October 5, 2026 - B-1 Bombers Evacuated from UK Base

Los Angeles and Berlin are cities of roughly the same size. Los Angeles has about 8,500 police officers. Berlin has about 18,000.

That comparison comes from Malcolm Gladwell's new book, The American Way of Killing, and it challenges one of the core assumptions of recent years. After George Floyd, the prevailing view in much of the country was that America is over-policed. Gladwell argues the opposite. By global standards, American police departments are tiny, and he says many people in our most violent neighborhoods feel under-protected, not overrun.

He goes further. Citing Harvard sociologists, he contends that small, overmatched forces lean harder on force. Fewer cops can mean more violent cops. Meanwhile, the U.S. spends about the same share of its economy on public safety as Western Europe, but we pour ours into prisons, locking up roughly five times as many people per capita. Germans, he writes, think we're soft on crime because we have so few police. We think they're soft because they don't lock people up.

There's a fair rejoinder. Research led by Aaron Chalfin at the University of Pennsylvania finds that adding officers reduces homicides, with Black residents benefiting most. But it also increases arrests for minor offenses, which fall hardest on those same communities.

Still, Gladwell's central point deserves a hearing. Our problem, he says, is not crime. It's violence combined with easy access to guns. If he's right, we've spent years arguing about the wrong number of cops. Malcolm Gladwell is my guest today on SiriusXM.

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