Police stations — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a police station. There are more than 155,000 worldwide. The size of a dot represents the footprint of the building, and there is only one colour. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as which force runs it and its website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every station here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national register of police stations.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `amenity=police`. Because we match the tag exactly, a feature tagged as a police station and a fire station together is missed, though that way of tagging is uncommon.

Colour

There is one colour, and that is a decision rather than something we forgot. The useful division would be by force: national, regional, municipal or military. OpenStreetMap has a tag for it, but under 3% of stations record it, and most of the values mean something in only one country. A legend built on that would describe a fortieth of the map, and it would mostly be a legend about two or three countries. Size represents the building instead, and the force is in the panel when you click, where it can be exact for the stations that record it without implying anything about the ones that don't.

The biggest dots are not stations

At the top of the size range are training academies and patrol territories rather than 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 over the building it is run from. The largest feature covers more than ten square kilometres. We cap the size scale 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.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the station in square metres. Only about 45% of stations are drawn as an outline, so for more than half of this map the size of a dot is not telling you how large the station is. Those are drawn at one nominal size instead. A police station is often 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. Among the stations that do have a shape, the typical one covers about 570 m². That share also runs large, because the stations with an outline of their own are more often the standalone compounds.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a station there, not that a place has no policing. Mapping is more complete in North America, Australia, Japan and western Europe than in west Africa or central Asia. Countries also organise policing differently, and a country with a neighbourhood post on many streets genuinely has far more separate stations than one working from a smaller number of larger buildings.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A station shown here may have closed, and a closed station often keeps its building for years.

Source and licence

Back to the map