Politics

NYPD America's Biggest and Baddest?

Mayor Bloomberg's boast of a "personal army" may not be far off with a police department larger than the FBI that's moonlighting as an intelligence agency in the region and the world

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The NYPD is the biggest police force in the country, with over 34,000 uniformed officers patrolling New York's streets, and 51,000 employees overall—more than the FBI. It has a proposed budget of $4.6 billion for 2013, a figure that represents almost 15 percent of the entire city's budget.

NYC's population is a little over 8 million. That means that there are 4.18 police officers per 1,000 people. By comparison, Los Angeles, the second largest city in the U.S. with 3.8 million people, has only 9,895 officers–a ratio of 2.6 police per 1,000 people.