As a liner note, London’s population around 1829 was approaching 2,000,000 residents, meaning one policeman for every 2,000 residents. If you consider visitors, work shifts, and various leaves of absence, that figure balloons to roughly one policeman for every 10,000. Today’s population runs around 9.2M, and there are now over 31,000 police officers in London’s Metropolitan Police Force, including about 5,500 detectives. That translates to about one bob for every 300 residents. Applying the same mathematical adjustment comes to about one on-duty roz for every 1,000 Londoners. Too many? New York has about 8.5M residents and employs about 36,000 officers. According to the math, that’s one (1) for every 900 NYC residents.
Compare those figures with a smaller city. Gainesville, Georgia (yeah, I know!) has about 40K residents with a mere 119 police department employees (around 2/3 are cops.. so 80-ish). That comes to about one (1) for every 500 residents. Math applied, about one on duty for every 1,500 Gainesvillians.
Some folks must need more policin’ than others.
