10 ms·

You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a Terrorist

265 points by cryoshon 11y ago

cryoshon 11y ago
A frank discussion of where our national priorities are versus where they should be would include the data point in the article. We spend trillions killing Muslims across the ocean for the privilege of "safety" at home, where we are killed by the police in greater frequency than the Muslims ever did.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- briandear 11y ago
  We are also killed more frequently by illegal aliens. Let's put our troops on the border rather than Afghanistan.
chrisBob 11y ago
The problem is the people are going to look at this the wrong way. Its not that you should be scared of police; its that you shouldn't be scared of terrorists.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  True, but who do people interact with and see much more? The cops are visible and aggressive whereas terrorists are abstract.
- skywhopper 11y ago
  Oh, you should be very scared of the police. They have complete power over you, your life, and your property any time you interact with them, even if you do nothing to invite the interaction. If they choose to invade your home, confiscate your cash, or shoot you dead because you didn't respond to their commands fast enough, or slow enough, or deferentially enough, you have no power to respond.
  - schrodinger 11y ago
    You have no power to respond on the spot, but you certainly have power to respond later through the court system.
    - msandford 11y ago
      Doesn't do you any good if you're dead or impoverished as a result of your civil asset forfeiture, or things of that nature. Just because some people are able to get justice when their rights are violated, it doesn't automatically mean that the system works. It just means that some people are able to get justice.
    - cryoshon 11y ago
      Yeah, but you have no power to make sure that bad actors get fired and charged. They can fuck with you. You can beat the charge, but not the ride. They will not get comeuppance for sending people on rides.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      Not if you're dead.
    - marssaxman 11y ago
      You MAY have power to respond later, assuming the police officer has not killed you, but that right is of little use unless you can prove that the police officer is lying about what happened, since the court will always believe their testimony over yours. Meanwhile, you are likely to have been injured, impoverished, and/or imprisoned; the best you can hope for is that the "justice" system will agree to stop punishing you. The officer will face no consequences regardless of the outcome. Some "power" that is.
- exelius 11y ago
  This is exactly it. 9/11 was an extraordinary terrorist event: it killed more people than the previous decade of terrorist attacks worldwide. An attack on the scale of 9/11 is simply impossible in the current security climate. And "ordinary" terrorist attacks are simply too isolated to ever be a realistic threat to any one person. Even in Israel, where terror attacks are commonplace, the number of civilian deaths is very small relative to the population. Or to put it differently, more people died on 9/11 than have died from terrorism in the entire history of the modern state of Israel. You're more likely to win the lottery while being struck by lightning than you are to be killed by a terrorist.
  - kazagistar 11y ago
    It is unlikely that anyone has won the lottery while being struck by lightning. Keep your examples sensible.
    - exelius 11y ago
      Well, the likelihood of being killed by a terrorist is closer to whatever near-zero percentage of this ridiculous example than it is to being killed by a police officer. The FBI counted 460 deaths at the hands of police officers in 2014 -- and reporting is voluntary, so over half of the nation's police departments aren't included in that number. Unofficial numbers from citizen watchdog groups are closer to 1,000 people nationwide in 2014, and those numbers have reportedly spiked in 2015.
  - user_0001 11y ago
    >9/11 was an extraordinary terrorist event: it killed more people than the previous decade of terrorist attacks worldwide Obviously you mean their "terrorist" attacks on us. Clearly, more people have been killed by either sides "terrorist" attacks. When we drop bombs on 3rd world villages, or fund armies to do it for us, those villages consider it a "terrorist" attack, regardless of whether "we" refer to it differently in the press - protection of interests, operation freedom, operation democracy spreading. Please don't be so closed minded that only "they" are terrorists and "we" are the good guys, everytime without fail. The use terror tactics has been a part and parcel of our militaries since the time the military was created. We are all as bad as each other
- dudul 11y ago
  Actually you should be scared of the police.
- xacaxulu 11y ago
  I'm scared of police and I'm basically a WASP. If I were black or latino, I'd be even more scared. Civil asset forfeiture, drug dogs that always indicate presence of drugs, camera/drone tracking of movements of people, illegal phone searches, militarized police departments with special forces type weapons and vehicles, etc. I'm a former US Marine and the police are basically becoming a domestic occupying military force, similar to what I saw in Afghanistan. I'm more scared of police than terrorists because it's statistically way more likely that I'll die, be injured or be defrauded by a member of the police/legal/civil industrial complex.
  - morley 11y ago
    I'm sure there are plenty of people scared of terrorists for the same statistically unlikely reasons. It doesn't make that fear necessarily a net positive on society.
  - steveeq1 11y ago
    And you are statistically more likely to be killed by a black man than you are by an actual policeman. I agree with chrisBob in that you shouldn't worry about the dangers of policemen in the same way you shouldnt worry about the dangers of black people, even if it's statistically "true". It's simply a bad way to look at it. There is a lot of police brutality news lately in the media so I suspect a lot of availability bias is going on. Things like shark attacks, airline crashes and terrorism tend to get a lot of mental coverage because it sells. And it tends to get a lot of people worried despite their actual nominal probabilities in the grand scheme of things.
    - llamataboot 11y ago
      Police have lots of ways to ruin your life than just killing you (which they can also do with impunity) -- plenty of people have plenty of reasons to fear/dislike the police.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Whether or not you actually get killed by police, there's still plenty to fear from a paramilitary organization.
- mgrennan 11y ago
  Correct - More people die in hospitals then anywhere else. So should you be scared of going to the hospital?
  - forgetsusername 11y ago
    >So should you be scared of going to the hospital? Ludicrous. Hospitals are where the sick and dying go for treatment. Police are there to Protect and Serve. Terrorists try to kill you. Why do the former do more damage than the latter? I agree that the headline is sensationalist, but if you don't think we've got a real police problem, your head is in the sand. Fortunately, the solution isn't that difficult (body cams), and is essentially around the corner.
    - llamataboot 11y ago
      It's important to remember that there is a downside to bodycams. #1) It turns all cops into walking surveillance machines. #2) We don't know yet how much violence it deters, or whether it makes the police more likely to be prosecuted when they commit illegal acts. Initial studies seem promising that it is helpful in some ways, but we don't know how helpful yet. Personally, I think disarming the police would have a lot more effect than body cams.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - vectorpush 11y ago
        > It turns all cops into walking surveillance machines Cops already function as defacto surveillance machines. The bodycam doesn't capture any more than the cop does with his/her own eyes and the cop has the authority to act based on that alone, the bodycam is at least an impartial representation of the cop's (or citizen's) allegations.
        Coincoin 11y ago
        Yeah, a cop is like a body cam that can lie, has imperfect memory and if used in court can only testify against you. However, the problem with technology is the scale. You can't systematically collect everything a cop sees in a database; with a camera, you can.
- tempodox 11y ago
  “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” — George Orwell Billions of dollars of yearly agency budgets are justified with terrorist scare narratives. Saying that we shouldn't be scared of terrorists is a good beginning. I just wonder if anybody will listen.
  - user_0001 11y ago
    the narrative will change back to the red scare shortly as Russia grows. Then the "terrorists" will be our friends. Our war against the terrorists will be forgotten and so on and so on....
a3voices 11y ago
This is ignoring black swan events. There is no chance that police officers will kill 10 million people tomorrow, but there is a non-zero chance that terrorists will.
- Retric 11y ago
  There is a non zero chance a police officer will kill 10 million people tomorrow.
  - a3voices 11y ago
    Well that would make him a terrorist. There is a zero chance it would happen from routine police activity.
    - Retric 11y ago
      If you’re talking about really low probability deaths then you need to consider really unusual cases. Fires gun at fleeing suspect, bullet hits _ -> deaths. Now, how does _ end up with 10 million deaths? Well, the US Air Force for example has accidently dropped nuclear warheads on several occasions. They are designed to be really tough, but there is probably a non-zero chance a bullet could end up setting a defective one off. Of course reality can be far stranger than fiction so I am unlikely to think of the most likely risk. PS: The odds of terrorists being able to kill 10 million people tomorrow is so low it's really not worth considering.
      - a3voices 11y ago
        But it's far, far higher chance that terrorists would kill 10 million tomorrow than police. All it takes is for a terrorist group to get their hands on nukes.
        Retric 11y ago
        If your comparing something with 1 chance in 10^50 vs. 1 chance in 10^55 then sure the first is more likely. It's still not worth considering. First, getting a nuke while hard is not enough. Killing 10 million people takes either a really big nuke in just the right spot, or a large number of nukes. Second, having a nuke is not enough you need to be able to correctly detonate on command which it which is harder than you might think. Third, you need to transport it to a useful location as there not stored in the middle of city's. Fourth, you need to decide using them is more useful than threating to use them. Fifth, if your comparing them to US police then they need to target the US. So, no it takes far more than picking one up to kill 10 million people. PS: Simply killing lots of people is not that useful to a terrorist organization. Making nukes less useful than you might think.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
...and twice as likely to commit suicide, than be killed by anybody.
- DiffEq 11y ago
  So this is the problem with statistics; these statistics apply to the average person. But there is no such thing as an average "real person". For instance MY chances of suicide are zero; and the chances of me being killed by a terrorist are far below the average person because of where I live and where I spend my time; the same goes for being killed by a police officer. This applies to MOST people for at least the "being killed by a police officer category". I think we all know the subset of society that is most prone to being shot by police officers: those that are breaking the law.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Agree in principle. But the chance that each of us will die by suicide is not actually zero. Its more closely related to the chance we will experience debilitating depression. Its a disease issue; no one is immune.
  - bigfudge 11y ago
    It would be nice to assume that were true, but is it actually the case? And what laws were the breaking? Perhaps more interesting is how close the second category comes in terms of frequency: what's the probability for a black man with a mental health issue?
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    > So this is the problem with statistics That's not a problem with statistics, it's a problem with using particular statistics to talk about a non-particular group. If you'd adjusted for people who don't break the law, people like you, who get shot on accident by a police officer, the statistics would be perfectly fine to compare to the threat of you dying at the hands of police vs terrorists. There's no problem with statistics in the way you describe them, just with bad statistics just like there's a problem with bad anything (math, engineering, policy etc)
notliketherest 11y ago
You're eight times more likely to be a terrorist if you get shot by a police officer.
- GFischer 11y ago
  Unfortunately funny but containing a kernel of truth. In my country, police tries to make killings look less bad by ascribing as many crimes as possible to "gang killings" ("ajuste de cuentas" in Spanish). In one case I knew of, a guy was killed when he resisted robbery, and the police told the press he must have been involved in something !!
hieronymous 11y ago
And we are even more likely to be killed by each other (homicides, vehicle accidents) and ourselves (suicides, vehicle accidents). Honestly I take issue with the statistic. Many criminals are shot and killed by the police for good reasons. I would like to see the statistic for the likelihood of being killed when not in the commission of a crime or unlawfully resisting arrest. This is just sensationalizing the issue.
- thatswrong0 11y ago
  If police forces were required to report all killings, then we could know that statistic. But they aren't, so we can't.
tmaly 11y ago
bummer
jobu 11y ago
This is where that quote comes from: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-stupid.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-... "You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack"
philipkuklis 11y ago
"[...]one should ask why police officers are such a significant source of danger." The statements are based on data from 2011. 155 people were killed by police officers in US, total population was about 311.7 million back then. That's roughly 0,00005% and we don't even know the circumstances in which they got killed. Saying you're 8 times more likely to [insert extremely unlikely event] than [insert exceptionally unlikely event] might be true but it's pure sensationalism.
- delinka 11y ago
  Indeed it is sensationalism. And it highlights the fact that we're expending far too much effort and money on handwavy "solutions" to handwavy "terrorism."
  - _dark_matter_ 11y ago
    They don't see it that way. Obviously our efforts have been so fruitful that terrorism has been wiped out.
    - catshirt 11y ago
      of course. and we can't stop now- it's working! how convenient for them.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Obviously our efforts have been so fruitful that terrorism has been wiped out. If that's the perception, maybe we need to direct the same effort to the now more serious problem of police shootings of citizens, so those can be wiped out to the same low level as the terrorism threat has been reduced to.
  - schnable 11y ago
    or maybe some of the effort we put into fighting terrorism is effective.
    - 11y ago
melling 11y ago
"400,000 Americans have been shot and killed since 9/11;" http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/27/police-officers-too-often-scapegoated-problems-society-obama-says/74662192/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/27/polic... Since we're fucking around with numbers can someone figure out the probability of being killed by another American than a terrorist?
- ctdonath 11y ago
  Raw annual odds of being murdered in USA (presumably by another citizen): 0.0045%
pmlnr 11y ago
Note: US only.
- PMan74 11y ago
  Indeed, cops here don't even have guns, he'd have to beat me to death
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    Haha agreed. But where we live other comparisons probably apply, things like obesity or traffic ought to be feared much more than terrorism. Internationally it still boggles my mind why there's so much attention for things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. Remember bring our girls home? All the way to the whitehouse. Since the kidnapping of the 219 girls, about 300 thousand have died of aids. There's this fetish with terrorism as a threat to human livelihood I don't understand. Obviously those were 219 too many kidnapped girls, but I don't understand why we focus so much attention on things that relatively affect us in the least, if 200k people died of terrorist attacks in a single country per year, year after year, you'd expect it to be headlines in the press every single day until it's over.
throwaway049 11y ago
Being a middle income white person not involved in crime, I suspect my risk for being killed by the police is below average. As I live in London and travel on public transport my risk for being killed by a terrorist is above average.
- rmxt 11y ago
  Poor comparison -- you are drawing a comparison between averages that are on different orders of magnitude. Being "below average" in one case and "above average" in another case doesn't make suddenly make them equivalent.
- jamesbrownuhh 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menez...
- task_queue 11y ago
  More than half of the police shootings this year were of white males.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
cubano 11y ago
And you are five times more likely to be killed at a railroad crossing then by a police officer.[1] Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism , and while you will be hard pressed to find someone with a bigger animus towards the current USCJS then I, I think we should all be on the lookout for hyperbole, no matter what underlying meme it may be promoting. [1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a3134/how-trains-can-be-silent-killers-16627219/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a3... [EDIT] The original stats used for this analysis have been changed and edited as different versions of the OP have been posted.
- dandare 11y ago
  I understand what you mean but it is not just the absolute level of the thread, it is also our reaction to the thread. We have sacrificed freedoms, hundreds of thousand of lives and trillions of dollars to mitigate the terrorism thread.
- hnamazon123 11y ago
  5 years ago this wouldn't have made it to the front page, let alone have so many comments defending it as intellectually honest. Notice how no one ever laments how "HN is turning into Reddit"? There used to be a statement specifically about saying this in the HN guidelines. No one says this anymore because the full Reddit-ification of HN happened a while ago.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  It isn't hyperbole that US cops are far more violent and unstable than the cops of other developed countries. Look at how many people Germany kills per year. Now look at how many people China kills per year. Now look at the US...
  - dionidium 11y ago
    Does Germany have an equivalent to South Chicago or North St. Louis? Because we've got one of those in just about every major U.S. city. It seems relevant.
irixusr 11y ago
I don't really fear police (white 30 year old with no accent) because I know it's fairly rare that some thing bad will happen to me with them. I also don't fear terrorists who are even less likely to harm me, or the monsters under my bed.
- ElComradio 11y ago
  You are also less likely to hide in the bushes to ambush someone who annoyed you, more likely to get out of the middle of the street when the cop yells at you to do that, and to not be selling loose cigarettes in public.
  - irixusr 11y ago
    I'm a coward, not a saint. Nor am I very "progressive" (yuck) so I'm not trying to be apologetic to minorities. But I've done things that get black folks killed that white folks get warnings for. And that's the problem. No one should get killed (or jail!) for selling cigs off the street
mcnamaratw 11y ago
I like numbers, but this one might work better if they put some context: "You're 50% more likely to be killed by lightning than by a terrorist." or "You're six times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a bumblebee." Or the somber "You're 150 times more likely to be killed by a motor vehicle than a terrorist." (The War on Vehicles should apparently be funded to the tune of $150T a year, if I understand the value of American lives properly.)
- dllthomas 11y ago
  If something on the order of the 9/11 attacks happened every other day, we'd still lose more Americans to heart disease.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    I can't see the war on heart disease winning an election though.
    - anoother 11y ago
      Which is an utter shame.
  - mcnamaratw 11y ago
    lol there you go. Let's spend 1500T a year on that.
  - nsxwolf 11y ago
    It has been 5,161 days since 9/11. Every other day would be 2,580 9/11 sized attacks. The entire country would be in ruins. There would be no more cities, and the economy would have ground to a halt. We would all be living in a post apocalyptic nightmare, with knock on effects leading to far more deaths than the direct numbers from the attacks. This is why I hate these comparisons to heart disease and whatnot.
    - dllthomas 11y ago
lumberjack 11y ago
But the latter does far more damage to the state.
ctdonath 11y ago
You can also significantly adjust your odds of being killed by police by choosing behavior unlikely to attract lethal force. The core issue with terrorism is you have no such choice, the terrorist making the decision to kill people doing absolutely nothing to warrant lethal force. ETA: I didn't say "make your odds 0%", I said "significantly adjust". Sure you could be shot for no reason, and a few are, but nearly all killings by police occur precisely because the decedent was knowingly perpetrating a crime for which lethal force was a not-unreasonable response. If you choose to not do something which police would reasonably kill you for, you will significantly reduce the odds of being killed by police. The lead statistic would be more useful if we divide the odds between, say, those with vs without criminal records.
- jMyles 11y ago
  > You can also significantly adjust your odds of being killed by police by choosing behavior unlikely to attract lethal force. Well this is the part that it's dispute, particularly regarding people of color.
  - briandear 11y ago
    People of color have the same ability to not conduct criminal activities or resist arrest or attack police officers as everyone else. Yet, why does a higher percentage choose to do so? Why is South Chicago less safe than the Appalachian per capita?
- task_queue 11y ago
  Tell this to the mentally ill, whose first encounter with anyone trying to get them help usually involves police with guns who have a tendency to shoot them.
- a3voices 11y ago
  You have a choice of not living near a large population center which draws more potential terrorist attacks.
- r00fus 11y ago
  Or you could significantly adjust your odds by being black, hispanic or poor.
dandare 11y ago
We need to sacrifice some of our freedoms to increase our security from the cops.
- federico3 11y ago
  That's exactly what is happening with putting cameras on cops and their cars.
gotchange 11y ago
> You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a Terrorist I hate to say this and defend those people but that statistical observation is due to the fact that security, intelligence and law enforcement officers are doing their job in foiling most of the terrorist plots and averting disasters.* However, if terrorists were given free rein, the casualties number on their side would much much higher just like what's occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. *: Not counting false-flags or stand-down operations.
- monocasa 11y ago
  If that were true, we'd be seeing non bullshit terrorist convictions. I'm not a big fan of paying for snake oil.
  - gotchange 11y ago
    To what factor would you attribute this observation if you are not buying the law enforcement competence theory? From the top of my head, the Garland Texas terrorist attach was foiled due to the officers competence who shot down the two terrorist who were about to go on a rampage a la Charlie Hebdo at the center. That's just one example to support my argument
tptacek 11y ago
Eight times epsilon being... I don't think this headline means what Cato wants it to mean; as it stands, what it's saying is that you simply aren't going to be killed by a police officer. It doesn't make more sense as a resource allocation argument either, since Cato opposes the "war on terror".
lpgepk 11y ago
Your source does not support your claim. The only thing worse than people who spew lies are people who do so with footnotes that imply that you're not lying. American police officers are out of control. That's not a "meme" that's being "promoted" it's an actual fact that some authoritarian assholes (read: you) are attempting to discredit and hide. You should be ashamed of yourself.
- briandear 11y ago
  Criminals are out of control. Don't fight with a cop, don't resist arrest, you don't get shot. Pretty simple solution. Perhaps, to be fair, we ought to discuss violence committed by illegal aliens. We don't have that discussion on HN. Perhaps our outrage ought to be directed at the criminals and misfits that seem to think running from cops, fighting with cops or insulting cops is somehow smart. I know far more victims of crime than I do victims of police brutality. You're more likely to be shot by a gangbanger than a cop, thus shouldn't we be complaining about that?
  - rmxt 11y ago
    The answer to hyperbolic statements in a forum like HN shouldn't be.... more hyperbolic statements. The GP's statements might not be grounded in facts or statistics, but neither are yours.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Don't fight with a cop, don't resist arrest, you don't get shot. . Pretty simple solution. Well, except for all those people who neither fought with cops nor resisted arrest and still got shot. > I know far more victims of crime than I do victims of police brutality. Since police brutality is crime, its impossible for the reverse to be true. But really, all that tells us (even assuming the characterization is accurate) is something about who you know, not what the relevant incidence of those things is in society. > You're more likely to be shot by a gangbanger than a cop, thus shouldn't we be complaining about that? I'm not sure law enforcement failing to do their job and thereby endangering innocents is a different problem than law enforcement failing to do their job and thereby endangering innocents.
Karunamon 11y ago
Tangentially related, but I'm a little bit surprised to see something like this coming from CATO. Traditionally, a focus on police abuse and statistics like these have been the purview of the American left, while CATO is a conservative think tank. It's very heartening to see this problem addressed by the other side of the aisle.
- scarmig 11y ago
  Cato has been good on these issues since forever. I picked up my instinctive knee jerk support of civil liberties from them when I was a wee little thing.
olivermarks 11y ago
IMO the word 'Terrorist' is a hopelessly useless propaganda word used to incite fear of the bogeymen in the population. It also lumps all sorts of people together, from credible conceptual revolutionary ideas to psychotic mono religious zealots. Slight digression from the point Cato is making but the headline inevitably falls into the sensationalist trap for this reason...
arca_vorago 11y ago
Cyber-terrorism is the new terrorism is the new communism is the new facism and so on. The military industrial complex works to serve itself, and it will invent or even create and support enemies if those enemies can be used against the public to push a bigger budget. (See Operation Gladio A and B) The thing to realize though is that the threat is from hard to find potentially non-nationstate actors, and the threat is somewhat real, but it is hard to detect and creates a constant state of fear... which is great if you want to capitalize on that fear. To a certain extent it worked for a better good by bringing tons of money into America which along with the UK and Israel is one of the top arms suppliers to the world. (a great intro book on this subject is the updated The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade.) My problem is that this model of fear and money has been taken to the extreme is now eroding freedoms at home, and bankrupting us. Many republicans will rant and rave about the budget, but if you ask about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse (WFA) in DoD/Pentagon they hardly ever admit such WFA exists (even though everyone actually familiar with it knows how excessive it is, especially at the Pentagon.) The other problem is that secretly, unbeknownst to you or the general public, in the smokey closed door places in the Beltway, the strategic thinkers have been saying we are returning to a neo-cold war, and to the tripolar world, and thats the real reason for our expansionism... used a measure of containment against our future enemies, (Russia and China) in the upcoming resource wars. Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria/Somalia/Georgia/Ukraine/The Stans, all make sense if you look at it from this perspective. Don't get me started on the petroldollar and world finance schemes. I don't know enough to quite disagree with that justification, but my problem is that if that's the real reason, the public deserves to know, but our reps and the military brass have all just held that close to their chest and we are hemorrhaging money that gets wasted and it all ends up in VA and NY, and our constitution is being undermined, while our media is captured and corruption is rampant in all three branches of government, and the surveillance state grows so the intel agencies are more and more powerful against their own people and less and less useful abroad... All this spells disaster in my opinion.
joesmo 11y ago
I guess the only thing we have to fear is not just fear itself but the fearful themselves who are driving the madness in this country because of their fear of what is essentially a ghost (terrorism). So much for JFK's America. Today's America is filled with fearful cowards, just like the people in charge the past fifteen or so years always wanted.
simonh 11y ago
Do we know what the ratio is between persons actually engaged in criminal activity killed by police officers (in the US), and innocent citizens? I realise it would be hard to have much confidence in any such statistics, but the point is if I visit the US and I have no criminal intent, my personal risk of getting killed by an officer is certainly not zero, but I expect it would be low compared to the risk for persons who do have such intent. Conversely, my risk of being a victim of terrorism has no significant correlation to my intent.
bprieto 11y ago
It depends on the value of "You". Even if we are talking only of USA and not any other country, you don't have the same probability of being killed by a police officer if you are a white person living in a rich area than if you are a black drug dealer in downtown Detroit. And although terrorist might be more "random" in selecting their victims, you probably are more prone to being killed by a terrorist if you live in a big city than if you are in a small village. So my point is this comparison, stated like this, is useful only to those that want to confirm their beliefs on "police brutality".
Ch_livecodingtv 11y ago
It definitely is not a good reputation to police officers. Some articles would even say 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist is even underestimated. It's awful thinking that there may be police violence and killings that's grossly under reported. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/u-s-citizens-58-times-killed-police-terrorists/ http://thefreethoughtproject.com/u-s-citizens-58-times-kille...
gopowerranger 11y ago
Define "you". By "you" do you mean criminals and others who are evading, resisting or shooting at cops? Or do you mean the majority of law-abiding citizens without issues that involve the police coming after you? I'm in the latter. So is my whole family, friends and, afaik, co-workers. So do I think that 8x number applies to any of us? No.
myth_buster 11y ago
What you fear and what kills you.... I think this[0] is relevant. I believe people whose counter argument is to compare death by police officer to other causes of deaths are missing the point. [0] http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/FEAR.jpg http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/FEAR.jpg
wnevets 11y ago
CATO isn't known for its honestly. What a terrible headline and comparison.
novaleaf 11y ago
I am actually very surprised it's only 8x, considering how infrequent I and other Americans encounter terrorists.
hwstar 11y ago
1. American cops are armed to the teeth because the perps carry guns. I'm not saying that we should repeal the second amendment, but because the perps are more likely to be armed, the environment is far more dangerous for cops in the US than just about any developed country. 2. It used to be prior to Tennessee v. Gardner (1985), a cop or citizen could shoot a fleeing felon for just about any reason. Now they have to have make the decision that letting the felon flee is more dangerous to society than taking a human life. This has gotten a few police officers jailed recently.

265 points by cryoshon 11y ago

A frank discussion of where our national priorities are versus where they should be would include the data point in the article. We spend trillions killing Muslims across the ocean for the privilege of "safety" at home, where we are killed by the police in greater frequency than the Muslims ever did.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
briandear 11y ago
We are also killed more frequently by illegal aliens. Let's put our troops on the border rather than Afghanistan.

chrisBob 11y ago

The problem is the people are going to look at this the wrong way. Its not that you should be scared of police; its that you shouldn't be scared of terrorists.

cryoshon 11y ago
True, but who do people interact with and see much more? The cops are visible and aggressive whereas terrorists are abstract.
skywhopper 11y ago
Oh, you should be very scared of the police. They have complete power over you, your life, and your property any time you interact with them, even if you do nothing to invite the interaction. If they choose to invade your home, confiscate your cash, or shoot you dead because you didn't respond to their commands fast enough, or slow enough, or deferentially enough, you have no power to respond.
- schrodinger 11y ago
  You have no power to respond on the spot, but you certainly have power to respond later through the court system.
  - msandford 11y ago
    Doesn't do you any good if you're dead or impoverished as a result of your civil asset forfeiture, or things of that nature. Just because some people are able to get justice when their rights are violated, it doesn't automatically mean that the system works. It just means that some people are able to get justice.
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    Yeah, but you have no power to make sure that bad actors get fired and charged. They can fuck with you. You can beat the charge, but not the ride. They will not get comeuppance for sending people on rides.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Not if you're dead.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    You MAY have power to respond later, assuming the police officer has not killed you, but that right is of little use unless you can prove that the police officer is lying about what happened, since the court will always believe their testimony over yours. Meanwhile, you are likely to have been injured, impoverished, and/or imprisoned; the best you can hope for is that the "justice" system will agree to stop punishing you. The officer will face no consequences regardless of the outcome. Some "power" that is.
exelius 11y ago
This is exactly it. 9/11 was an extraordinary terrorist event: it killed more people than the previous decade of terrorist attacks worldwide. An attack on the scale of 9/11 is simply impossible in the current security climate. And "ordinary" terrorist attacks are simply too isolated to ever be a realistic threat to any one person. Even in Israel, where terror attacks are commonplace, the number of civilian deaths is very small relative to the population. Or to put it differently, more people died on 9/11 than have died from terrorism in the entire history of the modern state of Israel. You're more likely to win the lottery while being struck by lightning than you are to be killed by a terrorist.
- kazagistar 11y ago
  It is unlikely that anyone has won the lottery while being struck by lightning. Keep your examples sensible.
  - exelius 11y ago
    Well, the likelihood of being killed by a terrorist is closer to whatever near-zero percentage of this ridiculous example than it is to being killed by a police officer. The FBI counted 460 deaths at the hands of police officers in 2014 -- and reporting is voluntary, so over half of the nation's police departments aren't included in that number. Unofficial numbers from citizen watchdog groups are closer to 1,000 people nationwide in 2014, and those numbers have reportedly spiked in 2015.
- user_0001 11y ago
  >9/11 was an extraordinary terrorist event: it killed more people than the previous decade of terrorist attacks worldwide Obviously you mean their "terrorist" attacks on us. Clearly, more people have been killed by either sides "terrorist" attacks. When we drop bombs on 3rd world villages, or fund armies to do it for us, those villages consider it a "terrorist" attack, regardless of whether "we" refer to it differently in the press - protection of interests, operation freedom, operation democracy spreading. Please don't be so closed minded that only "they" are terrorists and "we" are the good guys, everytime without fail. The use terror tactics has been a part and parcel of our militaries since the time the military was created. We are all as bad as each other
dudul 11y ago
Actually you should be scared of the police.
xacaxulu 11y ago
I'm scared of police and I'm basically a WASP. If I were black or latino, I'd be even more scared. Civil asset forfeiture, drug dogs that always indicate presence of drugs, camera/drone tracking of movements of people, illegal phone searches, militarized police departments with special forces type weapons and vehicles, etc. I'm a former US Marine and the police are basically becoming a domestic occupying military force, similar to what I saw in Afghanistan. I'm more scared of police than terrorists because it's statistically way more likely that I'll die, be injured or be defrauded by a member of the police/legal/civil industrial complex.
- morley 11y ago
  I'm sure there are plenty of people scared of terrorists for the same statistically unlikely reasons. It doesn't make that fear necessarily a net positive on society.
- steveeq1 11y ago
  And you are statistically more likely to be killed by a black man than you are by an actual policeman. I agree with chrisBob in that you shouldn't worry about the dangers of policemen in the same way you shouldnt worry about the dangers of black people, even if it's statistically "true". It's simply a bad way to look at it. There is a lot of police brutality news lately in the media so I suspect a lot of availability bias is going on. Things like shark attacks, airline crashes and terrorism tend to get a lot of mental coverage because it sells. And it tends to get a lot of people worried despite their actual nominal probabilities in the grand scheme of things.
  - llamataboot 11y ago
    Police have lots of ways to ruin your life than just killing you (which they can also do with impunity) -- plenty of people have plenty of reasons to fear/dislike the police.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Whether or not you actually get killed by police, there's still plenty to fear from a paramilitary organization.
mgrennan 11y ago
Correct - More people die in hospitals then anywhere else. So should you be scared of going to the hospital?
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >So should you be scared of going to the hospital? Ludicrous. Hospitals are where the sick and dying go for treatment. Police are there to Protect and Serve. Terrorists try to kill you. Why do the former do more damage than the latter? I agree that the headline is sensationalist, but if you don't think we've got a real police problem, your head is in the sand. Fortunately, the solution isn't that difficult (body cams), and is essentially around the corner.
  - llamataboot 11y ago
    It's important to remember that there is a downside to bodycams. #1) It turns all cops into walking surveillance machines. #2) We don't know yet how much violence it deters, or whether it makes the police more likely to be prosecuted when they commit illegal acts. Initial studies seem promising that it is helpful in some ways, but we don't know how helpful yet. Personally, I think disarming the police would have a lot more effect than body cams.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - vectorpush 11y ago
      > It turns all cops into walking surveillance machines Cops already function as defacto surveillance machines. The bodycam doesn't capture any more than the cop does with his/her own eyes and the cop has the authority to act based on that alone, the bodycam is at least an impartial representation of the cop's (or citizen's) allegations.
      - Coincoin 11y ago
        Yeah, a cop is like a body cam that can lie, has imperfect memory and if used in court can only testify against you. However, the problem with technology is the scale. You can't systematically collect everything a cop sees in a database; with a camera, you can.
tempodox 11y ago
“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” — George Orwell Billions of dollars of yearly agency budgets are justified with terrorist scare narratives. Saying that we shouldn't be scared of terrorists is a good beginning. I just wonder if anybody will listen.
- user_0001 11y ago
  the narrative will change back to the red scare shortly as Russia grows. Then the "terrorists" will be our friends. Our war against the terrorists will be forgotten and so on and so on....

a3voices 11y ago

This is ignoring black swan events. There is no chance that police officers will kill 10 million people tomorrow, but there is a non-zero chance that terrorists will.

Retric 11y ago
There is a non zero chance a police officer will kill 10 million people tomorrow.
- a3voices 11y ago
  Well that would make him a terrorist. There is a zero chance it would happen from routine police activity.
  - Retric 11y ago
    If you’re talking about really low probability deaths then you need to consider really unusual cases. Fires gun at fleeing suspect, bullet hits _ -> deaths. Now, how does _ end up with 10 million deaths? Well, the US Air Force for example has accidently dropped nuclear warheads on several occasions. They are designed to be really tough, but there is probably a non-zero chance a bullet could end up setting a defective one off. Of course reality can be far stranger than fiction so I am unlikely to think of the most likely risk. PS: The odds of terrorists being able to kill 10 million people tomorrow is so low it's really not worth considering.
    - a3voices 11y ago
      But it's far, far higher chance that terrorists would kill 10 million tomorrow than police. All it takes is for a terrorist group to get their hands on nukes.
      - Retric 11y ago
        If your comparing something with 1 chance in 10^50 vs. 1 chance in 10^55 then sure the first is more likely. It's still not worth considering. First, getting a nuke while hard is not enough. Killing 10 million people takes either a really big nuke in just the right spot, or a large number of nukes. Second, having a nuke is not enough you need to be able to correctly detonate on command which it which is harder than you might think. Third, you need to transport it to a useful location as there not stored in the middle of city's. Fourth, you need to decide using them is more useful than threating to use them. Fifth, if your comparing them to US police then they need to target the US. So, no it takes far more than picking one up to kill 10 million people. PS: Simply killing lots of people is not that useful to a terrorist organization. Making nukes less useful than you might think.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

...and twice as likely to commit suicide, than be killed by anybody.

DiffEq 11y ago
So this is the problem with statistics; these statistics apply to the average person. But there is no such thing as an average "real person". For instance MY chances of suicide are zero; and the chances of me being killed by a terrorist are far below the average person because of where I live and where I spend my time; the same goes for being killed by a police officer. This applies to MOST people for at least the "being killed by a police officer category". I think we all know the subset of society that is most prone to being shot by police officers: those that are breaking the law.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Agree in principle. But the chance that each of us will die by suicide is not actually zero. Its more closely related to the chance we will experience debilitating depression. Its a disease issue; no one is immune.
- bigfudge 11y ago
  It would be nice to assume that were true, but is it actually the case? And what laws were the breaking? Perhaps more interesting is how close the second category comes in terms of frequency: what's the probability for a black man with a mental health issue?
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  > So this is the problem with statistics That's not a problem with statistics, it's a problem with using particular statistics to talk about a non-particular group. If you'd adjusted for people who don't break the law, people like you, who get shot on accident by a police officer, the statistics would be perfectly fine to compare to the threat of you dying at the hands of police vs terrorists. There's no problem with statistics in the way you describe them, just with bad statistics just like there's a problem with bad anything (math, engineering, policy etc)

notliketherest 11y ago

You're eight times more likely to be a terrorist if you get shot by a police officer.

GFischer 11y ago
Unfortunately funny but containing a kernel of truth. In my country, police tries to make killings look less bad by ascribing as many crimes as possible to "gang killings" ("ajuste de cuentas" in Spanish). In one case I knew of, a guy was killed when he resisted robbery, and the police told the press he must have been involved in something !!

hieronymous 11y ago

And we are even more likely to be killed by each other (homicides, vehicle accidents) and ourselves (suicides, vehicle accidents). Honestly I take issue with the statistic. Many criminals are shot and killed by the police for good reasons. I would like to see the statistic for the likelihood of being killed when not in the commission of a crime or unlawfully resisting arrest. This is just sensationalizing the issue.

thatswrong0 11y ago
If police forces were required to report all killings, then we could know that statistic. But they aren't, so we can't.

tmaly 11y ago

bummer

jobu 11y ago

This is where that quote comes from: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-stupid.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-... "You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack"

philipkuklis 11y ago

"[...]one should ask why police officers are such a significant source of danger." The statements are based on data from 2011. 155 people were killed by police officers in US, total population was about 311.7 million back then. That's roughly 0,00005% and we don't even know the circumstances in which they got killed. Saying you're 8 times more likely to [insert extremely unlikely event] than [insert exceptionally unlikely event] might be true but it's pure sensationalism.

delinka 11y ago
Indeed it is sensationalism. And it highlights the fact that we're expending far too much effort and money on handwavy "solutions" to handwavy "terrorism."
- _dark_matter_ 11y ago
  They don't see it that way. Obviously our efforts have been so fruitful that terrorism has been wiped out.
  - catshirt 11y ago
    of course. and we can't stop now- it's working! how convenient for them.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Obviously our efforts have been so fruitful that terrorism has been wiped out. If that's the perception, maybe we need to direct the same effort to the now more serious problem of police shootings of citizens, so those can be wiped out to the same low level as the terrorism threat has been reduced to.
- schnable 11y ago
  or maybe some of the effort we put into fighting terrorism is effective.
  - 11y ago

melling 11y ago

"400,000 Americans have been shot and killed since 9/11;" http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/27/police-officers-too-often-scapegoated-problems-society-obama-says/74662192/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/27/polic... Since we're fucking around with numbers can someone figure out the probability of being killed by another American than a terrorist?

ctdonath 11y ago
Raw annual odds of being murdered in USA (presumably by another citizen): 0.0045%

pmlnr 11y ago

Note: US only.

PMan74 11y ago
Indeed, cops here don't even have guns, he'd have to beat me to death
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  Haha agreed. But where we live other comparisons probably apply, things like obesity or traffic ought to be feared much more than terrorism. Internationally it still boggles my mind why there's so much attention for things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. Remember bring our girls home? All the way to the whitehouse. Since the kidnapping of the 219 girls, about 300 thousand have died of aids. There's this fetish with terrorism as a threat to human livelihood I don't understand. Obviously those were 219 too many kidnapped girls, but I don't understand why we focus so much attention on things that relatively affect us in the least, if 200k people died of terrorist attacks in a single country per year, year after year, you'd expect it to be headlines in the press every single day until it's over.

throwaway049 11y ago

Being a middle income white person not involved in crime, I suspect my risk for being killed by the police is below average. As I live in London and travel on public transport my risk for being killed by a terrorist is above average.

rmxt 11y ago
Poor comparison -- you are drawing a comparison between averages that are on different orders of magnitude. Being "below average" in one case and "above average" in another case doesn't make suddenly make them equivalent.
jamesbrownuhh 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menez...
task_queue 11y ago
More than half of the police shootings this year were of white males.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

cubano 11y ago

And you are five times more likely to be killed at a railroad crossing then by a police officer.[1] Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism , and while you will be hard pressed to find someone with a bigger animus towards the current USCJS then I, I think we should all be on the lookout for hyperbole, no matter what underlying meme it may be promoting. [1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a3134/how-trains-can-be-silent-killers-16627219/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a3... [EDIT] The original stats used for this analysis have been changed and edited as different versions of the OP have been posted.

dandare 11y ago
I understand what you mean but it is not just the absolute level of the thread, it is also our reaction to the thread. We have sacrificed freedoms, hundreds of thousand of lives and trillions of dollars to mitigate the terrorism thread.
hnamazon123 11y ago
5 years ago this wouldn't have made it to the front page, let alone have so many comments defending it as intellectually honest. Notice how no one ever laments how "HN is turning into Reddit"? There used to be a statement specifically about saying this in the HN guidelines. No one says this anymore because the full Reddit-ification of HN happened a while ago.
cryoshon 11y ago
It isn't hyperbole that US cops are far more violent and unstable than the cops of other developed countries. Look at how many people Germany kills per year. Now look at how many people China kills per year. Now look at the US...
- dionidium 11y ago
  Does Germany have an equivalent to South Chicago or North St. Louis? Because we've got one of those in just about every major U.S. city. It seems relevant.

irixusr 11y ago

I don't really fear police (white 30 year old with no accent) because I know it's fairly rare that some thing bad will happen to me with them. I also don't fear terrorists who are even less likely to harm me, or the monsters under my bed.

ElComradio 11y ago
You are also less likely to hide in the bushes to ambush someone who annoyed you, more likely to get out of the middle of the street when the cop yells at you to do that, and to not be selling loose cigarettes in public.
- irixusr 11y ago
  I'm a coward, not a saint. Nor am I very "progressive" (yuck) so I'm not trying to be apologetic to minorities. But I've done things that get black folks killed that white folks get warnings for. And that's the problem. No one should get killed (or jail!) for selling cigs off the street

mcnamaratw 11y ago

I like numbers, but this one might work better if they put some context: "You're 50% more likely to be killed by lightning than by a terrorist." or "You're six times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a bumblebee." Or the somber "You're 150 times more likely to be killed by a motor vehicle than a terrorist." (The War on Vehicles should apparently be funded to the tune of $150T a year, if I understand the value of American lives properly.)

dllthomas 11y ago
If something on the order of the 9/11 attacks happened every other day, we'd still lose more Americans to heart disease.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  I can't see the war on heart disease winning an election though.
  - anoother 11y ago
    Which is an utter shame.
- mcnamaratw 11y ago
  lol there you go. Let's spend 1500T a year on that.
- nsxwolf 11y ago
  It has been 5,161 days since 9/11. Every other day would be 2,580 9/11 sized attacks. The entire country would be in ruins. There would be no more cities, and the economy would have ground to a halt. We would all be living in a post apocalyptic nightmare, with knock on effects leading to far more deaths than the direct numbers from the attacks. This is why I hate these comparisons to heart disease and whatnot.
  - dllthomas 11y ago

lumberjack 11y ago

But the latter does far more damage to the state.

ctdonath 11y ago

You can also significantly adjust your odds of being killed by police by choosing behavior unlikely to attract lethal force. The core issue with terrorism is you have no such choice, the terrorist making the decision to kill people doing absolutely nothing to warrant lethal force. ETA: I didn't say "make your odds 0%", I said "significantly adjust". Sure you could be shot for no reason, and a few are, but nearly all killings by police occur precisely because the decedent was knowingly perpetrating a crime for which lethal force was a not-unreasonable response. If you choose to not do something which police would reasonably kill you for, you will significantly reduce the odds of being killed by police. The lead statistic would be more useful if we divide the odds between, say, those with vs without criminal records.

jMyles 11y ago
> You can also significantly adjust your odds of being killed by police by choosing behavior unlikely to attract lethal force. Well this is the part that it's dispute, particularly regarding people of color.
- briandear 11y ago
  People of color have the same ability to not conduct criminal activities or resist arrest or attack police officers as everyone else. Yet, why does a higher percentage choose to do so? Why is South Chicago less safe than the Appalachian per capita?
task_queue 11y ago
Tell this to the mentally ill, whose first encounter with anyone trying to get them help usually involves police with guns who have a tendency to shoot them.
a3voices 11y ago
You have a choice of not living near a large population center which draws more potential terrorist attacks.
r00fus 11y ago
Or you could significantly adjust your odds by being black, hispanic or poor.

dandare 11y ago

We need to sacrifice some of our freedoms to increase our security from the cops.

federico3 11y ago
That's exactly what is happening with putting cameras on cops and their cars.

gotchange 11y ago

> You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a Terrorist I hate to say this and defend those people but that statistical observation is due to the fact that security, intelligence and law enforcement officers are doing their job in foiling most of the terrorist plots and averting disasters.* However, if terrorists were given free rein, the casualties number on their side would much much higher just like what's occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. *: Not counting false-flags or stand-down operations.

monocasa 11y ago
If that were true, we'd be seeing non bullshit terrorist convictions. I'm not a big fan of paying for snake oil.
- gotchange 11y ago
  To what factor would you attribute this observation if you are not buying the law enforcement competence theory? From the top of my head, the Garland Texas terrorist attach was foiled due to the officers competence who shot down the two terrorist who were about to go on a rampage a la Charlie Hebdo at the center. That's just one example to support my argument

tptacek 11y ago

Eight times epsilon being... I don't think this headline means what Cato wants it to mean; as it stands, what it's saying is that you simply aren't going to be killed by a police officer. It doesn't make more sense as a resource allocation argument either, since Cato opposes the "war on terror".

lpgepk 11y ago

Your source does not support your claim. The only thing worse than people who spew lies are people who do so with footnotes that imply that you're not lying. American police officers are out of control. That's not a "meme" that's being "promoted" it's an actual fact that some authoritarian assholes (read: you) are attempting to discredit and hide. You should be ashamed of yourself.

briandear 11y ago
Criminals are out of control. Don't fight with a cop, don't resist arrest, you don't get shot. Pretty simple solution. Perhaps, to be fair, we ought to discuss violence committed by illegal aliens. We don't have that discussion on HN. Perhaps our outrage ought to be directed at the criminals and misfits that seem to think running from cops, fighting with cops or insulting cops is somehow smart. I know far more victims of crime than I do victims of police brutality. You're more likely to be shot by a gangbanger than a cop, thus shouldn't we be complaining about that?
- rmxt 11y ago
  The answer to hyperbolic statements in a forum like HN shouldn't be.... more hyperbolic statements. The GP's statements might not be grounded in facts or statistics, but neither are yours.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Don't fight with a cop, don't resist arrest, you don't get shot. . Pretty simple solution. Well, except for all those people who neither fought with cops nor resisted arrest and still got shot. > I know far more victims of crime than I do victims of police brutality. Since police brutality is crime, its impossible for the reverse to be true. But really, all that tells us (even assuming the characterization is accurate) is something about who you know, not what the relevant incidence of those things is in society. > You're more likely to be shot by a gangbanger than a cop, thus shouldn't we be complaining about that? I'm not sure law enforcement failing to do their job and thereby endangering innocents is a different problem than law enforcement failing to do their job and thereby endangering innocents.

Karunamon 11y ago

Tangentially related, but I'm a little bit surprised to see something like this coming from CATO. Traditionally, a focus on police abuse and statistics like these have been the purview of the American left, while CATO is a conservative think tank. It's very heartening to see this problem addressed by the other side of the aisle.

scarmig 11y ago
Cato has been good on these issues since forever. I picked up my instinctive knee jerk support of civil liberties from them when I was a wee little thing.

olivermarks 11y ago

IMO the word 'Terrorist' is a hopelessly useless propaganda word used to incite fear of the bogeymen in the population. It also lumps all sorts of people together, from credible conceptual revolutionary ideas to psychotic mono religious zealots. Slight digression from the point Cato is making but the headline inevitably falls into the sensationalist trap for this reason...

arca_vorago 11y ago

Cyber-terrorism is the new terrorism is the new communism is the new facism and so on. The military industrial complex works to serve itself, and it will invent or even create and support enemies if those enemies can be used against the public to push a bigger budget. (See Operation Gladio A and B) The thing to realize though is that the threat is from hard to find potentially non-nationstate actors, and the threat is somewhat real, but it is hard to detect and creates a constant state of fear... which is great if you want to capitalize on that fear. To a certain extent it worked for a better good by bringing tons of money into America which along with the UK and Israel is one of the top arms suppliers to the world. (a great intro book on this subject is the updated The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade.) My problem is that this model of fear and money has been taken to the extreme is now eroding freedoms at home, and bankrupting us. Many republicans will rant and rave about the budget, but if you ask about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse (WFA) in DoD/Pentagon they hardly ever admit such WFA exists (even though everyone actually familiar with it knows how excessive it is, especially at the Pentagon.) The other problem is that secretly, unbeknownst to you or the general public, in the smokey closed door places in the Beltway, the strategic thinkers have been saying we are returning to a neo-cold war, and to the tripolar world, and thats the real reason for our expansionism... used a measure of containment against our future enemies, (Russia and China) in the upcoming resource wars. Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria/Somalia/Georgia/Ukraine/The Stans, all make sense if you look at it from this perspective. Don't get me started on the petroldollar and world finance schemes. I don't know enough to quite disagree with that justification, but my problem is that if that's the real reason, the public deserves to know, but our reps and the military brass have all just held that close to their chest and we are hemorrhaging money that gets wasted and it all ends up in VA and NY, and our constitution is being undermined, while our media is captured and corruption is rampant in all three branches of government, and the surveillance state grows so the intel agencies are more and more powerful against their own people and less and less useful abroad... All this spells disaster in my opinion.

joesmo 11y ago

I guess the only thing we have to fear is not just fear itself but the fearful themselves who are driving the madness in this country because of their fear of what is essentially a ghost (terrorism). So much for JFK's America. Today's America is filled with fearful cowards, just like the people in charge the past fifteen or so years always wanted.

simonh 11y ago

Do we know what the ratio is between persons actually engaged in criminal activity killed by police officers (in the US), and innocent citizens? I realise it would be hard to have much confidence in any such statistics, but the point is if I visit the US and I have no criminal intent, my personal risk of getting killed by an officer is certainly not zero, but I expect it would be low compared to the risk for persons who do have such intent. Conversely, my risk of being a victim of terrorism has no significant correlation to my intent.

bprieto 11y ago

It depends on the value of "You". Even if we are talking only of USA and not any other country, you don't have the same probability of being killed by a police officer if you are a white person living in a rich area than if you are a black drug dealer in downtown Detroit. And although terrorist might be more "random" in selecting their victims, you probably are more prone to being killed by a terrorist if you live in a big city than if you are in a small village. So my point is this comparison, stated like this, is useful only to those that want to confirm their beliefs on "police brutality".

Ch_livecodingtv 11y ago

It definitely is not a good reputation to police officers. Some articles would even say 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist is even underestimated. It's awful thinking that there may be police violence and killings that's grossly under reported. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/u-s-citizens-58-times-killed-police-terrorists/ http://thefreethoughtproject.com/u-s-citizens-58-times-kille...

gopowerranger 11y ago

Define "you". By "you" do you mean criminals and others who are evading, resisting or shooting at cops? Or do you mean the majority of law-abiding citizens without issues that involve the police coming after you? I'm in the latter. So is my whole family, friends and, afaik, co-workers. So do I think that 8x number applies to any of us? No.

myth_buster 11y ago

What you fear and what kills you.... I think this[0] is relevant. I believe people whose counter argument is to compare death by police officer to other causes of deaths are missing the point. [0] http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/FEAR.jpg http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/FEAR.jpg

wnevets 11y ago

CATO isn't known for its honestly. What a terrible headline and comparison.

novaleaf 11y ago

I am actually very surprised it's only 8x, considering how infrequent I and other Americans encounter terrorists.

hwstar 11y ago

1. American cops are armed to the teeth because the perps carry guns. I'm not saying that we should repeal the second amendment, but because the perps are more likely to be armed, the environment is far more dangerous for cops in the US than just about any developed country. 2. It used to be prior to Tennessee v. Gardner (1985), a cop or citizen could shoot a fleeing felon for just about any reason. Now they have to have make the decision that letting the felon flee is more dangerous to society than taking a human life. This has gotten a few police officers jailed recently.