Overall Data Count

There is data on 1,561 counties (there are about 3,143 in total), 2,918 municipalities (there were about 19,522 in 2012), 2,961 special districts (of about 37K), and 540 townships (of about 16K total). However, the data seems to cover all of the larger counties/munciipalities so if we are looking at the top 200/300 it shouldn’t be a problem at all.

## # A tibble: 6 × 2
##   lvl_govt                        n
##   <chr>                       <int>
## 1 County                       1561
## 2 Independent School District  3366
## 3 Municipality                 2918
## 4 Special District             2961
## 5 State                          50
## 6 Township                      540

Flags

Still looking into this, but it seems like for the functions we care about, none of the flags are problematic. Flags C, K, R, T, U, V and Z denote that the value is from reported data, and flags A, B, D, G, J, P, Q and X denote that the value was imputed.

## # A tibble: 8 × 2
##   fte_flag     n
##   <chr>    <int>
## 1 C         1635
## 2 G         5275
## 3 P           39
## 4 Q          135
## 5 R        16977
## 6 T         1013
## 7 V            1
## 8 X          195

How Significant are Police and Firefighters as % of Payroll in Cities?

How Does Average Pay of Police/Firefighters Compare to Avg City FTE?

Note that payroll is reported as a 31-day monthly equivalent values for the month of March. Annual pay here was crudely estimated as 12 * Payroll / # FTEs.

Police and Firefighters Per Capita in Top 200 Cities