Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NHNew Hampshire Had 229 Full-Time Sworn Officers per 100,000 Residents in the 2018 Federal Census of Police Agencies. The National Rate Was 241.
The state has trailed the national rate in every federal count since 1996, but the gap has narrowed: 46 officers per 100,000 residents in 2000, 12 in 2018. Four of every five New Hampshire officers in that census worked for a town or city police department, and those departments averaged about 13 full-time officers each.
Audio edition (9:03): a synthetic voice reads the article. The charts, tables and fact check are on this page.
In June 2018, New Hampshire’s state and local law enforcement agencies employed 3,096 full-time sworn officers, according to the Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. That came to 229 officers for every 100,000 residents. The figure for the whole country was 241.
The bureau has taken this census of every state and local police agency in the country six times, in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2018. As of October 2026, the 2018 count, released in October 2022, is the most recent the bureau has issued. In it, 25 states had a higher published rate of full-time sworn officers per resident than New Hampshire, and 24 had a lower one.
Five counts, one gap
New Hampshire’s full-time sworn workforce grew between each of the five federal counts from 1996 through 2018. The bureau counted 2,305 full-time sworn officers in the state in 1996, 2,542 in 2000, 2,805 in 2004, 2,936 in 2008 and 3,096 in 2018. That is 791 more officers over 22 years, a gain of 34 percent. From 2000 to 2018 the gain was 554 officers, or 22 percent.
Measured per resident, the state stayed below the national rate the whole time. What changed was the distance. In 2000 New Hampshire had 206 full-time sworn officers per 100,000 residents to the nation’s 252, a gap of 46. By 2008 the gap was 29. In 2018 it was 12, because New Hampshire’s rate rose to 229 while the national rate fell to 241. The 1996 report gave its rates per 10,000 residents rounded to whole numbers: 20 for New Hampshire and 25 for the country.
Full-Time Sworn Officers per 100,000 Residents
State and local law enforcement agencies, New Hampshire and the United States, by census year. Bars are drawn to scale.
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