Using the Bureau of Justice Statistics: BJS Law Enforcement Statistics & Info

The Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) program is an annual national census of persons who died either during the process of arrest or while in the custody of state or local law enforcement personnel. The ARD program collects data on civilian deaths caused by any use of force by state or local law enforcement personnel as well as those not directly related to actions of law enforcement, such as deaths attributed to suicide, intoxication, accidental injury, and illness or natural causes.

Campus law enforcement officers patrol colleges and universities, providing a quicker response time to incidents on campus than local police, and offer campus-specific services not necessarily available from local policing organizations. Campus police forces can be comprised of sworn police officers, non-sworn security officers, or both. Campus law enforcement officers can have state, county, or city wide jurisdiction; others are limited to campus property. These findings are based on the 2011-12 survey of Campus Law Enforcement Agencies (CLEA).

Police and citizens often come into contact with each other for reasons other than criminal investigation. In addition to enforcing criminal law, police officers often engage in community service. Community service may include providing information and/or assistance to people in need, as well as offering youth education and coordinating community outreach efforts. In many communities, police officers network to establish partnerships between residents and the law enforcement agency. Community-oriented policing seeks to address the causes of crime and to reduce fear of social disorder through problem-solving strategies and police- community partnerships. Typically, it involves a greater use of foot and bicycle patrols and frequent meetings with community groups.

A federal law enforcement agency is an organizational unit, or subunit, of the federal government with the principle functions of prevention, detection, and investigation of crime and the apprehension of alleged offenders. Examples of federal law enforcement agencies include the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). BJS has surveyed federal law enforcement agencies seven times since 1993. The 2008 Census of Federal Law Enforcement Officers (FLEO) included agencies that employed full-time officers with federal arrest authority who were also authorized (but not necessarily required) to carry firearms while on duty. The officer counts exclude officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Transportation Security Administration’s Federal Air Marshals. Findings are based on the 2008 Census of Federal Law Enforcement Officers.

Forensic science can be simply defined as the application of science to the law. In criminal cases forensic scientists are often involved in the search for and examination of physical traces, which might be useful for establishing or excluding an association between someone suspected of committing a crime and the scene of the crime or victim. DNA evidence has become an increasingly powerful tool for solving both violent crimes and property crimes, such as homicide, sexual assault, and burglaries.

Presents findings on the basic training programs of more than 600 state and local law enforcement training academies, including data on program content, recruits, and instructors. Federal training academies and academies that provide only in-service training, corrections and detention training, or other special types of training were not included in these data. These findings are based on the 2013 Census of Law Enforcement Training Academies (CLETA).

The nature and extent of contact between police officers and residents varies by whether the contact was initiated by the police or by the resident. These contacts occur for many reasons: police provide services to community members; residents seek information or report crimes to police officers; residents are passengers or drivers during a traffic stop; police could stop residents in public places for suspicious behavior, make arrests, search residents, their vehicles or their homes, and officers could use or threaten use of physical force.

More than 3,000 sheriffs' offices operate across the United States. A sheriffs' office is a local law enforcement agency organized at the county level and directed by a sheriff, who is usually an elected official. Most sheriffs' offices perform a wide variety of law enforcement functions, including response to criminal incidents, response to calls for service, patrol, crime investigation, arrest of criminal suspects, execution of warrants, traffic enforcement, traffic direction and control, accident investigation, drug enforcement, and crime prevention.

Tribally operated law enforcement agencies provide a broad range of public safety services such as responding to calls for service, investigating crimes, enforcing traffic laws, executing arrest warrants, serving process, providing court security, and conducting search and rescue operations. Findings are based on the 2008 Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies.

The collection of law enforcement use of force statistics has been mandated as a responsibility of the Attorney General since the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Title XXI: State and Local Law Enforcement, Subtitle D: Police Pattern or Practice, Section 210402, states the responsibility of the Attorney General to collect data on excessive force.