Large Police Departments May Be Starting To Grow
We'll know more in a month or so.
“Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics” is one of my favorite quotes. It is often attributed to General Omar Bradley, but its exact attribution is uncertain. Whoever said it (hopefully not someone evil!), the quote still rings very true to me, especially as it relates to the logistics of policing and public safety.
We can talk about all sorts of policing strategies, but the basic reality is that reduced law enforcement staffing leads to longer response times which in term can feed lessened reporting of offenses and fewer cases cleared.
I’ve written before about how many agencies — especially medium and large ones — lost officers post-COVID. That decline slowed in 2023 and more or less levelled off in 2024. We will get staffing data for 2025 from the FBI sometime in the next month or so, but a perusal of some of the agencies that lost the most officers in the last 6 years shows a small bounce back of sorts occurring.
I looked at 10 large police departments (800+ officers in 2019) that lost the largest share of officers between 2019 and 2024. Staffing data for 2025 is available for seven of those agencies — either through the media or through the agencies themselves.
Six of the seven agencies with available data grew in 2025 though the exact scope of that growth isn’t quite clear in every agency so the below table doesn’t have the exact 2024 to 2025 growth. There was no publicly available data for three of the cities and one city (Pittsburgh) saw a small drop in officers in 2025. Note that
Separately, he Texas Department of Public Safety has some of the best publicly available data on police staffing and shows similar growth among a majority of large police departments in Texas in 2025. Seven of the 10 largest police departments in Texas in 2024 increased their officer counts in 2025.
Gains may be happening in police staffing, but they come on the heels of large drops since COVID. The gains themselves appear to be relatively modest following pretty large drops between 2019 and 2022/2023/2024. New Orleans, for example, went from more than 1,200 police officers and recruits in mid-2019 to 930 in late 2023. Today, there are around 960 officers and recruits.
The New Orleans example points to some clear hurdles ahead for departments looking to sustain these gains and continuing to grow. New Orleans spent $80 million on hiring and retaining officers, but that was done using one-time money and now the city faces enormous budget issues for unrelated reasons. The police department’s retention bonuses were potentially at risk of not being paid out though that risk did not come to pass.
New Orleans isn’t the only city where financial troubles might impact potential police department growth. Minneapolis police went way over budget in 2025 due to additional overtime costs double overtime pay ending. The city has taken steps to lower overtime spending.
It is unclear what impact the ending of additional benefits will have in New Orleans, Minneapolis, and other cities that are scrambling to replace lost officers. For now, at least, the data appears to be pointing in a growth direction though the scale of that gain won’t be known until the FBI’s official data comes out in a few weeks.
New on the Jeff-alytics Podcast
This week on the podcast I talked with Adam Gelb from the Council on Criminal Justice. We talk about why murder has fallen so dramatically over the last few years, how you build a sustainable organization that spans the political spectrum, and how CCJ brings together experts on such a wide range of topics covering everything from crime trends to the future of AI in criminal justice.
And while you’re here, be sure to check out these other recent great episodes:
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott
Filmmakers Ferne Pearlstein and Bob Edwards
Professor and researcher Ian Adams
Politics podcaster Galen Druke.