in a community of <16,000 and our Sheriff's substation has 16 Deputies.

[OnDoutside]

12. I think you are missing the point that there should be standardised police training within a country

but how can there be with 18,000 police forces, and I'm not talking about firing police officers ?

[cherokeeprogressive]

13. 18,000 forces with 3023 officers per force is over 54.4 million LEOs.

I think your numbers are either wrong or fudged.

I get that standardized training is hard with that many different forces but explain those numbers please.

[OnDoutside]

15. No, the first figure was UK police forces, the 2nd was US forces, so 61*18000= 1.1m US police

So you could potentially have 18,000 different Training programmes.

[cherokeeprogressive]

16. My bad! I'm sorry I read it wrong.

[OnDoutside]

17. No problem :)

[BumRushDaShow]

3. "mentioned yesterday by a retired Police Chief"

Charles Ramsey (who had been chief in several cities including D.C. (famously during the D.C. sniper ordeal, but recently retired from here in Philadelphia). He was a co-chair of the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

Also, I wouldn't compare the UK (total population 64 million, with England alone @ 53 million) to the U.S. (population 318 million).

But it is daunting. Which is why one of his suggestions was to do more "regionalization" of these forces to bring about some more consistency in SOPs, and his preference was actually to see the number of forces "cut in half. Good luck with that! (although some forces have had to, or were forced to consolidate due to lack of money, where some smaller municipalities - e.g., Camden, NJ, ended up consolidating with the Camden County force)

[OnDoutside]

4. 18,000 Police forces is at least 17,000 too many and must be massively inefficient, administrativel

y at the very least. What's clear in this case, it is massively inefficient in rolling out up to date training.

The UK is actually a good comparison in terms of number of police forces, my own brother in law is a London Metropolitan Police Officer, and they are regularly being upskilled in their interaction with the public.

Thanks for the Charles Ramsay reminder.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. Well note

that you have some large cities that hold the bulk of the officers and the rest are scattered around the states as county police - some covering large geographic areas.

I think the issue is geography that to a degree, limits consolidation - particularly in the larger western states (which makes me think of the "Texas Rangers", who cover the whole state via 6 divisions - they are in addition to the regular state and local police). The geographic size of the UK is like 94,000 sq miles & the U.S. is 3.8 million sq miles... Basically the UK is geographically around the same size as the state of Michigan.



It would probably make more sense comparing the numbers in the U.S. to all of Europe (similar total populations), which doesn't mean that the U.S. wouldn't still have more but again, geography.

The other issue of course is the proliferation of guns in the U.S., something that exists nowhere else in the world (except maybe countries involved in civil wars).

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

5. Chiefs are appointed by mayors.

Mayors might not want to lose that power.

Or, maybe there are too many municipalities in the U.S. If all the large cities absorbed their suburbs and even extended into absorbing distant rural communities, there would be a manageable number of local governments, so a manageable number of police forces.

D.C. could absorb Arlington and Chevy Chase, eg.

[Dreamer Tatum]

7. By all means, let's do away with a few thousand police forces.

No police force - no arrests, no disparity.

Boom - solved.

[Igel]

9. Too big a bucket for all the different categories.

Take where my kid had his robotics meet last winter.

Five sets of cops could have arrested us. County. City. School district. There are also state-level police. FBI, if we were doing a federal crime. Didn't see a single cop.

Thing is, they do different things, have different purposes, patrol different areas. Most of the county cops stay out of the city. Not all. If there were fewer county cops, they'd hire more city cops. But the city folk pay county taxes, too. (I grew up near Baltimore. Different there. There are county cops and city cops, and they don't mix much. Baltimore City is contained within but is not part of Baltimore County. Houston is contained within but also part of Harris County.)

But I pass through little towns sometimes where there are maybe 4 cops. It's very "Twin Peaks" like. They're also covered by county police, but the county police are concentrated by population. The county taxes paid by that little town wouldn't pay for a single officer's salary.

[OnDoutside]

14. Imagine having the US Army split into thousands of separate autonomous forces and not having

a standard training methodology.

[jmg257]

10. Here is a tyical situation - in the Northeast anyway

I was Town/PD LE - roughly 55 sq miles. We had maybe 20 officers (chief, 2 sgts), only 2 full time. 24 hr coverage only on the weekends (2 cops on after 12), 8a-12m coverage weekdays.

In the town, were 3 villages (a few sq miles each) - each with its own smaller PD - similar partial coverage.

There is also the County Sheriff dept.

And the State Police.

So in this 55 sq mile area there are 6 PDs with some sort of jurisdiction.

[Calculating]

11. I think we have too many cops in general

It leads to bored cops who have nothing better to do than harass citizens over broken taillights, rolling stop signs and stuff like that.

[HereSince1628]

18. I'd guess most police departments don't run police academies, now for-profit colleges do

as well as universities. I'd guess most of the basic curricula is pretty similar, and I'd guess all police coming from MP backgrounds all have pretty much identical military police training.

What really varies is what's learned on the job, because -that- is what their peers and mentors perceive as important within their departments contexts.

[Bluenorthwest]

19. The US is 50 States which don't have the same laws nor the same cultures at all.

Yesterday I watched a documentary about a man sentenced to 13 years in Louisiana Prison for having two joints. In my State, you can go to the store and buy joints if you are 21. The Sheriff in LA was saying 'Here the Sheriff is Big Daddy, he provides' and shit like that which gets him elected there, would get him run out of town on a rail here.

You seem to be calling for a Federal Police, with no local oversight or control, with some East Coast city as Headquarters. That's a plan for a disintegrating Union.

Here in Oregon, we recently had that Bundy Gang occupation of a wildlife refuge, you might recall it. It took place in a county larger than the State of Maryland with way under a dozen officers to serve it. Larger than Maryland. The refuge itself larger than the City of Chicago in size. They don't have enough officers to really even deal with the public safety issues in any actually 'emergency' sense.

[Bluenorthwest]

20. Read the wiki about law enforcement agencies in the UK, you suggest it's on giant foce

that's not the case at all....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_agencies_in_the_United_Kingdom,_Crown_dependencies_and_British_Overseas_Territories

[OnDoutside]

21. Where did I suggest that ?