Malcolm Gladwell says more police means less crime. Is he right?

What didn't work: The BLM movement and defund the police. Nor do Police Unions that make it almost impossible to fire bad cops.

What does work: Most cops do more good than not.

Interesting factoid: Until the 1970s, US minorities had similar crime rates to other ethnic groups. They also had similar co-habitation rates (two parent households). What changed is an interesting question. Slavery while terrible apparently didn't doom African Americans to high crime neighborhoods for over 100 years.

The Finland problem

Quartz Media

Oct 28, 2026

Los Angeles had 8,677 sworn police officers in April, its lowest total in nearly a quarter-century. Mayor Karen Bass essentially said the city's primary goal right now is just to stop the count from sliding any further.

Malcolm Gladwell thinks that kind of shortage explains why American police kill so many people. In his book The American Way of Killing, he argues that the real issue with US policing is not an excess of aggression, but a shortage of bodies. American cops shoot, he told TIME, because there are so few of them on the street that they end up cornered and scared.

City halls have leaned on versions of this thinking for decades: put more badges on the corner and the neighborhood cools down. The research shows that hiring police really does save lives. Just not the way Gladwell thinks.

Gladwell's go-to contrast is Los Angeles versus Berlin. Both have around 3.8 million people. But while the LAPD scrapes together maybe 8,500 officers on a good shift, he said on PBS that Berlin fields roughly 18,000.

His theory comes down to basic human fear. If two isolated officers walk into a chaotic crowd, their only way to take control is by shouting commands or pulling a gun. Give them eight colleagues behind them, and they don't need to reach for a holster.

It sounds reasonable enough, but it comes with an obvious test. If thin staffing turns police into nervous, trigger-happy squads, then the most thinly policed nation in Europe should be a nightmare.

By the Digits

2

people shot dead by police in England and Wales from April 2024 to March 2025. At US rates, it would've been about 190.

137

police officers per 100,000 people in Finland, the lowest rate in the EU.

393 million

civilian guns in the US in 2017; more than the other top 25 countries combined.

Outnumbered in Helsinki

First, the actual math. Gladwell claims European countries have twice as many cops per person as the US. They do not. An NBER working paper puts the US average at about 250 officers per 100,000 people, while City Journal cited roughly 198. The European Union average is 341 per 100,000. A Social Market Foundation briefing shows Germany as a whole at 298. Higher numbers, yes, but nowhere near double.

Then you run into Finland.

Finland gets by on 137 police officers for every 100,000 residents. That makes it the thinnest police force in the EU, and far smaller than the US on any count. If running lean made police twitchy and violent, Finnish traffic stops would be terrifying.

Instead, Snopes calculated 1.5 police killings per million people in Finland between 2002 and 2017. In the US over that same stretch, the rate was 71.

Look at England and Wales, which sit at 228 officers per 100,000, roughly mirroring the US. Police there shot and killed two people between April 2024 and March 2025. The Washington Post counted about 1,040 fatal police shootings in the US per year from 2015 to 2024. Given that England and Wales has 61.8 million people to the US's 340.1 million, US rates would imply about 190 such deaths there each year. But again, it had two.

Headcount is not what separates them. So what does hiring more American cops actually change?

In 2020, criminologist Aaron Chalfin and three colleagues looked at 242 US cities across nearly four decades. They found that each added officer prevents 0.06 to 0.1 homicides a year, which works out to one life saved for every 10 to 17 officers hired. When you put more uniformed patrols on the block, serious violent crime drops.

What it does not do is make the police less lethal. Chalfin's team checked fatal police shootings and found no significant drop as departments grew.

What new hires actually generate is low-level friction. Each new officer produces seven to 22 minor arrests a year, mostly for things like open container violations and petty drug offenses. The authors calculate that for every homicide a city prevents by expanding its police force, it adds three to six new use-of-force incidents during arrests.

More officers buy fewer murders, but they do not buy calmer police encounters. To explain why American stops turn deadly so often, you have to look at what officers walk into, and what they learn before hitting the street.

Guns and school

Start with the obvious: American civilians held an estimated 393 million firearms in 2017. That's about 121 guns for every 100 people, compared to 35 in Canada and far fewer across Western Europe. When an American officer walks up to a car with tinted windows at night, the worry that someone inside is carrying is not paranoia. As Rutgers sociologist Paul Hirschfield has argued, American police are primed to expect guns.

Then look at how we train them.

The average US academy gives recruits about 806 hours of basic instruction, or roughly 20 weeks, with 503 more hours of field training on average. European programs often run more than three years. In Finland, you can't pin on a badge without finishing a three-year police degree that focuses heavily on de-escalation, psychology, and the law.

Finland treats policing like an elite, highly educated civil trade, which means it can get away with fielding fewer bodies. The US puts recruits through a five-month crash course and sends them out into an armed population.

Brief History

1829

Sir Robert Peel creates London's Metropolitan Police, arguing good policing means the absence of crime, not shows of force.

1968

The Kerner Commission warns that shifting officers from foot patrols into patrol cars breeds community isolation and distrust.

1994

The federal COPS program launches with billions to add 100,000 officers to American streets

2008

Finland turns policing into an academic trade, requiring all recruits to earn a three-year degree.

2017

US police staffing peaks after decades of expansion, while fatal police shootings consistently top 1,000 a year.

2025 to 2026

City staffing drops 5.2% and overtime bills shatter records, setting the stage for Malcolm Gladwell's argument that America's core crisis is a shortage of badges.

Where scarcity shows up

American departments are genuinely short-handed right now, but you don't see the cost in the number of guns drawn. You see it on city spreadsheets.

When headcount falls and 911 calls do not, cities pay remaining officers overtime to keep cars moving. Officials like LAPD chief Jim McDonnell say staffing shortages are driving up overtime and burnout. Chicago spent $250.8 million on police overtime in 2025, overshooting its budget by 151%. New York hit a record $960 million in uniformed overtime in fiscal 2025.

As New York's comptroller pointed out, the bill isn't just an emergency response to empty desks. A huge slice goes toward planned events and routine scheduling habits. Cities are spending top dollar on a reactive, motorized model because... that's how they run it.

Gladwell's premise that American cities could use more cops gets the crime math right: more officers would mean fewer murders. But hiring a few thousand more recruits will not give the US European-style policing.

Finland got its results by choosing three years of school over raw headcounts. Los Angeles is struggling just to keep 8,677 officers on the payroll. The real problem is not the size of the roster. It's how little we train officers for the environment they step into.

Key Fact

A 2025 analysis by the New York City Comptroller found that overtime pay enabled more than 1,200 uniformed officers to earn more than $100,000 in overtime alone, pushing their individual earnings above the mayor's salary. Nationwide, American cities spend an estimated $4 billion to $5 billion annually purely on police overtime premiums. (source)