3 ms·

But how many do they have per square mile?

• harryh 13y ago
  35k officers / 468 square miles ~= 75 officers per square mile.
  • Glyptodon 13y ago
    Just as a comparison, Albuquerque has ~8 police per sq. mile, and Tucson has ~4.5 police per sq. mile. However, New York has ~27000 people/sq. mile, while Tucson has ~2800 and Albuquerque about ~3000. So NY has about ~9x the population density, but ~12x the police. Now what I'm also curious about - would you expect high population density to increase or decrease the number of police needed per capita? Off hand, I would be inclined to think lower population density would need higher police per capita, but here it seems to be the reverse (possibly reflecting the coffers rather than the needs, though).
    • arg01 13y ago
      I also have your intuition but after thinking about a couple of the police's jobs I do understand how it could easily go the other way. You have the somewhat obvious want of a visible police officer ranging an area to deter criminal activity such as shoplifting/vandalism/mugging. But you also want the police in an area to deal with domestic dispute type crimes which you'd expect to increase at least linearly with density, possibly more so as the closer you are to your neighbors the more you may see them and the more their behavior may impact you. Which may mean that you need several more cops to respond to concurrent incidents even if the average rate of incidents is lower than what a single cop could deal with. That's without getting in to any other issues such as bureaucracy needs/wants of larger departments. Or the odds of more dense areas being more culturally diverse/allowing higher differentials in income against distance. So after that I think it would be quite hard to judge what would be required.