The number of police officers in the EU has slowly been decreasing in recent years. The EU had a total of 1.6 million police officers in 2016, a reduction of 3.4 % since 2009.

Overall, there were 318 police officers per 100 000 people in the EU in 2016, or one police officer per 314 people.

However, there are big differences between Member States: Finland (137), Denmark (186 in 2015) and Sweden (203) had the lowest rates, and Cyprus (573), Malta (505), Greece (492) and Croatia (490 in 2015) the highest.

For more information, see the Statistics Explained article here.

To contact us: estat-user-support@ec.europa.eu