Police Department Budgets

Small Police Departments

Small agencies continue to face increasing budget cuts, but this negative can actually be seen as positive. Because of these budget cuts small agencies have had to work with what they have and adapt to their limited budget. They work with their communities by community policing, volunteers, etc. and this helps benefit the communities and the police.The article from the Bureau of Justice Assistance breaks down how small agencies typically use their budget, how they allocate funds, and how they distribute their budget to be more efficient with their funds.

• Article

• Video

Large Police Departments

Oakland County, which is a large police agency, has a huge budget every year but continues to overspend their budget by millions of dollars. This is due to police officers’ overtime but when looking closer at this problem they have noticed that this has started to spiral out of control.The website provides data from 2020 of all the police department budgets, percent the city budgets are spent on policing, city dollar per resident, and police officer ratio to resident ratio. When clicking on the different cities, it becomes apparent that the larger cities have larger budgets, and the rural cities have a far smaller one in comparison.

• Website

• Video

Where the Money Goes

This chart shows how police departments are spending their budgets and how much each category usually costs for them, so we can get a better idea of how effective their budget is.The website provides data from 2020 of all the police departments budgets; you can click on different cities and states to see how much their budget is.

• Website