Overall, there was one police officer for every 299 inhabitants in the EU (average 2017-2019), or 334.0 police officers per 100 000 inhabitants. The value was slightly lower than the previous three-year average (339.4 police officers per 100 000 inabithants).
However, there are big differences between countries. The lowest number of police officers per 100 000 inhabitants was in Finland (137.8), followed by Denmark (190.6), and Sweden (198.4). In nine EU Member States the figure was over 400, including Latvia (450.37 in 2019).
Due to differences in how countries organise law enforcement, there may be differences in which jobs count as police jobs.
Latvia has the second-highest proportion of female police officers. In the EU, on average for the period 2017 to 2019, slightly more than one in six police officers were women (17.4 %). There are large differences between EU Member States, as illustrated in Figure 2. The highest percentage of women police officers was in Lithuania (39.3 %), followed by Latvia (39.2 %), Estonia (35.3 %), the Netherlands (33.7 %), and Sweden (32.6 %). In all EU countries, with the exception of Luxembourg and Bulgaria, the percentage of women among police officers in the period 2017-2019 increased compared to the average for the period 2016-2018.
With regard to judges, Latvia leads the whole EU, with more than three quarters of its judges being female.
