No major city police force in America employs more officers who live outside of city limits than the Miami Police Department. In fact, just 7 percent of officers in the 1,860-person police force actually live within Miami's city limits.
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The data comes from FiveThirtyEight, which points out that the average large-city police force employs about 60 percent of officers who live in the city. Miami was just one of four departments where the percentage was less than 10 percent.
Several cities have some sort of residency requirements. Though, often they come with loopholes, and in some cases officers are allowed to move out of the city after a certain number of years of service.
Miami has no such requirements, and it appears that the majority of the force lives in other municipalities and suburbs in Miami-Dade and Broward County.
Breaking it down by race, FiveThirtyEight finds that zero percent of African-American cops live in the city, and just 3 percent of non-Hispanic white cops live in the city. Though, a comparatively larger but still slight 12 percent of Hispanic cops live in the city.
However, it's not such a surprise. Miami is the smallest city in America to anchor a major metropolitan area.
The City of Miami proper is also a checkered mix of areas marred by poverty and glistening high-rises condo towers where real estate sells for hundreds of dollars a square foot.
So it's not exactly a surprise that most city cops decide to live in areas of South Florida more accessible to the middle class.
In fact, the data probably says more about Miami's real estate disparity than it does our police force.
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