Increasing the number of Police officers per capita in Albuquerque

This post was updated to correct some data errors that I created doing some intermediate calculations on the FBI Uniform Crime Data from 2010.  The conclusions remain largely the same.

As noted in the earlier and now deleted post, I got into a discussion last Sunday on the subject of the number of police officers per resident in the Albuquerque metro area. The Albuquerque Metro area includes the counties of Bernalillo, Sandoval, Valencia, and Torrance as well as the cities of Rio Rancho and Albuquerque and several smaller cities. The result, for the Albuquerque metro area is about 1.9 officers per thousand residents. Since this compares to 4.20 for New York City, I asked myself the question whether or not we had enough police in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County.

To answer this question, we need to look at the crime rates here and in similar cities including New York. Interestingly, looking only at the city data, there are cities with higher crime rates and more officers per capita than ours. It is only when one steps back and looks at the cities' metropolitan areas that the data has any correlation. Looking at the metro areas tends to filter the data, like the high city of Dallas murder rate, somewhat by looking at the relatively calmer suburbs. Let me say that there are some really scary cities out there, like Dallas, Newark, and Compton!

When we filter the data through the metro areas, there seems to be a strong relationship between number of police officers per capita and the murder and property crime rates as evidenced by the low scatter but week relationship between the  number of police officers per capita and the violent and murder crime rates. See the graph below:

This is not to say that adding police will make a city as safe as New York. Some cities are particularly hard hit with crime. The city of Dallas, for example, with 2.81 police officers per thousand has a murder rate that is many times that of New York. Newark, New Jersey, part of the New York City metropolitan area, has a murder rate several times higher than New York City and has more police per thousand than New York. There appear to be environmental factors and possibly leadership issues that affect the outcome. One thing is certain, accepting the status quo is not the solution to the problem.

Here are the data for the cities in question and for their metro areas.

Now, if you accept that we could use more officers, what would be reasonable? Going to the number per thousand in the New Your metro area might be nice but I am certain most of us would get sticker shock. Also, this is the old west, many people have more means to protect themselves here than in New York and that is a good thing. Still, looking at the numbers, the means available to Albuquerque citizens do not appear to be a significant force multiplier since the number of police per thousand is a little less than half of that in NYC and we have about double the crime rate.

I suggest that we take a near-term target of 3 officers per thousand. That would take us to 1,638 sworn officers in Albuquerque and 350 in the Bernalillo Sheriff's Department. Using the current Albuquerque budget with $163,105,000 in payroll for around 1,600 personnel, we would have to increase the spending to about $217,949,056 - say $220 million. This increase of $56.9 million would increase the City of Albuquerque budget 6.4%. So, the increase is not earth-shattering but it would be a shock. The Bernalillo County Sheriff's budget is $31.733 million currently for 350 personnel. To add 113 deputies, we would expect an increase of $10.25 million or 12.1% of the county budget.

Neither of these numbers account for any increase in capital expenditures associated with increasing the number of sworn officers so they are likely somewhat low. It appears that we would need to increase the city and county budgets by around 10% to increase the number of officers by 50%.

A worthy goal and a reasonable cost.