We Don’t Need More Cops—We Need a Better Social Contract

A familiar anxiety is resurfacing in our national discourse: the idea that America is suffering from a dangerous lack of police officers. A recent piece in The Atlantic argues that despite the popular progressive slogans of recent years, the United States actually has too few officers compared to international peers, and that this vacuum is fueling public disorder.

This argument represents a fundamental misunderstanding of why American communities feel unsafe. The problem isn't a lack of badges and guns; it is the catastrophic failure of our social safety net, which has forced police to act as makeshift social workers, mental health counselors, and housing navigators—roles they are neither trained for nor suited to perform.

The Efficiency of Prevention

When we talk about a "shortage" of police, we are really talking about a surplus of unaddressed social crises. For decades, the American political consensus has been to defund the building blocks of stable neighborhoods—affordable housing, accessible mental healthcare, and living-wage jobs—while ballooning the budgets of municipal police departments.

We have treated the police as a Swiss Army knife for every societal ill. If someone is experiencing a psychotic break on a subway, we call the police. If a person is sleeping in a park because the shelter system is full, we call the police. When we do this, we are choosing the most expensive, most reactive, and most violent possible intervention. Investing in specialized crisis response teams and permanent supportive housing is not only more humane; it is more effective at reducing the "disorder" that The Atlantic suggests requires more traditional policing.

A Global Comparison Lacking Context

The Atlantic points to European models as evidence that more police can coexist with safer societies. But this comparison is intellectually dishonest if it ignores the context of those European states. Countries with higher police-to-citizen ratios often have universal healthcare, robust labor protections, and a fraction of the poverty rates seen in American cities.

In those nations, the police are not tasked with managing the fallout of a predatory economy. In America, increasing the number of officers without first addressing the underlying causes of crime simply creates more opportunities for negative interactions between the state and marginalized communities. More police in a system that remains structurally racist and shielded by qualified immunity does not produce safety; it produces surveillance and incarceration.

Labor and the Quality of Policing

There is, however, a kernel of truth in the labor side of this discussion. Like teachers and nurses, public servants in the justice system are burned out. But the solution to burnout isn't just hiring more people into a broken system. It is narrowing the scope of the job.

If we want the police to solve serious violent crimes—homicides and aggravated assaults where their investigative training is actually needed—we must stop asking them to patrol the boundaries of poverty. When we reduce the number of non-emergency calls police respond to, we allow existing officers to focus on the work that actually requires a badge. This is the path to better clearance rates for violent crime, not a mass hiring spree that lowers recruitment standards.

The False Choice of Security

We are often told that we must choose between the "defund" movement and public safety. This is a false choice. True safety is a proactive condition, not a reactive one. It is found in a neighborhood where every child is fed, every worker is paid a fair wage, and every person in crisis has a clinic to go to rather than a jail cell.

Doubling down on the carceral state under the guise of a "shortage" is a retreat to the failed policies of the 1990s. We cannot arrest our way out of a housing crisis, and we cannot prosecute our way to a functional mental health system.

The bottom line

We should reject calls for a massive expansion of police forces. Instead, federal and municipal governments must prioritize funding for non-police emergency response units and universal basic services. Safety comes from stability, not from an increased presence of armed officers on every corner.