Invest in More Cops
After the election of Brandon Johnson as mayor of Chicago, many are bracing for more of the same kinds of negligent public-safety policies preferred by his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot. Johnson has made it clear that he will not invest in more police resources or officers, claiming that neither will make Chicagoans safer. He’s wrong, of course. Johnson and other progressive leaders might take a lesson on better public-safety policies from an unlikely source: Europe.
The U.S. and its peers in the European Union each spend roughly 1.2 percent of GDP on public safety, but the U.S. is much more violent. Americans are more than seven times as likely to be murdered than Europeans. More than 60 percent of American inmates committed violent offenses, compared with roughly 40 percent of European inmates. Nearly one-third of people released from American prisons go on to commit a violent offense within the first five years. Given these higher violence levels, America’s public-safety resources are spread far thinner than those of the European Union, undermining our ability to fight crime effectively.
So, what is Europe’s secret? One possible answer: police. Europe spends five times as much of its GDP on policing as on prisons. America, meantime, spends a mere 1.5 times as much on policing as on prisons. As a result, Europe has more than twice the total number of police officers as the U.S., despite only having 35 percent more residents.
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