Big Police Departments Have Stopped Shrinking

But they aren't growing, for the most part.

The FBI released its first dataset of crime and policing in 2024 covering Law Enforcement Employees from 1960 to 2024. Most police department shrank after COVID while bigger agencies shrank again in 2023 albeit by a smaller amount. The 2024 release shows that big city police departments neither grew nor shrank last year while agencies in smaller cities and in counties grew modestly.

To measure how agency staffing has changed, I grabbed every agency that reported data to the FBI in 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024. I ignored 2020 and 2021 because the former was less pertinent for measuring the change and the latter was badly underreported due to the NIBRS transition.

All told there were nearly 10,000 agencies nationwide that reported data for all four of those years (9,993). Most big city police departments shrank from 2019 to 2024. There were 39 city agencies with at least 1,000 officers in 2019, and the number of officers shrank between 2019 and 2024 in 29 of them. More than half of those agencies (22 of 39) shrank by 100 or more officers while just three grew by 100 or more officers. There was a decline of 10 percent or more in 19 of those agencies while none grew by more than 10 percent.

Below shows the percent change in city agencies with between 1,000 and 3,000 officers in 2019. Bigger agencies weren’t included because New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago would drown out the smaller agencies.

There were 31 cities with between 1,000 and 3,000 officers in 2019, and 25 of them shrank between 2019 and 2023. Those that grew did so by just a bit while many agencies had drops of 15 percent or more. But 15 of these agencies grew from 2023 to 2024 while 15 shrank (Pittsburgh reported the same number of officers both years).

Most big city and county agencies covering 100,000 or more people declined relatively substantially after COVID between 2019 and 2022. There were only 493 of these agencies that reported data every year, less than 5 percent of the total number of agencies, but these agencies account for more than 55 percent of the total number of officers. Agencies in both groups shrank by more than 3 percent from 2019 to 2022 with a much larger decline in big cities of 250,000 or more than counties.

Smaller city (under 250k) and large county agencies grew modestly in 2023 and 2024 while small county agencies grew much larger in 2023. More granularity is needed, but the 50,000 foot view certainly supports the theory that many officers that left big city agencies didn’t leave the profession, they just went to quieter cities and counties.

In 2024, however, agencies of all sizes grew modestly with the exception of big city departments which were mostly flat. NYPD shrank by 3,256 officers (9 percent) between 2019 and 2023 but the department dropped by just 9 officers in 2024. Cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Winston-Salem lost 18, 33, and 27 percent of their police officers respectively between 2019 and 2023. Each of those cities saw either minimal growth or declines in 2024 though as the downward trend started to mellow out.

As it stands, the median big city police department is around 50 officers smaller in 2024 than it was in 2019. The median law enforcement agency for other population types, by contrast, have largely either remained unchanged or grown slightly. Big cities have fewer officers but for the most part they aren’t shrinking anymore.

If you’re interested in looking up any agency that I’ve included in this analysis you can find it here:

And if you’ve come this far, we have a dashboard on the AH Datalytics website showing each agency’s counts from 1960 to 2024 in the FBI data.

The other piece of good news is that the updated Law Enforcement Employees data is the first thing the FBI has published on the Crime Data Explorer since September of last year. The FBI stopped publishing quarterly data and hasn’t started publishing monthly data yet (if ever). This data release is at least reassurance that there won’t be a shutdown in crime/policing data coming from the FBI.