The UK Home Office has solved policing in the age of austerity. The answer, it turns out, is simple arithmetic. Divide the number of England fans expected at the World Cup by three, and you get your required officer count. Ten thousand fans. Three officers. Problem solved.

This is not a budget constraint dressed up as strategy. This is what happens when American authorities — who, let us remember, invented the concept of stadium security — look at a bill and decide someone else’s problem is someone else’s problem. The US will not fund UK police presence at the World Cup. Fair enough. But the UK’s response has been to achieve something remarkable: they have made the problem mathematically smaller by refusing to acknowledge its size.

Three officers. Let that number sit for a moment. Three human beings, each with two eyes, two ears, and presumably at least one working brain cell, will be responsible for monitoring ten thousand people across an entire nation. If we are being generous and assuming each officer can maintain visual contact with approximately 3,333 fans simultaneously — which, for the record, is impossible — then we have achieved perfect coverage. On paper. In a universe where humans do not blink, sleep, eat, or require bathroom breaks.

The beauty of this arrangement is that it makes every other policing priority look positively bloated by comparison. When a minor royal visits a shopping centre, how many officers show up? When a tech billionaire lands at a London airport for a press conference? When a celebrity chef opens a restaurant? The numbers are almost certainly higher. We are, as a nation, prepared to spend significantly more police time ensuring that people who are already famous do not get jostled by crowds than we are prepared to spend ensuring that ten thousand intoxicated people in a foreign country do not turn a city block into a war zone.

This is not a criticism of the three officers being sent — they are presumably professionals who have accepted an impossible task with dignity. This is a criticism of the logic that says: we will send officers, but we will send so few that their presence becomes purely symbolic. They are not a security measure. They are a gesture. A very small, very tired gesture.

The real scandal is not that the US refused to pay. The real scandal is that the UK looked at that refusal and said: well, three it is then. There was presumably a moment in a meeting room where someone said, “What if we just sent three?” And no one laughed. No one said, “That is absurd.” Someone nodded. Someone filed a report. Someone approved it.

Meanwhile, across the country, police forces are stretched so thin that response times to actual crimes are measured in hours, if they come at all. But send officers to watch English fans abroad? We have a budget for that. It is just very, very small. It is three.

The math works out perfectly if you do not think about it.