The number of police officers in New Hampshire – one of the safest states in the country – has grown by 20% over the last 20 years, nearly twice as fast as the population.
Over the same period of time, the number of law enforcement officers across the country increased by 9%.
These are two quick facts contained in the Monitor’s five-part series, “Counting Cops.” This information shouldn’t be a secret, but it isn’t easily available either. Information about staffing levels in departments around the state isn’t kept by any government agency or non-profit.
That’s why we collected it for you. With the help of the Granite State News Collaborative and investigative journalist Beryl Lipton, more than 200 Right-to-Know requests went out to every law enforcement agency in the state. Lead reporter Cassidy Jensen spent more than a year collecting the data and reporting on it.
The intention was to provide the public with a better understanding of how their police spending and strategies compare to their neighboring cities and towns. We found this information to be largely absent from discussions at the state and local level when considering police budgets, staffing and transparency.
Take Concord, for example.
A month after George Floyd’s death in 2020, the Concord City Council rejected public requests to decrease police funding and redirect some of that money to social support programs proven to reduce crime. Instead, councilors added an extra $1 million in unbudgeted increases to the department to boost officers’ pay.
A year later they added another $500,000 to the police department and this year they added two more police officers along with more increased funding. About 30% of all city taxes paid by Concord residents go to the police budget.
These moves begged many questions, like how many officers should a community have? Is there a standard across New Hampshire? How does Concord compare to other cities?
Among other things, the series found that police in Concord, Manchester and Nashua have consistently solved about half of serious crimes like murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault that were reported, even as police departments’ size and budgets have grown.
Published this month, Counting Cops, was meant to be a starting point – to offer missing information that allows for comparison between towns and cities and between law enforcement agencies that wasn’t possible before.
Access to government records is guaranteed by state law, but that didn’t stop many police departments from rejecting our requests or ignoring us entirely. In those cases, we used data that departments report to the FBI to gather staffing information.
Concord officials made records available and pointed us to some data kept on the city’s website. It revealed that the city’s police department has grown more than three times faster than the city’s population, increasing the number of officers in its ranks by 20% between 2000 and 2020, an overall trend seen around the state. Some departments shrank, others doubled in size.
Several departments were prompt and complete in their responses. The New Hampshire State Police, tallied staffing information in response to our request even though they said they didn’t have to do so. That was helpful. Most told us to look through old town reports and records kept online or at the state library.
Jensen went through thousands of pages of records and collected the information for 20 years of police growth by hand.
Gathering such baseline information shouldn’t be this hard.
Why look at the numbers of police? Staffing is the biggest driver to a department’s budget. The more officers are added, the bigger the spike in spending. Oftentimes, the desire to increase the number of officers had nothing to do with violent crime.
The series revealed that police often ask for more resources based on increases in calls for service or slight increases in population. They will ask for increases following a recent spate of crime even as overall violent crime is dropping in the state. Chiefs often cited the omnipresent opioid epidemic and the growing mental health crisis in the state as the need for more officers.
Police departments and politicians often use worst-case scenarios and fear to justify increases in spending and personnel.
Yet in a few cities – like Keene where the police force shrank in the past 20 years and in Portsmouth where growth was minimal – the departments were able to make due and crime rates did not go up.
An interesting takeaway was that chiefs and supporters of reform agree that police are being asked to respond to a growing number of substance abuse calls and particularly mental health calls, which doesn’t align with their training.
“If our only tools are handcuffs and a gun, how do you come up with ways to solve that problem?” said Londonderry Police Chief William Hart.
The next steps are up to you and your elected officials.
We hope this information proves useful when city budgets are discussed and around town meeting time.
We hope the series spurs meaningful conversations at the state and local level about how many police officers is the right number and what the state’s police force is being asked to do.
We hope the New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Council – through its pledge of openness and transparency – will collect and release police staffing information each year because it is in the public’s interest to do so.
That’s why the Monitor pursued this data and this series of stories in the first place.
A member of the Monitor’s reader advisory board reacted to the series this way: “I didn’t know that I wanted to know this information, but now that I’ve read about it, I’m grateful to understand it in more depth,” she said.
We hope you agree.