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Full-time Law Enforcement Officers, Range in Rate per 1,000 Inhabitants by Population Group, 2010

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 by population group for law enforcement officers.
• 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 officer tables.

Methodology

• The information in this table is derived from law enforcement officer counts (as of October 31, 2010) 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.
• The FBI derived the rate of full-time law enforcement officers per population group by first dividing the aggregated total of officers 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 2010 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 2000 decennial population counts and 2001 through 2009 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 2009 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2010 population estimate.