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Home • Crime in the U.S. • 2015 • Crime in the U.S. 2015 • Tables • Table 72 • Table 72 Data Declaration

Table 72 Data Declaration

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Full-time Law Enforcement Employees, Range in Rate per 1,000 Inhabitants, by Population Group, 2015 

The FBI collects these data through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. 

General comments 

  • This table provides the number of agencies that fall within specified rate ranges of employment for law enforcement personnel, both sworn officers and civilian employees, within a particular population group. 

  • Agencies with no resident population (i.e., those associated with universities and colleges [see Table 79], other agencies [see Table 81], and some state agencies) are excluded from this table. Therefore, the total number of agencies used in this table differs from those provided in other law enforcement employee tables. 

  • The 2015 police employee data from the Alaska state UCR Program were not received and, therefore, are not included in this table.  However, the Bureau of Indian Affairs submitted police employee data for one Alaskan tribal agency which is included in this table. 

Methodology 

  • The information in this table is derived from law enforcement employee counts (as of October 31, 2015) submitted by participating agencies. 

  • The UCR Program defines law enforcement officers as individuals who ordinarily carry a firearm and a badge, have full arrest powers, and are paid from governmental funds set aside specifically to pay sworn law enforcement. 

  • Civilian employees include full-time agency personnel such as clerks, radio dispatchers, meter attendants, stenographers, jailers, correctional officers, and mechanics. 

  • The FBI derived the rate of full-time law enforcement employees per population group by first dividing the aggregated total of personnel for the group by the aggregated estimated populations covered by the contributing agencies within the group and then multiplying the resulting figure by 1,000. 

Population estimation 

For the 2015 population estimates used in this table, the FBI computed individual rates of growth from one year to the next for every city/town and county using 2010 decennial population counts and 2011 through 2014 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Each agency’s rates of growth were averaged; that average was then applied and added to its 2014 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2015 population estimate.