Police Spending In Comparable Towns

When discussing Police budgets, it’s informative to understand how Arlington’s budget - and staffing level of officers - compares to other municipalities.

Police Spending Per Capita

Approximate police budgets per capita and as a %age of total budget for Arlington versus comparable towns. For notes on how budget data is calculated, see the Comparable Town Budgets note. This comparison shows both the raw spending in the Schedule A budget for police departments by capita (total residents of a town), and as a percentage of the total town budget. The green line is Arlington’s level.

Police Spending Per Capita

Police Spending As %age Of Total Budget

Police Staffing Per Capita

While not all comparable towns post detailed police staffing numbers, we have gathered approximate staffing levels for most towns. These are sourced from annual reports or budget documents from either the most reecnt posted year or a year earlier. Similarly, not all towns use the same exact categories for “patrol officers” versus other officers, so this is not a strict apples-to-apples comparison. Nonetheless, this is a useful way to compare staffing levels. The green line is Arlington’s number of total police department FTE staff per 1,000 residents.

Data Sources

Download this data as a CSV spreadsheet, or see the specific data sources (page numbers within annual reports or budget documents) in the policing data catalog.