Helgi's Point - Police Officers Per 1 mil People

There were 1.7 million police officers in the EU27 in 2009, according to Eurostat. A relative measure of the size of individual police forces may be provided by analysing the number of police officers per 1 mil inhabitants. There were, on average, 3,380 police officers per 1 mil inhabitants in the EU27 in 2009. Among the Member States this ratio was almost twice as high in Cyprus where there was an average of 6,720 police officers per 1 mil inhabitants; the next highest ratio was recorded in Spain (5,060). At the other end of the range, the lowest numbers of police officers were recorded in Finland (1,560), Denmark (1,970) and Sweden (2,070). There were an estimated 28 million crimes recorded by the police within the EU27 in 2009. From 2000, the number of recorded crimes in the EU27 rose to a peak in 2002 and 2003, but subsequently fell each year through to 2009.