FAQ Listing

ICE is an acronym for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE is the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security. The agency is responsible for identifying and eliminating vulnerabilities in the nation’s border, and economic, transportation, and infrastructure security. ICE is organized into four major offices: Investigations, Intelligence, Detention and Removal Operations, and Federal Protective Service (FPS). The primary mission of ICE is to prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities.

In 2017, local (county, municipal, and township governments), spent $99 billion on police protection. Police protection expenditures were 6% of all local government direct general expenditures in 2017. In real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, local police protection spending per capita was $282.  

In 2017, there were 2,446,891 justice system employees in federal, state and local governments. There were 302,499 federal justice system employees, 68% (206,737) of whom worked in police protection.  Almost 58% of all justice system workers (1,411,983 people) were employed by local governments, 62% of whom worked in police protection. In addition, 30% (732,409) of all justice system employees worked for states, and 447,793 of these state employees worked in corrections functions. 

In 2018, about 70% of training academies had a minimum law enforcement experience requirement for full-time instructors. Among academies with a minimum experience requirement, the average was about 4 years. Overall, a quarter of training academies reported that full-time instructors must have a 2-year college degree or higher degree. In addition to law enforcement experience and education requirements, most academies required full-time instructors to have state or POST certification (86%), qualified subject matter expertise (67%), academy certification (57%), or some other certification (35%).

The average length of basic training for all state and local law enforcement academies in 2018 was 833 hours. Of all state and local academies, 83% reported that field training was mandatory for some or all recruits after they completed basic training. Of academies that oversaw field training, the average length of that training was 508 hours. In 2018, the highest average number of hours of instruction was dedicated to firearms skills (73 hours), followed by defensive tactics (61) and patrol procedures (52). Nearly all recruits were instructed in legal subjects in 2018, receiving about 51 hours of instruction in criminal and constitutional law, 26 hours in traffic law, and 11 hours in juvenile justice law.

According to the 2003 BJS Law Enforcement and Management Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, 5% of local police departments operated at least one boat. Most local police departments serving 250,000 or more residents had boats. About 1% of local police departments operated at least one helicopter. The majority of local police departments serving 250,000 or more residents had a helicopter. Less than 0.5% of local police departments operated at least one airplane. For more detailed information regarding helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, please see BJS Special Report Aviation Units in Large Law Enforcement Agencies, 2007.

LEMAS stands for Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics. The LEMAS survey is typically conducted every 3 to 4 years and collects data from over 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, including all those that employ 100 or more sworn officers and a nationally representative sample of smaller agencies. The first LEMAS survey was conducted in 1987. Data are obtained on the organization and administration of police departments and sheriffs' offices, including agency responsibilities, operating expenditures, job functions of sworn and civilian employees, officer salaries and special pay, demographic characteristics of officers, weapons and armor policies, education and training requirements, computers and information systems, video cameras, vehicles, special units, and community policing activities. Visit the LEMAS Series page and the LEMAS Data Collection section of our site to learn more.
 

Compared to jail facilities, prisons are longer-term facilities owned by a state or by the federal government. Prisons typically hold felons and persons with sentences of more than 1 year. However, sentence length may vary by state. Six states (i.e., Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Delaware, Alaska, and Hawaii) have an integrated correctional system that combines jails and prisons. There are a small number of private prisons, facilities that are run by private prison corporations whose services and beds are contracted out by state or federal governments. See the Terms & Definitions section.

You no longer have to order paper copies of BJS reports released prior to 1995. More than 450 BJS publications that were previously available only through postal mail are now accessible from the BJS website. To view a complete list of titles now available online, please view BJS Publications Prior to 1995. All BJS publications are free to download from the BJS website.

Many surveys have a specific margin of error because all of the questions are asked of every person. For example if you ask an opinion question all of the respondents in the sample, everyone can give an opinion. The margin of error is different for different crimes and different findings in NCVS because questions are asked only of people who are victims of those crimes. There is a large margin of error around statistically rare crimes, such as rape/sexual assault. The margin of error is smaller around crimes which occur more frequently, such as property theft. Within a crime category such as violent crime, the margin of error around specific characteristics such as hospitalization may be larger than that for overall violent crime, since the estimates are based only on violent crime victims who experienced that characteristic.