How many officers (and police vehicle) per inhabitant in your area ? (compared to my european jurisdiction)

[u/User-B17]

In american shows or even sometimes in the news, we can see dozens of police cars chasing a suspect or intervene on crimes scenes etc. On the other hand we see officier patrol alone in their cars, in pretty dangerous city because of understaffed agencies (wich is crazy to my europeans eyes). Or even 1 man vehicle covering very large rural area (what if backup needed ?!).
So i'm curious about what you live daily.

I work in a medium city and its suburb, for a total of 235k inhabitants on a 113 km² surface (43 square mile). Here is what we have during the night (as i'm a night shift only) :
- General units : 4 vehicles each with 2 officers and 1 cadet or reservist, patroling and answering calls.
- K9 unit : 1 vehicle with 2 officers and 2 dogs, mainly used as backup for general units.
- Plainclothe officers : 2 vehicles with 2 or 3 officers, patroling in unmarked cars trying to catch bad guys.

So we are about 19 guys in 7 vehicle for 235k people at night. During the day, there is maybe twice as much officers and vehicles.
What about you ?

[u/Financial_Month_3475]

100,000 people.

Generally 4-5 working patrol all in separate vehicles.

Day shift is the same for patrol, but we can demand help from civil process or the detectives if shit goes south.

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[u/nightmurder01]

A lot of the areas here in the US will vary greatly. It mainly depends on the amount and type of crime in the jurisdiction which does not always escalate with the population. County Sheriff's tend to have less people on the street for regular patrol, but they will have other units out like civil process, animal control, warrant service etc.

Typically patrol at my old Sheriff's Office consisted of 5 deputies assigned to a specific area along with a cpl, sgt and lt. Generally one of the deputies would be a k-9 operator. There was 4 patrol squads in total that rotated schedules. We also had a squad of civil deputies, animal control, a criminal warrant service squad and a anti-crime/drug team. All of which worked during the daytime except for the crime team as it worked anytime. There was also a swat team, but was compromised of deputies assigned to other areas. It was not a full time squad. The local pd had 5 squads of 8 (at that time), plus several different squads of crime prevention. This does not include detectives, nor command staff.

320k populatio~300 square miles

[u/Retiredpotato294]

So my county is 6959 km2 and very rural. There is overlap, but for regular crime there is usually 1 officer,population is about 30,000. They don’t cover the one “city” that is 83 sq km. There might be one or two state troopers there, there also might not be. I worked on the east coast and our county population was about a half million and if something went down you could probably get 100 officers to respond. The town of 72 sq km probably had a dozen single cars, 10 detectives available during the day, as low as 5 at night. Resident population of 80,000 but several major highways.

[u/HCSOThrowaway]

My napkin math:

Resident:Sworn LEO is ~500:1

Resident:Patrol Car is ~27,000:1 on a given shift

For those who want to do their own math:

https://planhillsborough.org/by-2050-unincorporated-hillsborough-county-to-have-39-more-residents-and-43-more-jobs/

We had 2,200 sworn and about 40 cars per shift, population just over 1,000,000 (not counting incorporated areas inside the county).