Research
343,758 police cars
In 2013 the federal government counted every vehicle operated by every local police department in America — and asked what was inside them. The answers overturn most assumptions about what a typical police car is.
We argue about police cars using the ones we can picture: the LAPD black-and-white, the state trooper’s Charger, the unmarked Crown Victoria. All of them real, none of them typical.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics counted the actual fleet. Across 12,326 local police departments employing 477,317 sworn officers, it tallied every four-wheeled vehicle and then asked what technology was fitted to them.
The first thing the numbers establish is that the typical American police department is nothing like the one in your head.
Most police departments are very small
| Population served | Departments | Share of departments | Share of officers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fewer than 2,500 | 4,815 | 39.1% | 3.4% |
| 2,500–9,999 | 3,873 | 31.4% | 9.2% |
| 10,000–24,999 | 1,986 | 16.1% | 12.5% |
| 1,000,000 or more | 16 | 0.1% | 21.7% |
Nearly four in ten American police departments serve fewer than 2,500 people, and between them they employ 3.4 percent of the officers. At the other end, sixteen departments employ more than a fifth of every local police officer in the country.
That shape explains a great deal about the market these cars were sold into. A manufacturer designing a patrol vehicle is selling to sixteen enormous customers and roughly twelve thousand very small ones — which is why the bid-piggybacking arrangements that let small agencies buy on a larger agency’s contract matter so much.
The fleet, counted
| Population served | Total vehicles | Per 100 officers | Marked per 100 | Unmarked per 100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All sizes | 343,758 | 72 | 46 | 25 |
| 1,000,000 or more | 51,106 | 49 | 29 | 20 |
| 100,000–249,999 | 48,484 | 83 | 49 | 34 |
| 2,500–9,999 | 35,860 | 73 | 54 | 19 |
| Fewer than 2,500 | 17,607 | 81 | 66 | 15 |
Three hundred and forty-three thousand cars — 220,779 marked and 122,979 unmarked. More than a third of the American local police fleet carries no markings at all.
And the rate runs opposite to intuition. The biggest cities operate the fewest vehicles per officer — 49 per 100 — while departments serving fewer than 2,500 people run 81 per 100, of which 66 are marked. A small department has nearly a car for every officer and almost all of them are liveried; a big-city department shares cars across shifts and runs a far higher unmarked proportion.
The image of the marked patrol car belongs to small-town America. The big cities run fewer cars, harder, and a fifth of their fleet is unmarked.
What else they operate
| Vehicle | All departments | Serving 1m+ | Serving under 2,500 |
|---|---|---|---|
| All-terrain vehicles | 21% | 79% | 15% |
| Motorcycles | 16% | 100% | 1% |
| Boats | 7% | 86% | 2% |
| Helicopters | 1% | 100% | 0% |
| Aeroplanes | <0.5% | 29% | 0% |
Every single department serving a million or more people operated both motorcycles and helicopters. Among departments serving fewer than 2,500, one percent had a motorcycle and none had a helicopter.
Which is worth holding against the Michigan tests, where motorcycles have been evaluated every year since 2007 with the same rigour as the cars. That programme serves the sixteen departments and the handful of state agencies. For eighty-four percent of American police departments, the motorcycle results describe a machine they will never buy.
When the technology actually arrived
This is the part that settles arguments, because the survey has been running since 1987 and the comparisons are like-for-like.
| 2000 | 2007 | 2013 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-car video cameras | 37% | 61% | 68% |
| Conducted energy weapons (Tasers) | 7% | 60% | 81% |
| Electronic incident reports from the field | under a third | — | 68% |
| Officers with in-field access to vehicle records | 67% | 86% | 93% |
| Officers with in-field access to criminal histories | 29% | 56% | 75% |
| Officers under a mandatory body armour policy | 25% in 1990 · 67% in 2007 | 82% | |
The Taser line is the steepest curve in the report: 7 percent of departments in 2000, 81 percent in 2013. Around ten thousand departments adopted it inside thirteen years.
In-car video is the one that matters for the cars themselves. It was already in 37 percent of departments by 2000, and by 2013 it was in about 8,400 departments employing 73 percent of all officers. If you are restoring a patrol car from the 2000s and wondering whether the camera mount is period-correct — more likely than not, yes.
2013 was also the first year the survey asked about body-worn cameras. The answer was 32 percent of departments, employing 24 percent of officers. That is the baseline everything since is measured from.
And the detail that dates the era precisely: in 2013, 25 percent of departments still transmitted incident reports on paper, and 7 percent did it by voice.
The equipment that never reached most cars
Two technologies show how unevenly this arrived.
Automated licence plate readers were used by 17 percent of departments — about one in six — but by more than three-quarters of departments serving 100,000 or more.
Gunshot detection systems were used by 4 percent overall, and by 50 percent of departments serving a million or more. In departments serving fewer than 2,500 people, one percent.
By 2013 an American police car was either a computer with a camera in it, or a Crown Victoria with a radio — depending almost entirely on the size of the town it was in.
Why this belongs in a police car archive
Because it is the only document here that describes the whole fleet rather than the interesting end of it.
Michigan tests the vehicles the largest agencies buy. The federal prototype programme was designed around what big-city patrol needed. Even the 1973 economics study drew its sample from twenty-nine cities.
This report counts the four thousand eight hundred departments serving fewer than 2,500 people, whose cars are overwhelmingly marked, who run more vehicles per officer than New York does, and who mostly had no plate reader, no gunshot detection and — four out of five of them — no motorcycle.
Those departments bought a very large number of police cars. Most surviving American patrol cars came from one of them.