The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö Page A

Not because the general public takes a solid stand behind the forces of law and order—as it does, for example, in England or the socialist countries—but because the police chief’s entire private army suddenly knows what it wants, and, what’s more, wants it very badly.
    Martin Beck stood on Regeringsgatan enjoying the chilly freshness of the early morning.
    He wasn’t armed, but in the inside right-hand pocket of his coat he was carrying a stenciled circular from National Police Headquarters. It was a copy of a recent sociologicalstudy, and he’d found it on his desk the day before.
    The police force took a very dim view of sociologists—particularly in recent years since they’d started working more and more with the activities and attitudes of policemen—and all their pronouncements were read with great suspicion by the men at the top. Perhaps the brass realized that in the long run it would prove untenable simply to insist that everyone involved in sociology was actually a communist or some other subversive.
    Sociologists were capable of anything, as Superintendent Malm had recently pointed out in one of his many moments of indignation. Martin Beck, among others, was supposed to look on Malm as his superior.
    Maybe Malm was right. Sociologists got all kinds of ideas. For example, they came up with the fact that you no longer needed better than a D average to get into the Police Academy, and that the average IQ of patrolmen in Stockholm had dropped to 93.
    “It’s a lie!” Malm had shouted. “And what’s more it isn’t true! And on top of that it isn’t any lower than in New York!”
    He’d just returned from a study tour in the States.
    The report in Martin Beck’s pocket revealed a number of interesting new facts. It proved that police work wasn’t a bit more dangerous than any other profession. On the contrary, most other jobs involved much greater risks. Construction workers and lumberjacks lived considerably more hazardous lives, not to mention longshoremen or taxi drivers or housewives.
    But hadn’t it always been generally accepted that a policeman’s lot was riskier and tougher and less well paid than any other? The answer was painfully simple. Yes, but only because no other professional group sufferedfrom such role fixation or dramatized its daily life to the same degree as did the police.
    It was all supported by figures. The number of injured policemen was negligible when compared with the number of people annually mistreated by the police. And so forth.
    And it didn’t apply only to Stockholm. In New York, for example, an average of seven policemen were killed every year, whereas taxi drivers perished at the rate of two a month, housewives one a week, and among the unemployed the rate was one a day.
    To these odious sociologists nothing was holy. There was a Swedish team that had even managed to torpedo the myth of the English bobby and reduce it to its proper proportions, namely, to the fact that the English police are not armed and therefore don’t provoke violence to the same degree as certain others. Even in Denmark responsible authorities had managed to grasp this fact, and only in exceptional situations were policemen permitted to sign out weapons.
    But such was not the case in Stockholm.
    Martin Beck had suddenly started thinking about this study as he stood looking at Nyman’s body.
    And now it came to mind again. He realized that the conclusions that document drew were correct, and paradoxically enough he sensed some sort of connection between those conclusions and the murder that occupied him at the moment.
    It’s not dangerous to be a policeman, and in fact it’s the policemen who are dangerous, and a little while ago he’d been looking down at the butchered body of a policeman.
    To his surprise, the corners of his mouth started to quiver, and for a moment it felt as if he were going to sitdown on the steps leading from Regeringsgatan down to Kungsgatan and burst into