The Twenty-Sixth Police Officer

On Tuesday night, the Common Council unanimously approved transferring $25,420.76 from the General Fund to the Police Department Personal Services account "to cover the estimated shortage . . . caused by the hiring of a 26th Police Officer." This action was necessary because the salary and benefits for this officer, hired to replace an officer who had retired, had been inadvertently omitted from the 2014 city budget.

Being reminded that our tiny city of less than two square miles with a population of 6,684 has a police force of twenty-six officers raises the question of whether this is not an unusually high ratio of police officers to residents. A search for comparative data discovered a table on Governing.com that gives the number of police officers per capita in the one hundred largest cities in the United States. These are cities with populations in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, so the table gives the number of officers per 10,000 residents. By applying a little math, we get the number of officers per 6,684 residents--the population of Hudson. 

Our chart includes only the ten cities that have the highest ratio of police officers to residents. Of the ten, only seven have a higher number of police officers per capita than we do in Hudson. Based on the numbers alone, it does seem that Hudson has an unusually high ratio of police officers to residents, but the numbers alone provide insufficient basis for speculating about whether the number of police officers in Hudson is unnecessarily high or inappropriately high.
COPYRIGHT 2014 CAROLE OSTERINK