One of America’s foremost thinkers hasn’t done enough thinking. Instead, he’s delivered a handful of thoughtful-sounding stuff that simply doesn’t hold up the minute readers start actually thinking about what he’s saying.
Malcolm Gladwell has a new book about gun violence in the United States. I haven’t read it, so I can’t comment on the entirety of his latest work. I have, however, read a particularly atrocious excerpt — one that was published by The Atlantic because even Slate has moved on from Slatepitches.
In this excerpt, Gladwell argues that the reason US law enforcement officers are so violent is because there just aren’t enough of them. You may think I’m paraphrasing. I assure you: I am not. Here’s the headline and subhead from his Atlantic piece:
America Has a Police Shortage
Many Americans have decided that their country’s problem is that it has too many police officers. In fact, it has too few.
That’s a wild conclusion to reach. It’s especially wild when the only outside support you have to offer for your theory are: one (1) study that agrees with your foregone conclusion, and one (1) police official who agrees with your foregone conclusion.
He starts by comparing US cops per capita with European cops per capita. Most people would think the Los Angeles PD is larger than the Berlin (Germany) police force. They’d be wrong.
Berlin has about 18,000 police officers, making its police department twice the size of Los Angeles’s.
American police departments, compared with their counterparts around the developed world, are tiny. Phoenix has 2,500 police officers. Munich—which has a population of roughly the same size—has nearly two and a half times as many. Dallas has 3,100 officers. The Brussels metro area, comparable to Dallas in population, has 6,700.
But would they actually be wrong? Maybe, but not by much. These comparisons only mean as much as Gladwell is willing to share. He doesn’t look at everything else that factors into this, including police spending as a percentage of national/local budgets.
Despite this objective lack of accountability for policing practice, public levels of trust in police remain among the highest in the EU only behind Scandinavian countries and Switzerland.[179] This allows Germany to maintain one of the lowest levels of public order and safety spending in the EU, at 1.5 percent of gross domestic profit, compared to the EU average of 1.8 percent.[180] As a result, Germany has a police force of only 300 officers per 100,000 of its population.
The US has about 243 officers per 100,000 people. That is a smaller number but it’s not so much smaller that it should immediately raise eyebrows, much less overwhelming support for Gladwell’s preferred narrative.
Here’s where Gladwell decides 2+2 equals whatever number he needs it to be.
In 2020, an African American man in Minneapolis named George Floyd was killed by a rogue police officer, setting off an extraordinary wave of protests around the country. The motto of many of the protesters was “Defund the police.”
If the police were badly behaved, the thinking went, it was because there were too many of them.
[…]
Following the [George Floyd] protests, city after city saw their police force shrink. Of the 15 largest police departments in the United States, 12 had a markedly smaller police force in 2025 than in 2019. Philadelphia lost 23.1 percent of its police force during that period; Washington, D.C., lost 21.4 percent; San Francisco, 17.5 percent; Phoenix, 15 percent; and on and on. The reformers won the day. But what they did not understand is that there is a trade-off between certainty and severity: When criminals think they can get away with crimes, policing and punishments need to be more severe to achieve the same deterrent effect. Severity is not something that comes from lots of police. It’s something that comes from having too few police.
First off, Gladwell refuses to call Floyd’s killing a murder, which is extremely fucking strange since the officer who murdered Floyd (Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin) was convicted of murder. Calling Chauvin “rogue” is just plain insulting to everyone’s intelligence, considering a handful of other officers were on the scene and not a single one did anything to stop Chauvin from murdering George Floyd.
Second, the sudden disappearance of cops had nothing to do with any “defunding” efforts. While lots of politicians made loud noises about defunding the police, very few of them actually did anything about it. No defunding of the police has taken place. In a few instances, some police funding has been rerouted to mental health professionals, allowing them to respond to incidents cops are poorly trained (if they’re trained at all) to handle.
The drop-off in police staffing is due to the cops themselves. Lots of cops who got into the business for its high octane blend of maximum power and minimum accountability decided they’d rather exit the force than improve or subject themselves to whatever bare minimum of accountability might be inflicted on them as a result of this widespread (but wholly ineffectual) “defund the police” movement. If cities were spending less on cops, it was due to attrition, rather than any funding restrictions enacted by local legislators.
But the most noxious conclusion Gladwell draws from these stats is that the George Floyd protests and the “defund the police” shouting that accompanied it generated police violence. That statement ignores that fact that decades of police violence (a lot of it racist) led to the nationwide protests that greeted George Floyd’s murder. And this was preceded by several other large protests against police violence that were far more severe and violent than those provoked by Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions.
Gladwell wants to connect the dots between calls for defunding police and the understaffing that now plagues many police departments — something that is wholly due to cops not wanting to be cops if it meant a modicum of accountability might be applied to their actions. But cops have been violent for years, and there’s nothing on the record that even slightly suggests having more cops and bigger budgets makes these officers better than those working for departments with less funding and staffing.
While we’re still on the subject of “more cops = better cops,” let’s go back to Gladwell’s quoting of German police staffing stats as evidence of his theory. I mean, I guess? He just dumps this comparison of Berlin to Los Angeles into the mix and then hustles past it to an interview with a Colorado law enforcement official who claims having more officers would somehow make all of these officers better.
But having more cops hasn’t exactly made German cops better.
As law enforcement is vested solely with the states of Germany, each state’s police force (or “Land” police) follows a different system of law. Accordingly, there is an absence of a federal comprehensive register, compiling and publishing regular, uniform, and comprehensive figures on complaints about police ill-treatment.[170] Even though Germany is bound to obligate its many international treaties and conventions, Amnesty International (2002) highlights the authorities failed to protect a range of human rights as guaranteed by international human rights law and standards.[170] A study conducted in 2019 on police brutality in Germany found that it led to complaints in only 9%, and trials in only 13% of the cases. The study was conducted by the Ruhr-University of Bochum and was the biggest study at the time to be conducted on police brutality in Germany. The study found that the low number of complaints was likely due to a low expectation of success.[174] Furthermore, most German states do not require their police force to carry identification, making it difficult for victims to lodge complaints against individuals.[175][176]
Having more officers doesn’t make policing in German better. In fact, the lack of accountability seems to be on par with the United States. The only reason we don’t hear more about this (and I’m speaking for Gladwell as well) is because we don’t live in Germany. What is different is how we train and arm our cops, which means US law enforcement will almost always kill more people than their counterparts in other parts of the Western world.
And, as if this butchering of logic weren’t damning enough, Gladwell is out there digging his own hole while promoting his book:
Evoking the parable of the blind men and the elephant he promises: “chapters on the trunk and the leg and the tusk, and at the end my hope is that by seeing all the parts in one place you will finally get a sense of the whole elephant – and understand that what seems from the outside like an intractable problem need not be intractable at all”.
If that’s the defense for his cherry-picking and attempting (and failing) to work backwards from his preconceptions, it’s time for a meme. And not just any meme, but one that hits Gladwell right in his presumptions twice:
The headline — “Defense: Chauvin did what he was trained to do” — points to the origin of a lot of our police violence problems. Adding more cops just means adding more cops trained to treat violence as a first option, no matter how many of them are actually patrolling the streets.
The second part is for Gladwell: you do get how that’s worse, right? Using this parable as a selling point for your book is an incredible self-own. If your best hope is that people will convert your own writing into an Aesopian game of telephone and then still come to the conclusions you want them to draw from this, you’re no longer in the non-fiction game. You’re just telling people what you believe and expecting them to fall in line simply because they might have heard your name somewhere before.
Again, I have not read Gladwell’s book. But if this is the promotional vehicle he’s chosen to drive, I’d rather walk.
