U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics *************************************************************** This file is text only without graphics and many of the tables. A Zip archive of the tables in this report in spreadsheet format (.csv) and the full report including tables and graphics in .pdf format are available on BJS website at: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5600 *************************************************************** ******************* Program Report ******************* ***************************************************** National Sources of Law Enforcement Employment Data ***************************************************** Duren Banks and Joshua Hendrix, RTI International Matthew Hickman, Seattle University Tracey Kyckelhahn, United States Sentencing Commission***Footnote 1 The findings in this report are those of the Bureau of Justice Statistics and not of the United States Sentencing Commission***. The United States has three national data resources that collect law enforcement employment statistics along with other information unique to each collection. The FBI, U.S. Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) data collections programs have different purposes, data definitions, respondent universes, and data collection procedures. This report details the similarities and differences among these three collections and discusses when the use of one may be preferred over the others. Law enforcement in the United States is made up of about 18,000 federal, state, county, and local agencies. Each agency has varying legal and geographic jurisdictions, ranging from single-officer police departments to those with more than 30,000 officers. The most common type of agency is the small town police department that employs 10 or fewer officers. The decentralized, fragmented, and local nature of law enforcement in the United States makes it challenging to accurately count the number of agencies and officers. The three primary data sources provide comprehensive information about the nature and scope of law enforcement employment in the United States: * The FBI collects data on the number and type of law enforcement employees as part of its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. * The Census Bureau collects data on all government agency employees, including police agencies, as part of its Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll (ASPEP). * BJS collects law enforcement employment data through its periodic Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies (CSLLEA). These three sources provide information about the number of sworn and nonsworn officers at the state and national levels. The sources vary in the type of information they provide about law enforcement employees and in the number and size of law enforcement agencies that report the information. This report describes and compares the three data sources, including the information collected and how different agencies and personnel are defined and enumerated. ******************************************************* Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Police Employee Data ******************************************************* Federal Bureau of Investigation ********************************** The FBI has administered the UCR Program since 1930. State and local law enforcement agencies voluntarily report to the UCR Program crimes known to law enforcement, arrest information, and law enforcement employee data. The UCR Program provides information on the level of crime in the United States, including the number and type of crimes reported to state and local law enforcement agencies, and arrests made by these agencies. More detailed incident-based information for selected crimes and jurisdictions is provided through the Supplementary Homicide Reports and the National Incident-Based Reporting System. ***Footnote 2 Supplementary Homicide Reports provide more detailed information on the circumstances surrounding homicides and the characteristics of victims and offenders. See The Nation’s Two Measures of Homicide (NCJ 122705, BJS web, May 2003***. ***Footnote 3 The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) provides more details about crime incidents in selected states and jurisdictions that report to NIBRS. See http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/nibrs and http://www***. The UCR Program also collects data on law enforcement employees from reporting agencies, including the number, type, and characteristics of these employees. In addition, the FBI collects information about the number of law enforcement officers killed and assaulted, including demographics, patrol assignments, and other characteristics of these officers. FBI police employee data are reported in the Crime in the United States series, available at https://www.fbi.gov/about- us/cjis/ucr/ucr-publications. Each year, state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States voluntarily report to the UCR Program the total number of sworn law enforcement officers and civilians employed by their agencies as of October 31. Law enforcement employees include sworn law enforcement officers and nonsworn (or civilian) personnel. Sworn employees carry a firearm and a badge, have full arrest powers, and are paid from government funds set aside specifically for sworn law enforcement staff. Full-time nonsworn staff include clerks, radio dispatchers, meter attendants, stenographers, jailers, correctional officers, and mechanics. Employees who do not perform primary law enforcement functions or officers who are not paid out of police funds are excluded, as are employees who primarily serve the civil justice system, provide courtroom security, or provide staffing at jail facilities. Law enforcement employees of federal agencies are also excluded. UCR law enforcement employee data include information on the number and characteristics of employees responsible for performing primary law enforcement functions. Data are also available for nonsworn employees. The data provide information on the size of the population uniquely served by the reporting agency, the rate of officers per 1,000 population (calculated by the FBI), and the sex of employees. ***Footnote 4 The UCR allocates population served to the agency that has primary law enforcement responsibility for that population. In most instances, it is a municipal police department or a county sheriff. There are occasional exceptions depending on the state. Some agencies serve populations that are primarily served by other agencies (e.g., a transit police department). In such cases, the agency is classified as a “zero population agency.” However, a zero population is never assigned to an agency in the UCR because of missing information***. An analysis of the UCR law enforcement employee data archived at the University of Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) indicates that there were 750,340 sworn law enforcement officers employed by the state and local agencies that reported law enforcement employee data to the UCR in 2012. The annual national estimate of sworn officers per 1,000 U.S. residents ranged from 2.23 in 1992 to 2.51 in 2008 (table 1). ***Footnote 5 Counts provided from the UCR police employee data are based on a convenience sample of agencies that voluntarily reported to the FBI and do not represent a national sample. Agencies that reported no employees to the UCR were eliminated from the sample so their populations would not affect population-based officer rates***. The FBI estimates that the approximately 18,000 agencies that report annually to the UCR cover 98% of the U.S. population. ***Footnote 6 FBI. (2014). Summary of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. Crime in the United States, 2013. Available at: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in- the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/about-ucr/aboutucrmain_final. pdf***. In 2012, a total of 17,379 agencies, or 95% of the agencies that participated in the UCR Program that year (N = 18,290), reported at least one law enforcement employee. ***Footnote 7 FBI. (2013). FBI Releases 2012 Crime Statistics. Available at: http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/ fbi-releases-2012-crime-statistics***. In each year from 1992 through 2012, more than two-thirds of the agencies that reported employment data served jurisdictions with a population of less than 10,000 (table 2). The UCR Program does not impute missing law enforcement employee data. It eliminates duplicate entries and conducts data quality checks. Data are published on an annual basis approximately 1 year after the reference year through the Crime in the United States report. Public use data files are available within 18 months after the reference year. Files from 1998 are archived and available for download at the ICPSR. Data from all years are available upon request from the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, Crime Statistics Management Unit. ************************************************ Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll ************************************************ U.S. Census Bureau, Governments Division ******************************************* Since 1957, the Census Bureau’s Governments Division has conducted the ASPEP to measure the number of federal, state, and local civilian government employees and their gross monthly payroll for March of the survey year. The ASPEP collects employment information for the federal government and for state and local governments. The ASPEP tracks 28 defined government functions. ***Footnote 8 overnment functions include elementary and secondary education, higher education, police protection, fire protection, financial administration, central staff services, judicial and legal services, highways, public welfare, solid waste management, sewerage, parks and recreation, health, hospitals, water supply, electric power, gas supply, transit, natural resources, correction, libraries, air transportation, water transport and terminals, other education, state liquor stores, social insurance administration, and housing and community development. Three functions apply only to the federal government and have no counterpart at the state and local government levels: national defense and international relations, postal service, and space research and technology***. Of these functions, police protection provides the most complete information on law enforcement employees. Employees classified as police protection by the ASPEP conduct all activities concerned with the enforcement of law and order, including local police departments, sheriffs’ offices, state police, coroners’ offices, police training academies, investigation bureaus, and temporary holding or lockup facilities. ***Footnote 9 Temporary holding or lockup facilities typically detain individuals for no more than 72 hours and are not part of a larger correction facility that holds inmates for longer periods of time***. Information on employees who provide police protection is collected from payroll records for agencies that include general police, sheriff, state police, and other government departments that preserve law and order; protect persons and property from illegal acts; and work to prevent, control, investigate, and reduce crime. Police protection employee statistics do not provide information on special jurisdiction agencies such as park rangers or fish and game wardens, federal postal inspectors, campus police, and transit police; law enforcement employees of legal offices; traffic control and engineering performed by nonpolice agencies; police jails that hold people beyond arraignment; and civil or bailiff activities of sheriffs’ offices. The ASPEP provides information on all employees, full-time employees, full-time-equivalent employees, and total March payroll by government function. ***Footnote 10 Prior to 1996, the reference month was October***. Information about police protection employees is provided separately for police officers (i.e., employees who have the power of arrest) and other (i.e., nonsworn) employees. In 2012, the ASPEP reported a total of 687,657 sworn and 891,289 total police protection employees in the United States at a rate of 2.19 sworn officers per 1,000 U.S. residents. The number of sworn police protection employees ranged from a low of 516,418 in 1992 to 695,981 in 2009 (table 3). The ASPEP is completed annually by government agencies that handle payroll at the federal, state, and local levels. ***Footnote 11 The ASPEP was not conducted with state and local agencies in 1996, when the reference month for payroll was changed from October to March***. The survey collects information about employees in all federal and state jurisdictions in each survey year, and about employees in all local jurisdictions in years ending in 2 or 7. The ASPEP is distributed to a sample of local government jurisdictions in all other years. ***Footnote 12 Local government jurisdictional boundaries do not always coincide with the geography served by the law enforcement agencies. As a result, it is difficult to compare local ASPEP data to those collected by the CSLLEA or UCR law enforcement employee program data***. Data are collected on all civilian employees of all federal government agencies (except the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency), all agencies of the 50 state governments, and more than 90,000 local governments (including the District of Columbia), representing counties, municipalities, townships, special districts, and school districts. ***Footnote 13 Prior to 2005, the District of Columbia was included with state governments. Since 2005, the District of Columbia has been categorized as a local government***. In 2012, the federal government and all 50 states had ASPEP unit response rates of 100%, and the local government response rate was 81% (2012 was a census year for local governments). The Census Bureau imputes missing ASPEP data due to nonresponse. The imputation procedure relies on historical data from the same reporting agency or, if the agency’s data are not available, it uses data from a similar agency. Historical data are adjusted by current growth trends in government employment numbers and payroll to impute the missing information. The Census Bureau releases data from the ASPEP about 2 years after the reference year. A summary report, summary tables, online analysis, and downloadable data from 1992 (excluding 1996) are available for each level of government at http://www. census.gov/govs/apes/. Data prior to 1992 can be obtained by contacting the Census Bureau Outreach and Education Branch directly. **************************************************** Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies **************************************************** Bureau of Justice Statistics ****************************** In 1983, BJS awarded a grant to the University of Maryland to review existing law enforcement data collections, focusing on both the quality and the utility of the data. To assess the utility of the data, two user surveys were conducted: (1) a survey of 152 large police departments (i.e., those serving 100,000 persons or more) and (2) telephone interviews of police, researchers, and policymakers. The police department survey produced information about the availability and desirability of various data items, while the interviews revealed differences in the perceived utility of data items for the police as compared to researchers and policymakers. The final report recommended that BJS continue to develop a national-level data collection, and outlined eight steps toward this goal. ***Footnote 14 Uchida, C. D., Bridgeforth, C., & Wellford, C. F. (1984). Law Enforcement Statistics-- The State of the Art. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology. An initial sample survey, conducted in 1987, used the Directory Survey of Law Enforcement Agencies as a sampling frame and was identified as the first Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics Survey conducted by BJS. ***Footnote 15 Profile of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 1987 (NCJ 113949, BJS web, March 1989). See also Police Departments in Large Cities, 1987 (NCJ 119220, BJS web, August 1989)***. The basic structure of recurring BJS law enforcement data collections includes two parts. The CSLLEA is conducted about every 4 years and collects a limited and essential core set of measures regarding police agencies and provides an accurate sampling frame for the second part of the collection. A more detailed Sample Survey of Law Enforcement Agencies is conducted in years between the census years. ***Footnote 16 The sample survey is now part of BJS’s Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics series***. BJS has conducted the CSLLEA since 1992. CSLLEA surveys were administered in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008. ***Footnote 17 The 2014 Census of Federal, State, and Local Law Enforcement Agencies was in the field at the time of this report***. Data are used to measure the number and type of state and local law enforcement and special jurisdiction agencies in the United States, along with some characteristics of those agencies, including the number of sworn and nonsworn employees in each agency. CSLLEA agency employee data can be disaggregated by full-time or part-time status, sex, race or Hispanic origin, population served, and patrol assignments. The CSLLEA universe is made up of all state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States, including primary state police, sheriffs’ offices, local police departments, tribal police, special jurisdiction agencies, and other agencies. Federal agencies were excluded from the CSLLEA. In 2008, there were an estimated 461,063 sworn officers in local agencies, 182,979 in sheriffs’ offices, and 60,772 in state police agencies. Across all agency types, the CSLLEA reported 2.52 sworn officers per 1,000 U.S. residents in 2008 (table 4). BJS develops a roster of all state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States for each survey administration. The roster is developed from the previous survey administration list along with a thorough review of FBI lists, consultation with various police membership organizations, and lists provided by State Peace Officer Standards and Training offices and other state agencies. BJS realizes that this list may not be comprehensive because it is difficult to identify all small agencies. Surveys are then mailed or distributed electronically to all agencies on the roster (about 20,000 in 2008), with extensive nonresponse follow-up. Responding agencies are screened for eligibility to be included in the final CSLLEA database. Agencies are determined to be ineligible if they (1) employ only part-time officers and the total combined hours of those officers average less than 35 hours a week, (2) contract or outsource to another agency for the performance of all services, (3) are private i.e., they do not operate with funds from a state, local, or special district, or a tribal government), (4) have officers that are unpaid volunteers only, or (5) were not fully operational at the time of the survey administration. Some agencies in the CSLLEA universe are not included in the UCR law enforcement employee data. Since the CSLLEA was first administered in 1992, about 18,000 responding agencies met these inclusion criteria, ranging from 17,358 agencies in 1992 to 18,769 agencies in 1996 (table 5). CSLLEA data are reported voluntarily, and unit response rates have historically been close to 100% due to a number of nonresponse follow-up efforts. Data quality checks are performed by survey staff, and item nonresponses for critical measures are replaced with agency data from the previous survey administration and flagged as such. BJS releases information from the CSLLEA through several agency publications and downloadable datasets. BJS bulletins present summary findings from each CSLLEA administration, and periodic special reports based on CSLLEA data provide information on topics such as tribal law enforcement. Data are available at the agency level and can be aggregated to the city, county, state, and national levels. Data are available from ICPSR and are released about 2 to 3 years after the reference year. ****************************** Comparing the three sources ****************************** The three national sources of law enforcement employment data have a number of similarities, but also differ in coverage, timing, and level of detail (figure 1). For example, the CSLLEA is generally conducted every 4 years, while the ASPEP and UCR data are available annually. The ASPEP is the only source for comparing the number of employees and payroll of those serving in police protection functions to other government employee functions. These and other differences may indicate that one source has more advantages than others for certain research or policy purposes. Each source relies on voluntary reporting from government agencies. The FBI follows up with the largest nonresponding agencies to encourage them to provide complete data. In 2012, 95% of the state and local law enforcement agencies that participated in the UCR reported at least one law enforcement employee. Although the FBI conducts data quality checks and follow-up, it does not adjust for missing data. The CSLLEA has a high local agency response rate (100% in 2008), likely due to the extensive nonresponse follow-up procedures. The ASPEP has a 100% response rate at the state and federal levels, and about an 80% response rate for local jurisdictions. The ASPEP imputes data missing due to agency nonresponse, while the CSLLEA imputes missing information due to unit nonresponse and item nonresponse for critical categories. All UCR and CSLLEA program data are reported voluntarily; therefore, coverage may vary from year to year, although the extent to which the programs cover all law enforcement agencies in the United States is unknown. An estimate of the extent to which the law enforcement employment data from the UCR and CSLLEA include information from all eligible law enforcement agencies in the United States is needed; however, a comprehensive and current roster of all law enforcement agencies in the United States is currently unavailable. Each source provides information on sworn officers or those with general arrest powers who carry a firearm, although the sources differ in how they categorize sworn employees. Unlike the UCR and CSLLEA, the ASPEP excludes sworn officers who are employed by transit police or school police agencies and instead categorizes these employees with arrest powers under other government functions. UCR data are limited to employees of agencies that primarily have law enforcement functions. UCR data exclude officers employed by agencies that serve court- and jail-related functions, while these officers are included in CSLLEA data. There are also differences in how each source defines nonsworn or civilian law enforcement employees. The ASPEP definition of police protection employees other than police (sworn) officers includes employees working for agencies that may not employ any sworn officers, such as coroners’ offices. The UCR and CSLLEA define nonsworn employees as those who work for agencies that primarily conduct law enforcement functions. The ASPEP provides a national source of information on federal law enforcement employees, while the CSLLEA and UCR include state and local law enforcement agencies only. BJS conducted a separate collection, the Census of Federal Law Enforcement Officers, every 2 years between 1996 and 2008, and it was discontinued after the 2008 administration. Measures of federal law enforcement employees are now included in the 2014 CSLLEA, which was in the field at the time of this report. These data are similar to the ASPEP coverage of federal law enforcement in that they include supervisory and nonsupervisory personnel with federal arrest authority who were also authorized to carry firearms while on duty. Both the ASPEP and BJS definitions of federal law enforcement employees exclude U.S. Armed Forces agencies and the Central Intelligence Agency. Agency-level data are only available from the UCR and CSLLEA. Although the ASPEP data are collected at the local level, information on police protection employees is not available for individual law enforcement agencies that serve local jurisdictions. The ASPEP provides information about the number of police protection employees in a specific local jurisdiction but does not allocate those employees to the multiple law enforcement agencies that may have jurisdiction in that locality. The CSLLEA provides additional information on agency functions and other agency characteristics, including employee functions and assignment types. It provides detailed information on patrol assignments, with measures related to patrol capacity (e.g., uniformed officers with regularly assigned duties that include responding to citizen calls for services, community policing officers, or school resource officers) and patrol operational area (e.g., law enforcement duties only, jail-related duties only, court-related duties only, other single operational area, or multiple operational areas that include or exclude law enforcement duties). Compared to the UCR and ASPEP data collections, the CSLLEA may provide a more complete frame for enumerating all agencies with sworn law enforcement officers because it relies on multiple sources, including the UCR, to compile a list of agencies to survey in each CSLLEA administration. Specific data elements collected during the survey administration are analyzed to determine if those agencies meet the CSLLEA definition of a law enforcement agency. The CSLLEA may also offer more complete agency-level data for small agencies. It includes more agencies that report at least one full-time sworn employee compared to the UCR, although the gap decreased from 3,474 agencies in 1996 to 917 agencies in 2008. The number of agencies is different because the CSLLEA captures more agencies with one employee (table 6 and table 7). Differences in how the three sources defined sworn law enforcement employees and in the number and type of agencies reporting to each source likely drove differences in the number and rate of sworn law enforcement officers that each reported. The CSLLEA and UCR consistently reported more full-time sworn officers than the ASPEP; however, all three sources followed similar trends over the time period studied. The rate of officers per 1,000 U.S. residents increased in the early 1990s, but has remained relatively consistent since 2000 at about 2.5 officers per 1,000 U.S. residents according to the UCR and CSLLEA data, and at 2.25 per 1,000 according to the ASPEP. The 2012 ASPEP and UCR data show a decrease in the number of sworn officers per 1,000 U.S. residents, compared to 2011 (table 8, figure 2). Differences across sources are also evident at the state level. In 2008, estimates derived from the convenience sample of agencies that reported police employee data to the UCR indicated that most states (26) reported fewer than 2.25 sworn officers per 1,000 U.S. residents (figures 3, 4, and 5). ***Footnote 18 State rates were calculated by dividing the total number of sworn officers reported to each data source by the total state population for a given year, multiplied by 1,000. State population estimates were retrieved from the Census Bureau’s State Intercensal Estimates for 1992 to 2012 (July 1 estimates), available at http://www.census.gov/popest/data/intercensal/. Because reporting to the UCR is voluntary and information on the number of sworn officers is based on a convenience sample of the agencies that reported, the number and rate of sworn officers presented here are likely to be lower than the true number and rate of officers nationally***. According to all three sources, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey, and New York each reported more than 2.75 sworn officers per 1,000 U.S. residents in 2008. In addition, 10 states have a rate of 2.0 officers or fewer per 1,000 U.S. residents: Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia. Nationally, the rate of officers per 1,000 U.S. residents was similar according to the CSLLEA and UCR, and slightly lower according to the ASPEP. However, in 2008 the ASPEP sworn officer rates for Arizona (2.5) and Massachusetts (3.3) were higher than the state rates reported by the CSLLEA (2.3 in Arizona and 2.8 in Massachusetts) and the UCR (2.1 in Arizona and 2.7 in Massachusetts). Differences across the three sources were most pronounced in Delaware (from 2.0 in the ASPEP to 3.3 in the UCR), the District of Columbia (from 5.3 in the ASPEP to 8.7 in the UCR), and Georgia (from 2.2 in the ASPEP to 4.0 in the UCR). ************** Conclusion ************** The CSLLEA likely captures more comprehensive information on the number of law enforcement officers employed by small agencies and appears to have the most complete coverage of agencies and the most complete data, with a typical 100% response rate. It is also likely to provide the most complete information on agencies serving specialized functions or jurisdictions because these agencies are excluded from the ASPEP police protection function and may be less likely to participate in the UCR. UCR data may be best suited to compare the number of law enforcement officers to reported crime rates because this is the only source that collects both types of information directly from participating agencies. However, UCR coverage may be limited because about 1,000 fewer agencies participated in the UCR than the CSLLEA in 2008. A comparison of CSLLEA and ASPEP data for local agencies only (excluding employees of state and special district agencies) shows that the CSLLEA captures a greater number of nonsworn officers employed by local law enforcement agencies (table 9). This difference is likely due to variations in scope between the two collections. The CSLLEA includes employees of all agencies with at least one full-time-equivalent sworn law enforcement officer, while the ASPEP police protection category excludes a number of agencies that would fall into the CSLLEA scope (e.g., special forces of nonpolice agencies such as park rangers, fish and game wardens, campus police, and transit police). Therefore, the CSLLEA may be better suited to examine the purpose and functions of nonsworn officers in law enforcement agencies. The percentages of total local employees who were sworn officers reported to the CSLLEA and ASPEP were similar in most states, with the ASPEP sworn percentage within 10 percentage points of the CSLLEA’s sworn percentage in 40 states and the District of Columbia. In the remaining 10 states, the ASPEP percentages of sworn local employees were within 15 percentage points of the CSLLEA sworn percentages. Due to different ASPEP and CSLLEA classifications, the reported number of nonsworn officers differed significantly between the two collections in states in which local sheriffs’ offices had little law enforcement functions. Some states relied on sheriffs’ offices to perform sworn law enforcement functions, while sheriff employees in other states were primarily responsible for nonsworn functions. Therefore, state-level differences in law enforcement organizations and functions should also be considered when determining which data source is best suited for various research purposes. The most complete law enforcement employment data source may vary across states, depending on the organizational structure and functions of law enforcement agencies in the state, whether the state’s reporting systems are compatible with the UCR, and how closely law enforcement agency definition by source aligns with the law enforcement structure in the state. As stated previously, the ASPEP’s ratio of sworn law enforcement officers to 1,000 U.S. residents in Massachusetts and Arizona were greater than in the other two collections. This was contrary to the national rate of sworn law enforcement officers, which found the ASPEP rate to be lower than those produced by the UCR and CSLLEA. Massachusetts and Arizona may have fewer specialized law enforcement agencies that were excluded from the ASPEP, such as school districts that employ police officers. UCR and CSLLEA data may be used in combination with other sources, such as the National Directory of Law Enforcement Agencies, to develop a comprehensive roster of law enforcement agencies in the United States. It has been difficult to develop and maintain this roster from one source alone because of-- * the voluntary nature of submitting data to the UCR along with reporting methods that resulted in one agency reporting for multiple agencies * the fact that ASPEP data were not maintained at the agency level * the 4-year interval between CSLLEA administrations, during which time a number of smaller agencies were likely to be created or subsumed under larger agencies * the need to develop and follow one common definition of what constitutes a law enforcement agency and a sworn law enforcement officer. To answer key policy and research questions, it is critical to have a national and regularly updated roster of law enforcement agencies in the United States. For example, the currently available data cannot be used to compare the number and functions of law enforcement officers to public safety and indicators of social and economic health. Also, there is currently no thorough accounting of the number and type of agencies that serve the same or overlapping jurisdictions. Such information could greatly inform research on the overlapping or supporting role of tribal and local police agencies, explore the extent to which concurrent jurisdictional responsibilities are outlined in agency policies or memoranda of understanding, and lead to a better understanding of the nature and extent of conflicts that may occur between state and local agencies with overlapping jurisdictions. ******************************************************** The Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice is the principal federal agency responsible for measuring crime, criminal victimization, criminal offenders, victims of crime, correlates of crime, and the operation of criminal and civil justice systems at the federal, state, tribal, and local levels. BJS collects, analyzes, and disseminates reliable and valid statistics on crime and justice systems in the United States, supports improvements to state and local criminal justice information systems, and participates with national and international organizations to develop and recommend national standards for justice statistics. Jeri M. Mulrow is acting director. This report was written by Duren Banks and Joshua Hendrix of RTI International, Matthew Hickman of Seattle University, and Tracey Kyckelhahn of the United States Sentencing Commission. RTI International verified the report. Irene Cooperman and Jill Thomas edited the report. Barbara Quinn and Tina Dorsey produced the report. April 2016, NCJ 249681 ******************************************************** ************************************************* Office of Justice Programs Innovation * Partnerships * Safer Neighborhoods www.ojp.usdoj.gov ************************************************* ************************ 4/5/2016 11:10 am JER ************************