Larger Police Departments Shrunk After COVID, Smaller Ones Mostly Stayed the Same Size

Exploring FBI's new data on law enforcement employees.

The FBI recently released its Law Enforcement Employees Data for 2022 which you can find on the Crime Data Explorer (warning: CDE requires at least a PhD to effectively navigate and sometimes even that is insufficient). This new data allows us to evaluate the change in police officers between 2019 and 2022 to show a pretty stark change in law enforcement over the last few years.

Here is what it shows:

Larger Agencies Shrank

There has been tons of ink spilled on police losing officers since 2020 and the 2022 data helps to quantify some of that change. 16 of the city and county agencies with the most officers in 2019 shrank by 2022. Note, for this entire analysis I’m not counting agencies that are not the primary law enforcement agency for a county or city (like State Police or Highway Patrol) and I’ve removed agencies that didn’t report any data in 2019. That leaves 10,345 agencies with data for both 2019 and 2022.

There were 27 cities that had 500 or more officers in 2019 and lost greater than 10 percent of their officer total by 2022. Only 3 cities, by contrast, had 500 or more officers in 2019 and grew by 10 percent or more by 2022.

Smaller Agencies Didn’t Really Shrink…

There was a pretty good correlation between agency size and change in officers from 2019 to 2022. Smaller agencies — which make up the vast majority of American law enforcement agencies — largely grew or stayed about the same. Larger agencies, especially agencies with 1,000 or more officers, tended to shrink.

But They Didn’t Really Grow Either

Only 30 percent of very small agencies (fewer than 50 officers) shrank between 2019 and 2022, but they did not grow all that much either. Very small agencies grew by just over 2 percent over that span while agencies with between 50 and 249 officers in 2019 shrank a tiny amount. Unsurprisingly, bigger agencies shrank by considerably larger amounts with a nearly 6 percent decline in the 59 agencies with 1,000 or more officers in 2019.

The problem was particularly acute in cities where big agencies shrunk a considerable amount on average. City agencies with greater than 500 officers in 2019 shrank by around 7 percent on average while county agencies shrunk by less than 4 percent.

A Law Enforcement Employment Dashboard

If you’re interested in exploring the FBI’s new law enforcement employment data at an agency level you can do so in our new dashboard. Check it out if you ever want to know what any agency has reported to the FBI over time.