Police stations — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a police station — a feature tagged `amenity=police` in OpenStreetMap. 157,805 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by the footprint of the building.

Click any feature to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — which force runs it, and its website. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every feature links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

Why this map has no colours

Everything here is one colour, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

The useful division would be by force: national, regional, municipal, military. OpenStreetMap has a tag for it — `police=*` — and it is recorded on under 3% of stations, with values that only mean anything in one country: `koban` in Japan, `carabinieri` in Italy, `gendarmerie` in France and its neighbours. A legend built on that would describe a fortieth of the map and would mostly be a legend about two countries.

So the map is sized by footprint instead, and the force is a row in the panel when you click a station — where it can be exact for the features that record it without implying anything about the ones that do not.

This is one of the most evenly spread maps on HueMaps

Counted crudely — features inside a country's boundary, per million people:

Japan — 111.8 per million, 13,924 in total
France — 91.9 per million, 6,270
Australia — 60.2 per million, 1,602
Germany — 46.5 per million, 3,872
United States — 42.2 per million, 14,165
Brazil — 36.3 per million, 7,845
United Kingdom — 27.6 per million, 1,866
Indonesia — 11.4 per million, 3,170
China — 5.5 per million, 7,757
India — 3.1 per million, 4,406
Nigeria — 1.3 per million, 279

Germany's rate is about 15 times India's. That is among the lowest ratios of any map on this site — most run into the hundreds — and it is worth saying plainly, because a reader might reasonably expect a map of policing to be a map of rich countries. It is not one: Japan leads, Brazil is ahead of the United Kingdom, and the spread across the whole table is narrow by the standards of everything else here.

Japan at the top is the kōban system: a neighbourhood police post, often a single room with two officers, is a normal fixture of a Japanese street in a way a police station is not elsewhere. The figure is measuring a genuinely different way of organising a police force, not better mapping.

Read these as evidence rather than proof. They are what has been mapped, not what exists, and a country with keen mappers will look better provided than one without.

More than half of this map is a point, not a shape

56.2% of the layer has no footprint at all. Only 69,127 of the 157,805 features are traced as an outline.

The size of a dot is therefore often not telling you how large the station is. Untraced features are drawn at one nominal size, set at the median of those that do have a shape. Where a feature genuinely is traced, its size is real.

That high share is itself informative: a police station is frequently a unit inside a town hall or a shared civic building, and a mapper marks a point rather than tracing an outline that belongs to something else. It also skews the traced ones large, since the stations with their own outline are disproportionately the standalone compounds.

The largest features are not stations

The top of this map by area is training academies and patrol territories, not buildings. An academy with a driving circuit and a firing range covers more ground than any city headquarters, and in some places a post is tagged over the whole territory it patrols rather than the building it occupies. The largest feature is 10,378,999 m² — a hundred and thirty times the 99th percentile of the layer.

The size scale is capped far below that so ordinary stations stay distinguishable from one another. A very large dot in open country is usually one of these rather than a police station.

One technical exclusion: the selection matches the tag exactly, so a feature tagged `amenity=police;fire_station` is missed. Multi-value tagging of this kind is uncommon.

The same stations are on the emergency services map

These are the police class of the emergency services map, which shows police, fire, ambulance and rescue together and colours them by which they are. Both maps ship on purpose: that one answers "what cover does this place have", and this one is for a reader who already knows they want police stations.

Naming

86.5% carry a name — the best-named of the four emergency services, and good by the standards of this site. Roughly one station in seven is an unnamed feature somebody marked, and clicking it will tell you little.

Mapped, not modelled

Each feature is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or a building they walked past. Nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no national register of police stations has been merged in.

Size

Each symbol is sized by the footprint of the feature, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to that (radius to its square root).

Among the traced features, the median footprint is 567 m², the 90th percentile 7,018 m² and the 99th 77,849 m².

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. A station shown here may have closed, and a closed station often keeps its building for years.

Source and licence

Back to the map