GlossaryCrime reporting systems
Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics
LEMAS is a federal survey of law-enforcement agencies. Learn what its staffing and policy measures describe and how they differ from crime statistics.
Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) is a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey program about the organization, staffing, policies, resources, and practices of law-enforcement agencies. It describes agencies and their operations. It is not an incident log, a count of all crimes, or a live measure of today's staffing.
What the survey contributes
BJS's collection documentation explains that LEMAS is conducted periodically and includes a core survey and topic-specific supplements. The program uses a nationally representative sample; eligibility, sampling, and question coverage depend on the collection.
An agency response and a national estimate are different outputs. A response describes what a particular agency reported. A weighted estimate uses the survey design to represent a broader eligible population of agencies. A reader needs the accompanying methodology to know which one appears in a table.
Example
Hypothetical example: A LEMAS-based table estimates the percentage of eligible departments with a written policy as of a stated reference date. A resident's department is not individually listed.
The table can describe the estimated prevalence of that policy within the survey's scope. It does not establish whether the resident's own department had the policy, follows it consistently, or still uses the same policy today. Local policy documents answer those separate questions.
Common confusion
NIBRS collects information about reported offenses and associated records. LEMAS collects information about agencies. A staffing response cannot be substituted for a crime total, and a crime total does not describe the survey's organizational measures.
A sample is also different from a census of every eligible agency. Missing an agency from the visible responses does not automatically mean its jurisdiction is excluded from every national estimate.
Reading a release
Check the reference year, eligible agency types, sample design, response rate, weighting, and wording of the particular question. Keep survey estimates separate from budget authorizations and more recent personnel counts. A publication date can be years later than the conditions the survey describes.