Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS), 2013 (ICPSR 36164)

Version Date: Sep 22, 2015

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Principal Investigator(s):
United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics

Series:

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36164.v2

Version V2

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Alternate Title

LEMAS

Summary

The Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey collects data from a nationally representative sample of state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States. Although the data collection instrument (see page 150 of the codebook) uses the year 2012 for the title, most questions have a reference date of January 1, 2013. For this reason, the study title uses the year 2013. The 2013 LEMAS sample design called for the survey questionnaire to be sent to 3,336 general purpose state and local law enforcement agencies including 2,353 local police departments, 933 sheriffs' offices, and the 50 primary state law enforcement agencies. The design called for all agencies employing 100 or sworn personnel to be included with certainty (self-representing) and for smaller agencies to be sampled from strata base on number of officers employed. A total of 26 local police departments were determined to be out-of-scope for the survey because they were closed, outsourced, or operating on a part-time basis. A total of 38 sheriffs' offices were excluded from the survey because they had no primary law enforcement jurisdiction. The final mailout total of 3,272 agencies included 2,327 local police departments, 895 sheriffs' offices, and the 50 state agencies.

Citation

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS), 2013. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2015-09-22. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36164.v2

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Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

states, cities, zip codes

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

2013

Date of Collection

2013
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Sample

The sampling frame used for the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) Survey was the 2008 BJS Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies(CSLLEA) (the most recent available). At the time of the 2008 CSLLEA, nearly all of the more than 12,000 police departments were operated at the sub-county level by individual municipal (85 percent) or township (13 percent) governments. The remainder were operated by tribal governments, multiple local governments (regional or joint departments), or county governments. Local police departments and sheriffs' offices are chosen for the LEMAS Survey using a stratified sample design based on number of sworn personnel. The original 2013 LEMAS sample included 3,336 state and local law enforcement agencies. It was designed to be representative of all general purpose state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States, with separate samples drawn of local police departments and sheriffs' offices. All 50 primary state law enforcement agencies (state police and highway patrol) were included. Agencies serving special jurisdictions (such as schools, airports, or parks), or with special enforcement responsibilities (such as conservation laws or alcohol laws), were considered out of scope for the survey. The 2013 LEMAS sample design called for 2,353 local police departments, divided into 7 strata based on number of sworn officers employed, to receive the survey. During the initial contact phase, it was determined that 26 of these departments had closed since the 2008 CSLLEA and were dropped from the sample. Of the remaining 2,327 departments, the sample design called for all 659 departments employing 100 or more full-time sworn personnel to be self-representing (SR) and receive the survey. It was later determined that 29 of these SR departments did not receive the survey because of inaccurate contact information.

Time Method

Cross-sectional

Universe

Publicly funded state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States in 2013.

Unit(s) of Observation

agency

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

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Original Release Date

2015-07-06

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS), 2013. ICPSR36164-v2. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2015-09-22. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36164.v2

2015-09-22 2015-08-13 The paragraph on imputation methods is removed from the codebook since the methods were used only for the BJS report and no imputed values are included in the data file.

2015-07-13 A note is added to the codebook on survey items H5 and H6.

2015-07-06 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Standardized missing values.
  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
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Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.