Where you live in Allegheny County determines what kind of police officer responds to your call for help.

High-paid, low-paid, full-time, part-time, experienced, inexperienced, well-equipped or poorly equipped — it’s a roll of the geographic dice, according to an analysis by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which discovered wide disparities in funding, staffing, training and workload among the county’s 109 police departments.

While communities with the most violence or highest number of 911 calls might need the most robust police services, the Post-Gazette’s analysis found those communities often support police departments with limited budgets and low-paid, part-time officers, while richer communities with less crime can afford to spend more on police.

From the two-man police department in Fawn to the nearly 900-member Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, Allegheny County contains more police departments than any other county in the state. This patchwork, which involves more than 2,700 officers and $340 million in annual spending, creates far-reaching divides — some residents are served by full-time officers who take home $71,000 salaries, while others get help from part-time officers who earn $10 an hour.

The best-staffed police departments in the county have 10 times more officers per resident than the least staffed, and the best-funded departments have more than 10 times the budget per resident than the poorest.

The police officers in Allegheny County who face the highest crime and poverty rates in their communities are also typically the lowest paid, the Post-Gazette found. Officers don’t stay as long in communities with lower pay, and in three of the lowest-paying departments, the average officer has been on the job only a year. In more affluent communities, officers average more than a decade on the job.

The current patchwork of police departments across the county won’t work for the long-term, Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said in a recent interview, and it reflects how some communities, forced to cut budgets after losing industry and revenues decades ago, are struggling to provide not only quality policing but also all basic municipal services, harming residents’ quality of life.

“If you’ve got a shrinking population and shrinking tax base, but the geography doesn’t shrink and you’ve still got to patrol the same square miles, it makes it very difficult to be sustainable,” he said.

A community’s crime doesn’t dictate police resources, the Post-Gazette found. Both Oakdale and McKees Rocks have 14 officers, even though Oakdale reported a single violent crime and no property crimes in 2017 while McKees Rocks had 79 violent and 324 property crimes.

In McKees Rocks, there are fewer than two officers for every 1,000 calls for service. Police departments in the county average four officers for every 1,000 calls. In richer areas, departments have dozens of officers for every 1,000 calls they receive.

“There is no rhyme or reason,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. “Some communities can afford more police, so they have them. Others can’t.”

Allegheny County police departments vary widely in both workload and resources. **East Pittsburgh P.D. was disbanded on December 1, 2018. Pennsylvania State Police have taken over policing the borough. Sources: Allegheny County, interviews with police chiefs, public records, Census Bureau.

*FBI Unified Crime Reporting Part 1 Crimes: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson.

**East Pittsburgh P.D. was disbanded on December 1, 2018. Pennsylvania State Police have taken over policing the borough.

Yet independent, small-scale policing has deep roots not only in Pennsylvania but across the nation. Politicians, community members and police unions have for decades resisted attempts to merge departments, arguing that small local departments can provide personal, tailored police services to their communities better than a centralized force.

“There’s a lot of duplication, there’s a lot of redundancy, but that’s really the way American police have evolved,” Mr. Wexler said.

Unequal neighbors