If you’re short on time and want to skip ahead to my critiques of Democrats, certain progressive non-profits, and “pro-police socialists,” here is a brief list of the most important things Gladwell gets wrong:

1. The pro-police “study” by “two socialist Harvard professors” on which Gladwell relied in interviews with Oprah and The New Yorker is actually just an article and not a “study” that does independent empirical research on the effectiveness of police or police violence, was not peer reviewed, and has been debunked in every material detail in the chapter of Copaganda that I have uploaded in full here.

2. Gladwell bases his claim that the U.S. is vastly “underpoliced” compared with other countries on an incorrect count of “police officers” that leaves out many policing agencies, such as ICE, one million private police that now patrol our cities, and many many many more local, state, and federal police. The foundation of his argument is therefore based on an embarrassing factual error, and the U.S. actually has more police than the median rich country even according to the admission of the very same Harvard professors Gladwell cites. And the U.S. having more police than the median wealthy country they studied is true even if you leave out the privately deputized cops, which would essentially double the number of U.S. police.

3. Gladwell ignores the social costs of police, including what mass surveillance and militarized police do to the possibility of democracy and how police use their organized political power to block the social investments that actually increase safety and security for ordinary non-wealthy people. He therefore obscures the longer causal chain in which policing as we know it increases violence and makes people less safe. Indeed, coordinated and intentional police surveillance, infiltration, and violence has been used to attempt to crush every major progressive social movement in the last 150 years, including the women’s suffrage, civil rights, labor, disability justice, indigenous rights, reproductive rights, immigrant rights, anti-war, LGBTQ, anti-genocide, and climate justice movements, among many others.

4. There is no evidence that expanding the number of police would reduce police violence, as Gladwell embarrassingly speculates. This is completely made up, and wrong to the point of erasing millions of additional police sexual and physical assaults.

5. Gladwell obscures the empirical evidence finding that policing as we practice it in the U.S. does not do a good job preventing or reducing even the narrow range of interpersonal violence Gladwell focuses on, and also that there are other less harmful and more effective social investments we can make to reduce interpersonal violence.

6. The notion that we could add hundreds of thousands of cops even if we wanted to is a fantasy. Police departments around the country struggle to fill the open positions they already have extra funding for (one reason we see so much money thrown at police tech companies for mass surveillance boondoggles or your local cops being trained by the Israeli military). Even if, contrary to the evidence, police were the answer to, say, taking gun violence or sexual assault in the United States to zero, and even if we ignored the repression of progressive movements, surveillance, mass incarceration, family separation, and violence that come with more armed cops using Flock and Palantir software along with tasers and SWAT teams, it’s irrelevant because hundreds of thousands more people do not want these gun-carrying jobs.