THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 8, 1996 TAG: 9604080079
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
Today's police officers are better educated, armed with more sophisticated weapons and more likely to be wearing body armor, the Justice Department said Sunday.
But they're only slightly more likely to be black, Hispanic or female, according to the report.
As of June 30, 1993, 12 percent of all local police departments required officer recruits to have at least some college education, double the rate for 1990, said the report, a statistical portrait of the more than 12,000 county and city police departments in the United States.
Eight percent had a degree requirement, and 1 percent required a four-year degree.
Eighty-four percent authorized field officers to use semiautomatic handguns in 1993, up from 73 percent in 1990.
A third required their field officers to wear body armor while on duty. Nearly half of those agencies protected areas with populations of 1 million or more.
``Departments with such a requirement employed 41 percent of all local police officers in 1993, compared to 32 percent in 1990,'' the report said.
Figures from 1993 were the latest available for the analysis, the Justice Department said.
Data were collected from a representative national sample of 3,000 departments.
Increases in the numbers of minorities and female officers ranged from less than 1 percentage point to 2 percentage points over figures for 1987.
In 1993, blacks accounted for 11.3 percent of the 373,550 full-time sworn officers in city and county law enforcement agencies, compared with 10.5 percent in 1990 and 9.3 percent in 1987, the report said.
Hispanic officers accounted for 6.2 percent in 1993, up from 5.2 percent in 1990 and 4.5 percent in 1987. And women comprised 8.8 percent of local police officers in 1993. About 8.1 percent were women in 1990 and 7.6 percent in 1987.
Altogether, the law enforcement agencies employed an estimated 474,072 full-time employees, up 3 percent from 1990. More than 373,550 were sworn officers.
About 230,000 were uniformed officers ``whose regularly assigned duties included responding to service calls,'' the report said.
Eighty percent of U.S. residents were served by a local police department. Local law enforcement agencies provided 21 full-time police officers for every 10,000 residents in 1993, the report said. The rest relied on sheriff's deputies or state police.
``The average number of training hours required of new local police officer recruits in 1993 ranged from 1,100 hours in departments serving a population of 100,000 or more, to under 500 in those serving fewer than 2,500 residents,'' the report said.
Almost all departments authorized the use of one or more types of nonlethal weapons. Three-quarters allowed the use of chemical agents, and the most popular among them was pepper spray.
Two-thirds used computers - up from one-half in 1990 - for such duties as record keeping, budgeting, manpower allocation and keeping track of arrests, traffic citations, stolen property, warrants and criminal histories.
Police department operating budgets totaled $24.3 billion in 1993, 6 percent more than 1990's figure after adjusting for inflation. by CNB