To quote Lee Camp “what an epic bag of shit.”
Here in Los Angeles, we don’t need more police—especially when Mayor Karen Bass is protecting LAPD funding while proposing cuts to essential city services.
Facing a $1 billion budget crisis in 2025, Bass proposed laying off more than 1,600 city workers while protecting sworn LAPD officers and allocating $3.3 billion to the department. As LA Public Press reports, Bass, once an advocate for community-based alternatives to policing, has aligned herself with a police union that endorsed her reelection and has spent millions opposing her challenger, Nithya Raman—who is herself hardly an anti-police candidate.
In this episode of Moment of Clarity, Lee Camp takes on Malcolm Gladwell’s argument that America needs more police, asking why more officers are so often presented as the answer while the conditions that contribute to violence go unaddressed.
So much more can be said about policing in Los Angeles and about our mayor, whose record raises serious concerns on many fronts. We have come a long way from the vision of a society that relies less on police and more on meeting people’s needs.
Six years ago, the late Dan Siegel, whose voice and work will never be forgotten, explored that vision in “What Defunding the Police Can Look Like.” His thoughtful arguments remain a valuable starting point for a discussion about policing, public safety and what another way could look like.
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Editor’s note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Censored words appear as they did in the supplied transcript, except for the final line.
Lee Camp: America has a police shortage. There are too few police officers in the United States, where they murder thousands of people a year. The Lancet medical journal proved 55% of all police murders are written down as something other than murders by police.
Malcolm Gladwell argues that America’s policing problem isn’t that it has too many officers—it’s that it has too few. Compared with European countries, American cities have significantly smaller police forces, which Gladwell believes contributes to higher violent crime, slower emergency responses, weaker community relationships and, paradoxically, more aggressive policing.
Yes, he believes that the lack of police in the United States is causing higher violent crime, slower emergency response and weaker community relationships.
I do love the weaker community relationships, because if you’ve lived in the United States and if you’ve ever dealt with police in the United States, you know that they are just part and parcel of the community. You see him walking around, you go, “Hey, Officer Joe.” And Officer Joe goes, “Hey, Lee, I haven’t seen you in a whole week.”
No, no, no. You have never met any police officer around your community unless you have one that shows up to your store a lot or something—like you own a business and he comes in and gets his coffee every day. But in general, practically nobody knows their police officers around their area. The only time they’re seeing them is when they’re there to harass somebody.
A community relationship with police in the United States does not exist. They’re designed to enforce the class war perpetrated by the rich against everyone else. That’s the real reason they’re there. They only go after street crime, which is a tiny percentage of real crime if you actually calculate all the numbers. It’s a tiny percentage of the amount of money stolen from the American worker. But police aren’t arresting people on Wall Street, are they? They’re not arresting corporate CEOs, are they?
They go after pretty much middle class and below, but especially the poor. Probably 90% of the people they harass or arrest are the poor. It is designed to reinforce capitalism because capitalism creates an incredibly unequal, unfair, oppressive system. And they’re there to make sure that people don’t join together and realize that their true enemy is the ruling elite.
He says American cities have far fewer police officers than European cities, and he gives examples: Los Angeles, 8,500 officers—only 8,500 officers in Los Angeles. Berlin, 18,000 officers. Phoenix, 2,500 officers. Munich, nearly 6,200 officers.
So I thought I would look up the truth about Los Angeles. Is it really such a small number in Los Angeles? It really [ __ ] no. If you actually look at greater Los Angeles, it’s over 22,000 police officers. But on top of that, police officers are not the only law enforcement in Los Angeles or in most cities in the United States. You’ve got state law enforcement, you’ve got FBI, federal, you’ve got state troopers. In D.C., there’s apparently like 17 law enforcement agencies. There’s park police, there’s Capitol Police.
When he gives these numbers of how many police officers, he’s specifically using a tiny little area of Los Angeles, like the city of Los Angeles specifically. He’s then not counting any law enforcement except city police officers. He’s not counting anything else that goes on involving law enforcement throughout Los Angeles. So it’s designed to misconstrue these numbers.
And then, of course, outside of sheer numbers, a lot of it just has to do with how these law enforcement officers behave. In other cities, you might have more, but they’re doing something different. They’re not running in and murdering people, which is what we do in the U.S. They’re often not running in and even pointing a gun at people. A lot of police officers in certain countries don’t even have guns.
So it’s just a completely different situation, and he acts like clearly the reason you have so much less crime in Europe is just because there are more police officers, which is utter [ __ ] on every level.
Understaffing: Fewer police officers may encourage more aggressive policing. So the idea that because you don’t have enough police, they therefore go in more aggressively, they attack people more because there’s not enough of them—again, [ __ ]. This is not true. You could look at times where there were more in a city or less in a city, and they don’t get more aggressive because there are more or less. There’s no correlation between that.
But then, on top of that, if you actually look at the diagram of what police in certain cities do with their time, the amount dealing with violent crime is a tiny, tiny percent. It is 4% or less of their time spent dealing with violent crime. The vast majority of what police do is tiny traffic [ __ ], harassing people sleeping on a bench, going after a homeless person because they had a fire in a barrel so they could keep warm in the winter.
And they’re doing far more of that [ __ ] in poorer areas. So you have police wandering around poorer areas far more than you do in the suburbs. And again, that’s because the main purpose of police is to reinforce the class war. It’s to make sure the poor stay down and the rich can be comfortably rich without being worried about being rich.
He also says when police are sufficiently numerous, they can maintain public safety through consistent presence. Does that sound like you have freedom? Does that sound like the world you want to live in? Cops next to you all the time. That’s what he’s advocating for. We could have a better society if you had a police officer standing next to you all the time.
What the [ __ ]? That sounds like a dystopia to me. Why the [ __ ] would we highlight this in one of the biggest publications in the nation to say, “Here’s happiness: You have Flock cameras on every corner. You have Ring doorbells monitoring you all the time. And why not? You have a police officer standing next to you all the time”?
There’s no thought in this article about whether this is how people would want to live. Would you want to live like that? And of course, if you doubled the police officers in the United States and you had them far more prevalent throughout cities, you would have a lot more killings. You’d have a lot more assaults by police. It would make the bad things police do far more prevalent because you’d have a lot more of them.
And then he goes on. He says countries like Norway, Switzerland and Japan have substantial police capacity and relatively few killings by police. It’s not like you have more police and therefore they stop killing people. No, it’s because in those countries, some of the police don’t have guns usually. But on top of that, they don’t go running into residences with their guns drawn.
In the rare case that one of them shoots an innocent person—which in a lot of these countries is almost unheard of—in a lot of these countries, the only time these cops are actually firing their gun is when they’re being shot at. So it’s rather unheard of that a cop shoots just a guy reaching for his wallet or something. But when that happens, guess what? That guy does not maintain his career as a police officer.
Whereas in the U.S., lots of times you kill people and you [ __ ] live on the job again. Sometimes they move to a different precinct, kind of like a Catholic priest moved around. So there are a lot of reasons—I just gave a couple—but there are a lot of reasons that in other countries you can have even more police in some areas and far fewer killings.
Then he goes on to give some more [ __ ]. He says the defund the police movement made things worse because it decreased the number of police in the United States in a lot of these cities. And he goes on to list examples. He says in Philadelphia there was a 23% reduction; Washington, D.C., a 21% reduction; San Francisco, a 17% reduction; Phoenix, a 15% reduction.
But he’s choosing not to mention the fact that a lot of other things happened that are not defund the police in those cities. A lot of those cities had changes in the number of police officers due to budgetary changes that were not connected to defund the police. [Inaudible] changed whether a lot of people wanted to be police and wanted to go door to door, because some people were like, “Maybe this job doesn’t seem so fun anymore.”
A lot of people chose to stop being police because, guess what? A lot more information about what police are and what they do is getting out. The stuff I’m covering right now is getting to more people than it used to. So you have a lot of people across the nation going, “You know, having a badge and harassing people and strangling people and kicking poor people off benches because they’re taking a nap doesn’t seem as fun as I thought it would be. I thought I’d just be a hero running into terrorist situations to protect the city.” And that’s not what this is.
And again, there are plenty of police who are racist and they sign up to be racist. But there are people who believed the propaganda and thought policing was being a hero, and they realize, because information is getting out about the truth about American policing. Fewer people are choosing to sign up in some of these areas.
And then his final point is that he says preventing violence matters more than responding after. Well, that is true. But all the studies that have been done on preventing violence have shown that what prevents violence the most is the things that mostly police don’t do. It’s things like keeping youth in school or, when they’re out of school, giving them programs to do—all of those things that are not policing.
I’m not an expert on what they call preventative policing, so I don’t know all of the programs, but that kind of thing heavily decreases violence. Decreasing poverty has been shown to heavily decrease violence because, guess what? Poverty causes violence because poverty causes desperation. It causes poor life choices because you’re trying to get by.
These are the things that have the biggest impact on decreasing violence. If this lunatic Malcolm Gladwell actually wanted to decrease violence, he would talk way more about that stuff than talk about, “Let’s just add more police”—over 80% men—to go into communities and rough people up.
We haven’t even talked about imprisonment, but we have the world’s largest prison system in the United States. We have millions in some form of prison or parole across this country. Millions. We are the number one prison state in the world, I believe both per capita and sheer number, and it is horrific. And of course, putting more police on the streets would just increase that number.
So he wants the U.S. to be even more of a dystopia. Beloved neoliberal icon Malcolm Gladwell in the beloved neoliberal outlet The Atlantic, talking about how we need more police. What an epic bag of shit.
What makes communities safer: more police, or more investment in people? In this episode of Moment of Clarity, Lee Camp takes aim at Malcolm Gladwell’s argument that America needs more officers, challenging his comparisons with European cities and calling attention to poverty, youth programs and police violence.