EXPERT PANEL FINDS “PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE” AGAINST HIRING MORE POLICE
WASHINGTON — A panel of law-enforcement experts testified before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday that a proposal to dramatically expand America’s police forces — advanced this week by the author Malcolm Gladwell, who noted that Berlin fields 18,000 officers to Los Angeles’s 8,500 — is unworkable, unaffordable, and, in the words of one witness, “a solution in search of a fleet.”
The first witness, a metropolitan police chief, explained that hiring is constrained not by salaries but by his department’s equipment standard. “We maintain a ratio of one armored vehicle for every point-eight officers,” the chief said. “Five hundred new officers would require four hundred additional carriers to hold that ratio. The city cannot afford the carriers. Therefore, the city cannot afford the officers. The math is the math.”
Asked whether the city could at least afford to outfit five hundred new officers, the chief shook his head. “Senator,” he said, “have you checked the price of Kevlar lately?”
A municipal finance expert testified that the proposal ignored the difference between one-time and recurring costs. “An armored carrier is ready for duty in a weekend,” she said. “An officer the public trusts takes twenty years of continuous investment, and then he can retire, or resign, or be filmed. The department does not have twenty years. The department has a procurement cycle.”
The president of a national police labor federation warned that mass hiring would dilute experience and harm the existing force. “Our members currently earn significant overtime precisely because of the shortage,” he said. “This committee should understand that eliminating the shortage is a pay cut for the very officers it claims to support. Morale would collapse. We would lose our best people to departments that are still short-staffed.”
A criminologist dismissed the European comparison outright. “Berlin’s officers can afford patience,” he testified. “They are not outnumbered by their own equipment. German police do not arrive at a disturbance dressed for Fallujah, and so, miraculously, the disturbance does not dress for Fallujah either.”
The panel’s final witness, a security consultant and former federal agent, addressed the proposal’s author directly. “Malcolm Gladwell is a liberal agitator with a gift for making the unworkable sound like arithmetic,” he said. “This is the man who informed America that mastery requires ten thousand hours — a number his own source disputes — and who studied the death of Sandra Bland and concluded that the problem was that strangers misunderstand one another. Now he wants to redesign American policing from a bookstore. The committee should also note that his book Blink correctly established that officers must make split-second judgments, a finding he apparently no longer finds convenient.”
Asked by the ranking member whether the department’s equipment might ever be excessive relative to its staffing, the chief paused. “Senator, in twenty-six years, no armored carrier in my department has called in sick, filed a grievance, requested a transfer, or retained a lawyer,” he said. “I cannot say that for the officers. I wish I could.”
Mr. Gladwell, reached for comment, said he stood by the arithmetic.
The subcommittee voted 7 to 2 to commission a study of optimal vehicle-to-officer ratios. The study will be conducted by an independent firm that manufactures armored vehicles. The chief’s separate request for two additional carriers was approved later the same afternoon, unanimously, as an emergency measure to maintain readiness during the ongoing shortage of police.
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