Is Your State A Police State?

Vermont is also one of the most favorable gun law states with regards to the 2nd Amendment. This fact is somewhat puzzling given that the state is entirely democrat at this time with a socialist leaning. I would be concerned that going forward as they receive more influx from places like New York, that they may not remain so friendly with regards to the 2nd Amendment. One never knows though… They do have a very low population density though, and great farming lands.

Yes, another layer of depth analysis would be to include any and all Federal law enforcement agencies. If I am able to discover their numbers with regards to each state, I will add an additional post with this information. The data of this post includes all state, local, and sheriff law enforcement.

This post is simply a presentation of the facts regarding the total number of state, local, and sheriff law enforcement for each state. I took the raw data and created a map with graduated colors (and a bar chart) to visualize the data.

There are those who are interested to know this type of information, especially if considering a move, while this could be one of many criteria. One might consider that states with a high police-to-residency ratio, might be states that are more intrusive to individual liberties compared with states of low police-to-residency ratio. There are exceptions notion though, and one would need to consider other data and perform their own due-diligence to more accurately discover a state’s true ‘police state’ factor…

This data includes State police, Local police, and Sheriffs. It does not include whatever Federal law enforcement may be in your state (DHS, FBI, CIA, etc…)

If I throw out the data for Washington D.C. (which is ridiculously high) then the average is 355 law enforcement per 100K residents. Your reference to Texas is above the average at 395, which is #12 in the United States.

The data includes all state, local, and sheriff department law enforcement. Having said that, there are high concentrations within many larger cities, which would change the ‘landscape’ for the rest of the state somewhat with regard to the total data. I have not granulated to that detail, but the overall bigger picture of each state does shed some light on the general ‘police state’.

Jason, What you are not understanding is the concept of the shading on the map, or you have not taken the time to look at the data that is being used. It is really quite simple… Each state has “x” amount of law enforcement (State, Local, and Sheriffs dept.) Each state also has “x” amount of people living in it. The map simply illustrates the total number of law enforcement per the number of people living in the state. Period. That’s it. It is not “wrong” at all. The map is a “state” map of the United States. It does not resolve down to the county or city level. Therefore, it does not show the potential variations “within” each state with regards to police density.

The map does not take into account other factors that one might consider when speaking of a Police State, such as the politics of a given state and how it is applied towards the people through law enforcement, etc. It does not take into account whatever federal law enforcement agencies may be operating within a given state. It simply is a direct relationship between the number of law enforcement versus the number of people that live in the state. I hope I have helped make this clear for you or others who are apparently confused about this.

Your surprise about Wyoming also surprised me with their numbers. According to the U.S. Dept. of Justice they have 2,990 law enforcement personnel while they have approximately 550,000 residents in the state. This bears out to the approximate 560 law enforcement per 100,000 residents. At first I thought this might be due to Yellowstone, but that is a National Park which presumably employs federal law enforcement… interesting.

You mentioned California… You have approximately 126,538 law enforcement in your state, along with approximately 38,000,000 residents. This works out to approximately 333 law enforcement per 100,000 residents. The numbers don’t lie. No doubt though that if you compare what you see in Los Angeles or San Francisco to what you might see up in Weaverville, things will likely appear a bit differently…

You are correct regarding the consideration of land area per state, however the effects may not be quite as extreme as one might expect due to the generalization that most people live in the areas where most people live, generally speaking. Your example about Wyoming versus Vermont while considering land area would assume that all LEO’s would be spread out equally across the land. This is probably not entirely accurate because most LEO’s reside and patrol where the people are… The proper correlation is probably somewhere in between… maybe 70:30 leaning towards the population density equation IMO. But I get your point…