Here are some staggering facts about our Law Enforcement and the Thin Blue Line.

1. There are over 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. 

2. 80% of all law enforcement agencies have 25 or fewer sworn officers.

3. Over 1,000 of these have only one sworn officer.

4. US. Customs and Border Protection, with about 45,600 sworn officers, is the largest law enforcement agency in the United States. This includes the Border Patrol.

5. The New York City Police Department is No. 2, with about 34,000 sworn officers.

6. The next largest agencies vary in size and ranking, but usually include the FBI, the Chicago and Los Angeles Police Departments, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, and the California Highway Patrol. 

7. Roughly half of all line-of-duty law enforcement deaths are vehicle-related.

8. Half of those vehicle-related deaths are single-car patrol vehicle accidents.

9. The suicide rate for law enforcement officers is about 150% of that for the population at large.

10. Fewer than 1% of all law enforcement officers ever engage in any serious acts of misconduct.

11. Up until the 1980s, 50% of law enforcement officers who worked 20 years or more before retiring did not live through their first year of retirement. The numbers have improved since then.

12. Most law enforcement officers never fire their guns outside of the pistol range.

13. There are often over 100 applications filed for each law enforcement officer hired. For elite agencies such as the FBI, this can increase by a factor of ten or more. 

14. The federal Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act (LEOSA) permits active duty law enforcement officers to carry concealed weapons in every state and the District of Columbia. Prior to this, most officers could carry concealed weapons only in their home states. 

15. LEOSA also extends to honorably retired law enforcement officers with ten years or more of service who qualify with their weapons annually.

16. Actors and other celebrities who are or were full-time or volunteer (reserve) cops: Ken Osmond (Eddie Haskell from Leave It To Beaver), Bobby Sherman (60s pop star), Sonny Grosso, Eddie Egan, Dennis Farina, Ernie Hudson, Shaquille O'Neal. I don't count the people who were on Armed and Famous.

17. On their first day as a firearms-qualified police constable, a UK law enforcement officer has received more training in firearms than most U.S. police will receive during their entire careers.

18. The same is true of the driver training given to UK officers qualified to engage in vehicle pursuits.

19. Not all police badges have numbers. Some have the officer's name on them, while others have no visible unique markings at all.

20. There is no standard radio code system. Ten-codes ("10-4") and other brevity codes used on police radios differ radically from one part of the country to another. The trend is to abandon radio codes for "plain speech," where no codes are used.

Source: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts-about-the-police-and-law-enforcement


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