Other Justice, Public Order, and Safety Activities (U.S.) — NAICS 922190

An investor's primer. Plain-language and dual-audience: what this industry is, who owns it, how the money works, and the handful of public and private ways to get exposure — relevant to both public-market and private investors.

1. Overview

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 922190 is a catch-all for the government agencies that keep public order and safety but don't fit any of the named justice categories — courts, police, prosecutors, prisons, parole, or fire. In practice it is mostly emergency-management and disaster-preparedness offices (federal, state, and county), plus civil-defense units, public-safety coordination bureaus, and specialized federal safety regulators such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission [1][2].

The first thing to understand is that this is not a commercial industry. It is a government function paid for by taxpayers and federal grants, not a set of profit-making firms. There is essentially no private-sector employment coded to 922190 — the establishments are public agencies. So the usual "how do owners make money" question has an unusual answer: the agencies themselves don't. They run on budgets. The money is made by the vendors and contractors that sell software, radios, warning systems, data, and disaster-recovery consulting to them, and that is where investors — public and private — actually get exposure.

• Public-market route: there is no pure-play stock. The closest exposure is public-safety and government software (Motorola Solutions, Tyler Technologies, Axon, NICE), a small-cap emergency-warning maker (Genasys), and large federal-services contractors that support the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and state/local agencies.
• Private route: private-equity (PE) roll-ups of "govtech" and critical-event-management software, disaster-recovery consulting firms, and venture-capital (VC)-backed 911 and public-safety-data startups.

Why care if you can't buy the industry directly? Because it sits on a structural, rising demand curve — the cost and frequency of U.S. disasters keep climbing — and because it is one of the most politically contested budget lines in Washington. Both the tailwind and the risk flow through to the companies in Section 4.

2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope (what's in). NAICS 922190 covers "government establishments primarily engaged in public order and safety (except courts, police protection, legal counsel and prosecution, correctional institutions, parole offices, probation offices, pardon boards, and fire protection)" [1]. The official illustrative examples [1][2]:

• Emergency planning and management offices, government
• Disaster preparedness and management offices, government
• Public-safety bureaus and statistics centers, government
• Consumer product safety commissions, public administration
• General administration of public-order and safety programs

What it excludes (and where those activities live instead). This is a residual code, so most of the "justice and safety" world is carved out into its siblings in industry group 9221, and a few nearby commercial activities sit in entirely different sectors [1]:

Tribal governments, military police, and immigration enforcement are also classified elsewhere, not here [1]. Two adjacencies investors often confuse with this code: private security and alarm firms live in Investigation and Security Services (56161), and private prison operators (GEO Group, CoreCivic) are treated as correctional institutions, not 922190.

Ownership mix. Because the definition begins with the word "government," ownership is almost entirely public. Federal payroll statistics show local government is the center of gravity — roughly two-thirds of the jobs — with state and federal agencies making up the rest [3]. There is no meaningful private-company slice inside the code itself; the private economy attaches to it as suppliers, not operators, and those suppliers are counted in their own commercial industries.

3. How big it is

Our ingested federal business-statistics dataset has no metrics for NAICS 922190 — and that absence is itself the story. The standard business-census tools investors reach for — the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP), the Economic Census, and Small Business Administration (SBA) firm counts — deliberately exclude NAICS 92, Public Administration; they only cover private employers [4][5]. So the usual "number of firms / receipts / small-business share" figures simply do not exist for this industry, and their absence should not be read as zero activity.

The right sources for a government industry are the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which does count government payrolls, and the Census of Governments. QCEW 2024 annual averages for NAICS 922190 (BLS figures, not from our ingested dataset) [3]:

Reading this table: about 188,000 people work in this slice of government, drawing roughly $23.4 billion in wages, with local government about two-thirds of the jobs [3]. Average pay runs from roughly $95,000 (state) to $125,000–$130,000 (federal and local) per covered worker [3] — higher than most industries, reflecting a workforce weighted toward planners, coordinators, analysts, and directors rather than frontline labor. The signature occupation, emergency-management directors, numbered about 13,200 nationwide with a median wage near $86,000 in May 2024 (that count spans all industries, not just 922190) [6].

The undercount caveat cuts both ways. QCEW leaves out elected officials and some categories of government worker, and — more important — the classification of a government unit to 922190 is imperfect. A great deal of emergency-management and public-safety-coordination work is embedded inside larger agencies (sheriff's offices, general county administration, state homeland-security departments) that get coded elsewhere. Treat ~188,000 as a floor for a narrowly-defined activity, not the full footprint of public-order-and-safety coordination in the U.S. And because these agencies buy far more than they staff, the economic footprint that reaches investors — the vendor and contractor spending in Sections 4–5 — is a separate, larger number than the payroll here.

4. The investable universe

There is no publicly traded company whose business is NAICS 922190 — the establishments are government agencies, and no filing carries a clean 922190 revenue line. Investors reach the theme through the suppliers, technology vendors, and services contractors that sell into these agencies. Every company below has exposure well beyond this one code (into police, courts, corrections, or private-sector customers), so none is a pure proxy — read the scale figures as "here's the vendor and roughly how big it is," not "here's a 922190 pure-play."

(Tickers and figures appear here, in the investable-adjacency section only; the underlying industry has no share price. Scale is FY2024 unless noted, for comparability.)

Federal and disaster-services contractors — Leidos (NYSE: LDOS), Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH), ICF International, CACI, SAIC, AECOM, Tetra Tech, and Jacobs — earn a slice of revenue supporting FEMA and state/local emergency management (all-hazards planning, preparedness training, recovery, IT, and program management) [16][17]. For each, emergency management is a minor share of a much larger book.

Major private and other owners. The govtech software layer is increasingly PE-owned: CentralSquare Technologies (backed by Bain Capital and Vista Equity Partners) runs dispatch, records, permitting, and payroll software the company says is used by more than 8,000 agencies [18]; Everbridge is now inside Thoma Bravo [15]. The disaster-management consulting field is largely private — Tidal Basin, IEM, and Hagerty Consulting are leading firms that state and local governments hire for preparedness and post-disaster recovery. On the modernization side, RapidSOS remains independent (a 2025 financing led by Apax Digital added ~$100M for its emergency-response data/AI platform) [19], and Flock Safety (public-safety camera/data, a 2025 Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz) is a fast-growing private name [20] — while two earlier 911 startups, Carbyne and Prepared, were absorbed by Axon [11].

5. How the money works

Because the industry is government, its economics are budget-driven, not profit-driven — the metrics that matter on the buyer side are appropriations, grants, and headcount, not margins or same-store sales. (This is why utility rate-base, REIT, or mining cost-curve language does not apply here.)

Inside the agencies (the buyers). Money comes from three taps: (1) direct appropriations — federal (mostly through the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, and FEMA), state general funds, and county budgets; (2) federal grant pass-throughs that fund local staff and equipment; and (3) occasional cost recovery (fees, fines). Labor is nearly the entire in-house cost base — the ~$23.4 billion in Section 3 is wages [3]. The single most important funding mechanism to know is the Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG): about $319.5 million (roughly flat across FY2024–FY2025), distributed on a 50% cost-share (matching) basis explicitly to help cover the salaries of state officials and county emergency managers [8]. That is the pipe connecting federal dollars to those ~125,000 local jobs. More broadly, FEMA announced more than $1.3 billion across nine FY2025 preparedness and cybersecurity grant programs [9]. When disaster strikes, the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) — the multi-billion-dollar account FEMA draws on for declared disasters — turns on, and spending spikes.

Around the agencies (where profits are actually made). The vendors and contractors in Section 4 run on ordinary business metrics, and these are what an investor tracks:

• Recurring / subscription revenue and software-as-a-service (SaaS) gross margins. The strategic shift across Motorola, Tyler, and Axon is away from one-time hardware/license sales toward high-margin, multi-year cloud subscriptions; recurring revenue now makes up the majority of Tyler's business, for example [12]. Recurring revenue = visibility, which the market rewards.
• Contract backlog and book-to-bill. Government deals are large and multi-year; backlog is the leading indicator. Motorola ended 2024 with a ~$14.7 billion backlog [7].
• Win rates and procurement cycles. Revenue depends on winning long, competitive requests for proposals (RFPs), often statewide. Sales cycles are slow and lumpy.
• Billable utilization for the consulting firms (Tidal Basin, ICF, AECOM) — hours billed against disaster-recovery and preparedness engagements, which surge after major events.

Also watch renewal/retention, implementation duration, cash conversion, customer concentration, and security/compliance track record. The through-line: the core industry doesn't earn a return; the demand it generates does. An investor is really buying the derivative — the flow of public dollars into private suppliers.

6. What drives demand

• Rising disaster frequency and cost — the clearest structural driver. NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) counted 27 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the U.S. in 2024, totaling ~$182.7 billion — just short of 2023's record 28 events. Over 2015–2024 there were roughly 190 such events costing about $1.4 trillion, and since 1980 the country has logged more than 400 events exceeding $2.9 trillion in total damage [21]. More, costlier disasters mean more emergency-management activity, more recovery contracts, and more pressure to modernize warning and response systems. (Note: NOAA retired this running tally in 2025, so the series itself is no longer officially updated — a small illustration of how politically exposed even the data is.)
• Federal grant funding. EMPG, the Homeland Security Grant Program, the Urban Area Security Initiative, and hazard-mitigation and cybersecurity grants set the ceiling on how many local staff can be hired and how much technology gets bought [8][9]. Grant levels are the demand dial.
• Technology modernization. The multi-year rollout of Next Generation 911 (NG911) — internet-based emergency calling — plus interoperable communications, mass notification, cloud migration, and increasingly artificial intelligence (AI) for triage, alerting, transcription, dispatch, and situational awareness, is a replacement-and-upgrade cycle funding the vendors.
• Interoperable data. Growing demand to share data across agencies and responders favors platform vendors over single-point products.
• Population moving into harm's way. Growth along coasts and in the wildland-urban interface raises exposure and the political demand for preparedness.
• Political salience after failures. High-profile events (Hurricane Katrina, the 2023 Maui wildfire, repeated hurricane seasons) reliably trigger reform, reorganization, and new spending.
• Product-safety activity. Recalls, investigations, and public communication drive the CPSC-type slice of the code.

Demand is structurally resilient, but vendor revenue can stay uneven because projects hinge on appropriations, grant awards, procurement timing, and implementation capacity.

7. Regulation

The agencies in this code are largely administrators of public safety, but the sector operates inside a dense legal framework:

• The Stafford Act governs federal disaster declarations and the Disaster Relief Fund — the trigger for the bulk of federal disaster money.
• The Homeland Security Act of 2002 created DHS and folded FEMA into it; the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 restructured FEMA after Katrina.
• The National Incident Management System (NIMS) and Incident Command System (ICS) set standardized command-and-coordination procedures that state and local agencies must adopt to stay grant-eligible.
• Specialized federal safety regulators operate under their own statutes — e.g. the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which enforces the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA) and Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) through standards, testing, recalls, and reporting; its FY2024 total budgetary resources were about $174.3 million [22][23].

For the vendors, the binding rules are procurement and security standards, which raise barriers to entry and favor certified incumbents:

• The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) governs federal contracting and generally requires full and open competition (Part 6) [24]; FEMA-funded purchases must also meet federal grant-procurement and documentation standards [10].
• The FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy governs handling of justice data and permits cloud use when vendors meet its requirements [25]; FedRAMP/StateRAMP cover cloud authorization; and the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 is the common risk-management reference [26].
• State and local privacy, public-records, surveillance, biometric, and AI rules vary widely by jurisdiction and increasingly shape what public-safety tech can be deployed.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

On the buyer side, the market is extraordinarily fragmented. There is no single "customer" — there are roughly 50 states, thousands of counties, plus tribal, regional, and federal agencies, each with its own emergency-management office and budget. Fragmentation makes selling slow and implementation-heavy, but it also makes each installed base sticky: once a vendor is wired into an agency's dispatch, records, alerting, or planning, switching costs are high.

Competition remains genuine. Federal procurement rules generally require full and open competition (FAR Part 6), subject to statutory exceptions [24]. But incumbents benefit from reference accounts, existing procurement vehicles, security approvals (CJIS, FedRAMP), data integrations, and operational familiarity.

On the vendor side, consolidation is the dominant theme — the strategic prize everywhere is to convert fragmented, one-time government hardware purchases into consolidated, recurring, high-margin software subscriptions:

• Motorola Solutions has spent a decade acquiring public-safety software (911 call handling, dispatch, video, records) and bundling it into a command-center platform, including Rave Mobile Safety (mass notification / incident management) in 2022 [7][27].
• Axon is extending from police records/evidence into real-time operations and emergency call-handling; it reported its Carbyne acquisition closed in Q1 2026 and also acquired Prepared [11].
• Tyler Technologies acquired Emergency Networking to deepen its cloud public-safety and emergency-services offering [13].
• Private equity is rolling up the software layer — Thoma Bravo's ~$1.8 billion take-private of Everbridge in 2024 is the marquee example of a public critical-event-management company being pulled into a PE platform [15], alongside PE-owned CentralSquare [18].

Editorial judgment: the strongest competitive positions belong to vendors that combine mission-critical workflows, open integrations, reliable security, and recurring revenue. Feature breadth alone matters less than successful deployment and agency trust.

9. Risks

• Budget and political risk — the dominant risk. This is government spending, exposed to appropriations fights, continuing resolutions, and shutdowns. FEMA's structure, funding, and even its continued existence have been the subject of serious political debate and restructuring proposals; treat the size and shape of federal emergency-management funding as genuinely uncertain, not a given.
• Grant dependency and timing. Local agencies and their vendors lean on reimbursement-based, matching grants like EMPG that pay after the fact [8]; delays, priority shifts, or cuts hit the demand curve directly.
• Customer concentration. A single large federal or statewide contract can move a supplier's results materially.
• Lumpy, slow procurement. Revenue concentrates in large multi-year contracts subject to bid protests, sole-source challenges, recompetes, and long sales cycles — quarterly results can be choppy, and an apparent win can reverse.
• Implementation risk. Failed migrations, poor integrations, or outages of mission-critical systems damage trust and can trigger contract penalties.
• Cybersecurity and privacy exposure. 911 systems, emergency-notification networks, and public-safety data are high-value attack targets; a breach or unreliable AI output is both an operational and a reputational liability.
• Surveillance backlash. Automated license-plate recognition, facial recognition, drones, and predictive analytics face growing restrictions and public opposition in some jurisdictions.
• Product liability. Communications hardware, sensors, and safety products carry recall and injury exposure.
• Private-equity leverage. Debt-funded roll-ups add financial risk if renewals or integration savings disappoint.
• Climate strain. The same rising disaster frequency that drives demand also strains agency capacity and can outrun budgets — a demand tailwind and an execution risk at once [21].

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes (no pure-play). Treat these as different exposure profiles, not one sector, and never assign a whole company's revenue to 922190:

• Public-safety and government software — Motorola Solutions (the broadest, most liquid proxy), Tyler Technologies, Axon, and NICE. Emergency management is one slice of much larger businesses [7][9][10][12].
• Small-cap emergency warning — Genasys is the closest focused play, but a volatile micro-cap with contract-driven, lumpy revenue [14].
• Federal services contractors — Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, ICF, CACI, SAIC, AECOM, Tetra Tech, Jacobs — for indirect exposure to FEMA and state/local program spending [16][17].

When underwriting the public names, review segment reporting, government-customer concentration, contract duration and backlog, recurring revenue and renewal rates, gross margin, free cash flow, cybersecurity controls, and valuation multiples.

Private routes. PE is the natural owner of this category — the Everbridge and CentralSquare deals show the appetite for recurring-revenue govtech [15][18]. Other avenues: disaster-recovery consulting (Tidal Basin, IEM, Hagerty) and VC-backed public-safety data / 911 modernization (RapidSOS, Flock Safety) [19][20]. Underwrite procurement win rates, renewal behavior, implementation cost, security certifications, customer concentration, leverage, and exit options.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment). The structural case is a rising demand curve — disaster costs trend up over decades [21], and the shift to NG911 and cloud command-center software is a multi-year replacement cycle that favors the recurring-revenue vendors. The structural risk is the federal budget and FEMA's uncertain political future, which sits upstream of the grant dollars that fund local jobs and vendor purchases. On this reading, the most defensible way to hold the theme is through diversified, mission-critical, recurring-revenue vendors whose backlog gives visibility even when any single government budget wobbles — rather than betting on the government line item itself, which an investor cannot own directly and cannot easily predict.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Manual — NAICS 922190 definition, illustrative examples, and cross-references. 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
2. NAICS Association. "NAICS Code 922190 — Other Justice, Public Order, and Safety Activities" (illustrative examples and cross-references derived from the Census 2022 NAICS Manual). 2022. https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?code=922190
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), 2024 Annual Averages — NAICS 922190, national by ownership." 2025. https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2024/a/industry/922190.csv
4. U.S. Census Bureau. "County Business Patterns — Methodology" (coverage excludes NAICS 92, Public Administration, and most government employees). 2025. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
5. U.S. Census Bureau. "Understanding NAICS — 2022 Economic Census Guidance" (Economic Census does not cover public administration / government-owned establishments). 2025. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census/year/2022/guidance/understanding-naics.html
6. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Occupational Outlook Handbook / Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics — Emergency Management Directors (SOC 11-9161), May 2024." 2025. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/emergency-management-directors.htm
7. Motorola Solutions, Inc. "Reports Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2024 Financial Results" (net sales ~$10.8B; backlog ~$14.7B). 2025. https://www.motorolasolutions.com/newsroom/press-releases/motorola-solutions-reports-q4-fy-2024-financial-results.html
8. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). "Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG)" (~$319.5M; 50% cost share; salaries of state and county emergency managers). 2025. https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/emergency-management-performance
9. U.S. Department of Homeland Security / FEMA. "Fiscal Year 2025 Notices of Funding Opportunities — Preparedness and Cybersecurity Grant Programs" (more than $1.3B across nine programs). 2025. https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_gpd_fy25-prep-grant-ib-534.pdf
10. Axon Enterprise, Inc. "Axon 2024 revenue grows 33% to $2.1 billion." February 25, 2025. https://investor.axon.com/2025-02-25-Axon-2024-revenue-grows-33-to-2-1-billion-third-consecutive-year-of-30-annual-growth
11. Axon Enterprise, Inc. "Axon Reports Fourth-Quarter 2025 Results" (Carbyne acquisition closed Q1 2026; Prepared; expansion into emergency call-handling). 2026. https://investor.axon.com/2026-02-24-Axon-reports-Q4-2025-revenue-of-797-million,-up-39-year-over-year
12. Tyler Technologies, Inc. "2024 Annual Report (Form ARS)" (FY2024 revenue ~$2.0B; recurring revenue majority; public-safety and courts/justice suites). 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/860731/000086073125000019/tyl2024ars.pdf
13. Tyler Technologies, Inc. "September 2025 Investor News" (acquisition of Emergency Networking). 2025. https://investors.tylertech.com/news/news-details/2025/September-2025-Investor-News/default.aspx
14. Genasys Inc. (via StockAnalysis.com). "Genasys (GNSS) Revenue" (fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2024, revenue ~$24M). 2025. https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/gnss/revenue/
15. Everbridge, Inc. "Thoma Bravo Completes Acquisition of Everbridge" (~$1.8 billion; $35.00/share; delisted). July 2, 2024. https://www.everbridge.com/newsroom/article/thoma-bravo-completes-acquisition-of-everbridge/
16. Leidos. "Center for Domestic Preparedness / FEMA emergency-response, preparedness, training, and all-hazards planning." 2026. https://www.leidos.com/center-domestic-preparedness
17. Booz Allen Hamilton. "Civil Government" (technology, data, cybersecurity, homeland-security, and resilience work). 2026. https://www.boozallen.com/markets/civil-government.html
18. CentralSquare Technologies. "Board of Directors / Why CentralSquare" (Bain Capital and Vista Equity Partners; more than 8,000 agencies, per the company). 2026. https://www.centralsquare.com/why-centralsquare/board
19. RapidSOS. "RapidSOS Raises $100M to Scale Emergency Response AI" (financing led by Apax Digital). 2025. https://rapidsos.com/blog/rapidsos-raises-100m-to-scale-emergency-response-ai/
20. Flock Safety. "Series D Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz." 2025. https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/series-d-fundraise-andreessen-horowitz
21. NOAA Climate.gov / National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). "2024: An active year of U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" (27 events / ~$182.7B in 2024; ~190 events / ~$1.4T over 2015–2024; 400+ events / >$2.9T since 1980). 2025. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2024-active-year-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters
22. U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. "Agency Financial Report — Fiscal Year 2024" (total budgetary resources ~$174.3M). November 15, 2024. https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/FY2024_AFR_508_compliant.pdf
23. U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. "About CPSC" (authorities under the Consumer Product Safety Act and Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act). 2026. https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC
24. Acquisition.gov. "Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), Part 6 — Competition Requirements." 2026. https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-6
25. Federal Bureau of Investigation. "CJIS Security Policy Resource Center — Appendices" (cloud use permitted when vendors meet the policy's requirements). 2026. https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/cjis-division/cjis-security-policy-resource-center/appendicies/
26. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0." 2024. https://www.nist.gov/publications/nist-cybersecurity-framework-csf-20
27. Motorola Solutions, Inc. "Motorola Solutions Acquires Rave Mobile Safety" (mass notification / incident management). 2022. https://www.motorolasolutions.com/newsroom/press-releases/motorola-solutions-acquires-rave-mobile-safety.html