Just Released the Top 100 Police Departments in the United States
We have a top 10 or 50, or 100 list for just about everything, lists that rank everything from hospitals to best restaurants, pet adoption, day care, grocery stores, retail shops, salons, bars, local TV newscast, news anchor, the products we use daily, cities or states we plan to move to or visit, everything has a top list.
I searched high and low and couldn’t seem to find an all inclusive list of top rated police departments throughout the United States.
I even checked CALEA, where police departments can obtain accreditation and awards for excellence and could not find a list of the top 100 let alone top 50 police departments within the United States.
I started to wonder why?
I really want to know which police departments within the United States are ranked the highest to the lowest and why. What parameters were used to rank them and where they are.
So that I could better determine if we really have a cop issue or a citizen issue in the US or are these issues a lot more isolated than the media, the Black Lives Matter Movement and other groups make them out to be.
As I searched, I started seeing lists that were geared towards police work. They offered, helpful information such as, where I could find the best police department to work for, those that paid the highest wages, best cities to be a cop in and a top 10 of the most stable departments to work for.
To put it into perspective...
We are inundated daily with stories of police bias and brutality, officer involved shootings that were perceived as wrongful, stories about police misconduct and abuse at the hands of police.
When you take a step back and think about it, we do not take the time to appropriately or fairly praise or appreciate departments and the police who work in them for doing an outstanding job of serving the communities they work in.
We ignore the sacrifices these men and women make every working day and focus on the bad. It’s amazing how a handful of cops or departments can take the limelight from those that truly do shine brighter.
We tend to only see the the best of the best, the brightest lights once we are wearing the darkest pair of shades so do not truly see how bright the light is.
The only list I could find easily was a list that ranked the top 10 police forces in the world.
The police forces were ranked by things like resources and efficiency, public protection, how well they did at protecting vulnerable people, ability to tackle crime, implementation of neighborhood policing, fewest citizens beaten and/or shot, fairness, shots fired by the police on the force per year, and local priorities.
I’m sure I missed a few on the list that was used to rank Police Forces, but only two in the United States made the list made by infotainworld.
The California Highway Patrol and the NYPD were on the list, they were the only two departments from the US that made the list.
It is fair to say the those who created the list did not look nationwide here in the US at all of the departments within our country.
If they had, the list could have been a comprehensive study and a true comparative analysis of all police forces in the US the picture would have been different.
Sadly it still did very little to explain why no such list truly exists in the US. If it did, we’d get a much more clear idea of how widespread police misconduct really is.
The ability to have a list of top police departments in each county and state within the United States would show us that comparatively, all of the news stories about police misconduct really are just a handful of police and departments once you see the bigger picture.
The bigger picture being all of the departments, all of the police that we are not seeing splashed all over the news for getting it right.
That list would be crucial for those that are both for or against police reform. If you look at departments who do well, don't have issues, wouldn't you want to model your problem department after those that are being ranked much higher than yours?
Would it not help the Justice Department when it makes a recommendation that may or may not work for instance like in Oakland?
The issue that you have with the DOJ overseeing police reform is that they are not the cops on the street, they are not the departments that have a stellar track record within the communities they serve.
They simply cannot know how to tackle some of the problem departments and when they try, it costs the taxpayers way too much and the recommendations more often than not, end up failing in the long run.
In truth, at the end of the day instead of the DOJ running oversight and starting new programs so they can go in and help departments who feel they need help, these departments should be looking at the one’s who are doing it right.
The police and departments who are doing it right have already set the standard for how it should be done and the DOJ can’t top that let alone replicate it.
Cristal M Clark
