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USA Police Stations
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Data Sources

Where every record comes from, how old it is, and what we change.

Three levels of trust

Every record on the site is in one of these groups, and its page says which.

  • Imported. Copied from a source listed below, with only capital letters fixed. We have not called the agency or visited the building.
  • Official portal. Published by the government that runs the station, on its open data portal.
  • Checked by us. A person confirmed the fact against the agency or an official website. The page shows the date and source.

We do not invent facts. When a source lacks a phone number or an address, the page says "Not listed".

States, counties, and cities

Names, codes, land areas, and populations come from the U.S. Census Bureau. Population figures are 2023 estimates. The city pages cover the largest places in each state, not every town.

Connecticut is listed by planning region, which is how the Census Bureau now publishes its county equivalents. County boundaries used to place a location in a county are simplified Census boundaries.

Agencies (23,043)

Agency listings come from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, taken in 2008. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security republished it as the HIFLD Local Law Enforcement Locations layer, with locations checked against imagery in 2018 and 2019.

What we do to it:

  • Leave out agencies marked closed or with an unknown status.
  • Change ALL CAPS names and addresses to normal capitalization. Nothing else is edited.
  • Place each agency under a county page when the source's county code matches one.

Limits: the survey is old, so some agencies have closed, moved, or changed phone numbers. Some agencies appear once per office. Staff counts are what the agency reported at the time.

Stations (6,022)

No complete national list of police stations exists, so stations come from two kinds of source.

Official portals. A few cities and states publish their own station lists. Where one exists, it wins over any other source.

OpenStreetMap. For the rest of the country we use OpenStreetMap, a map edited by volunteers. Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. We keep a station only if it has a name and at least a street address, a phone number, or a website. We drop jails, academies, checkpoints, training sites, and records marked as disused, and we drop duplicates. These pages say they are not official.

Limits: OpenStreetMap does not map every station, so coverage differs between states. A volunteer map can hold mistakes.

Distances, ZIP codes, and who polices an area

Distances are straight lines between coordinates, not driving distance. A ZIP code is a mail delivery area, so a ZIP search is placed at the average position of the agencies listed in it. A ZIP code with no listed agency cannot be looked up.

The who polices this area tool finds the county for a location, then lists sheriff's offices in that county and the closest city, state, and special agencies. It is a guide. It cannot say who has legal jurisdiction at an address.

How and when the data changes

We rebuild the data from these sources every few months and compare each build with the last one, so removed, added, and changed records are reviewed. The station data was last built September 2026.

Something wrong? Tell us and we will check it.

In an emergency, call 911. This site is a directory. It cannot send help or take reports.

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