Citizens v. Police: the numbers

[michiganstud]

We are highly understaffed here too. Our cities bean counters ran the numbers and found out that in their opinion we had too many officers.

In reality they compaired the numbers to people based on the 1960's when our city population was the same as now.

They forgot to factor in the crime rate!!! The crime rate is significantly different from now and 1960.

So we are down from 153 officers in 1995 to 101 officers now.

[acreature]

approx 1:400 in the off-season vs 1:2,500 in the Summer

That's total road law in the County though... Not all are on duty at one time... 30 at a time at best for the whole County.

490 sq mi land, 490 sq mi water

[mcsap]

Our state recommended numbers are 1 officer per 1 thousand residents.

[retdetsgt]

I didn't even think of that. About how many officers would actually be on the street per shift in a department your size?

According to the 2000 Annual Report, the latest I could find, we had 1039 sworn officers. 549 officer rank were assigned to the 5 precincts. Traffic division had 44 officers. Traffic only answers calls on traffic related matters. But to look at the stats, we had 1.96 police to citizen ratio although just over half actually responded to calls for service.

That being said, a police dept cannot run without supervisors, command, etc.

Go to page 6 of this for all the numbers.

Detectives is a little misleading. All investigators assigned to detectives are Sgts. The few officers there are actually in the telephone report unit.

[decuervo]

That was just the kind of information I was curious about. I was going to ask about personnel breakdown next. Don't need to now. Thanks RetDetSgt.

[Ragnarok]

I don't know if this is true for all states, but IL State Police keep all the records of crimes, employees, etc.

Chicago has (as of Oct. 31st, 2003) 13,355 full-time sworn officers, and roughly 3 million population, leaving 4.5 officers per 1,000 residents

I don't think these numbers are very accurate, since "sworn officers" would include anyone who is a police officer but does not work the streets, and there is quite a bit of administration here, with all the substations, and so on...

At any rate...that's a lot of police, which we apparently need since we are also rated #3 in the country for "adult binge drinking".

[Mr Crustacean]

The average ratio of police officers to population in England in 2003 was
254.5 per 100,000 population.

Crustacean.

[121Traffic]

Our city has 13000 censused residents, with anywhere from 5000-12000 illegal immigrants depending on the season. This is all in TWO SQUARE MILES. We have 23 sworn officers, with only 15 real honest to god road officers. Three of those guys are dedicated traffic officers. We have three shifts, with four officers to a shift (corporal, three line officers). At any given time, due to scheduled days off, etc. there are usually only two to three officers on shift. SOMETIMES we have an overlapping cover "powershift" officer usually fridays and saturdays...this guy overlaps half and half of swings and graves. We have traffic during the day, but they aren't subject to the radio. That means that during a regular shift, with three cops, we are anywhere from 1:4000 to 1:9000. Not a good ratio...considering our call load. Each officer handles about 1200 calls a year. We are stretched thin. :(

[steelcityk9cop]

We're about 1:930

[decuervo]

Thanks for the info everyone, I'd been curious about that for awhile.

And Mr Crustacean, DAMN! Hope you fellas get firearms soon.

[Jynkxxie]

The city I live in has approx. 1 officer to a little over 5000 residents. Though I must say they have an excellent response time for being so understaffed, and they are really hoppin too.