| City | Population | Police | Fire | Police + fire | Officers / 1k | Share | 1967 to 2024 | Flags |
|---|
Not the general-fund figure from the budget speech. Every share here divides by a denominator defined the same way in every city, from the Census Bureau's record of what each government spent. Pick the denominator, then compare. The police and fire figures are not perfectly uniform: checked against 29 cities’ own budgets they typically agree within 7%, so a 25% share is good to about two points, and a few cities are off by far more. Treat differences of a few points as noise.
| City | Population | Police | Fire | Police + fire | Officers / 1k | Share | 1967 to 2024 | Flags |
|---|
Budget messages quote police and fire as a share of the general fund: about 70% in Phoenix and Houston, 46% in Chicago, 32% in Seattle. The same dollars are 30%, 28%, 20% and 16% of each city’s general expenditure. Both are true. Only the Census denominator means the same thing in every city, because each city decides what lives in its general fund.
By rule, Census counts a city’s payments into a pension plan run by another body as police or fire spending and leaves out payments into a fund the city runs itself. In practice the treatment does not follow from who runs the fund. Philadelphia ($1,317M with pensions, $775M without, $784M here), Nashville, Seattle and Baltimore land below their own department lines; San Diego, San Jose and Memphis run their own funds too and match within 5%. Los Angeles lands 1.77 times its department appropriation because centrally budgeted benefits are allocated to police. Compare against the spot-check table, not a rule.
Code 62 is the municipal police department and nothing else. County sheriffs and constables sit under the county; transit police under transit (Houston METRO, New York’s MTA, BART); port, airport and school-district police under those functions. A city that buys policing from the county (Las Vegas, Lancaster CA) shows almost nothing under code 62 at all. The Fiscally Standardized basis adds a share of the county; nothing adds the rest.
Sixteen cities show no fire spending because an independent fire district or county agency levies and spends it: Irvine, Lakewood CO, Port St. Lucie, Elk Grove and others. Their police-plus-fire share understates what residents pay; the Fiscally Standardized basis adds the district back.
When a city does not answer the survey, Census fills the line from its history and peers. In 2022 that includes Austin, Indianapolis, Akron, Dayton, Knoxville, Pueblo and about a third of the large Texas cities, 39 cities in all. Those rows carry the flag on every year they were estimated.
Constant dollars use the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U. A city’s Census fiscal year ends between July of one year and June of the next, so each year is deflated by the calendar year its midpoint falls in. Spending per resident divides by residents only, which flatters cities whose daytime population is far larger (downtown and tourist hubs such as Atlanta, St. Louis, Orlando).
Census year 2022 is the fiscal year ending between July 2021 and June 2022. Cities that close on 30 June (New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Philadelphia) line up with it. Cities that close in the autumn or on 31 December (Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, Chicago, Denver, Seattle) report here what they call FY2021.