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I'm an American expat living in the UK, so I am interested in judging things on comparative rather than absolute terms. In the UK, the police are on track to h

by nkoren 11y ago

I'm an American expat living in the UK, so I am interested in judging things on comparative rather than absolute terms. In the UK, the police are on track to have killed 3 people in 2015[1]. In the US, the police are on track to have killed 1,200 people[2]. Adjusted for population, the US has a police homicide rate that is 79 times higher than in the UK. In some places, police violence is now the no. 1 form of homicide, ahead of gang violence, petty crime, domestic violence, child abuse, and any other category of violence.[3] Actual homicide is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but if this doesn't qualify as "significantly and often" then I'm not sure what does. This is not just a civilian attitude. There are plenty of (ex-) police who feel this way too.[4] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc... 2: http://killedbypolice.net/ http://killedbypolice.net/ 3: http://www.sltrib.com/news/1842489-155/killings-by-utah-police-outpacing-gang http://www.sltrib.com/news/1842489-155/killings-by-utah-poli... 4: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/06/i-was-a-st-louis-cop-my-peers-were-racist-and-violent-and-theres-only-one-fix/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/06/...

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Nice statistics. Just because an officer kills, doesn't mean it was a crime and it doesn't mean the officer overstepped his bounds.
- anu_gupta 11y ago
  > Nice statistics Yeah, it sucks when someone comes armed with facts, doesn't it?
- antimagic 11y ago
  So what, you're postulating that US citizens justly deserve to be killed by police 79 time more than their British counterparts? I mean the police is only supposed to kill to protect their, or a bystander's, life. We know from the few times that police-caused deaths have been caught on video in the US that this is often not at all the case. The guy shot down as he walks down the middle of the road. The guy who's neck gets broken in a police van, the young kid shot down in a park because he's playing with a toy gun. The guy that is choked to death because he's selling loose cigarettes in the street. Those are all recent cases that I am personally aware of, as a non-US citizen, living in Europe. I'm sure there have been plenty of others. So yes, not all police killings in the US are undeserved, but there sure are plenty that are, and that is what those statistics are showing.
- nkoren 11y ago
  If the US crime rate were 79 times higher than the British crime rate, then you'd be absolutely correct. However as far as homicides are concerned, it's only 3.8 times higher[1]. A 4-fold discrepancy would be completely understandable, and one could probably make a valid argument for a 10-fold discrepancy, based on a theory of necessary force multipliers or something like that, but a 79-fold discrepancy is utterly indefensible. Let me repeat: criminals in the US are 3.8 times more prevalent and/or violent than their UK counterparts, but police in the US are are 79 times more violent than their UK counterparts. (I'm using homicide as a proxy for overall crime, because the definition, record-keeping, and rate of reporting for other crimes varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, whereas homicide is defined relatively consistently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and is almost universally reported.) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
  - Pinatubo 11y ago
    I think to get a complete picture we'd also need to consider the relative prevalence of firearms in the US versus the UK. There are fewer non-lethal options for dealing with someone armed with a guns as opposed to other weapons.
golergka 11y ago
Don't you think you should also include crime rate in this analysis? And split it by areas. I don't think anyone would find if suspicious that cops kill more people in crime-infested poor neighborhood with constant gang violence than in a high-middle class London suburb.
- tremon 11y ago
  No. The prevalence of crime should not in itself be an excuse for the police to use lethal force. Or maybe you meant to argue that crime rate is an indicator for general lawlessness of the population, in which case crime rate and police violence are two sides of the same coin?
  - golergka 11y ago
    No. Crime rate is correlated with amount of situations where use of lethal force is necessary. How is it not obvious?
    - newman314 11y ago
      Because as other countries have shown, it's possible to resolve a situation WITHOUT having to resort to lethal force. But then again, you get stuff like this https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2015/12/los-angeles-deputy-shoots-partner-blames-suspect-both-kill-suspect-in-retaliation/ https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2015/12/los-angeles-deput... Crime is correlated to localized socioeconomic situations. FTFY.
      - golergka 11y ago
        Please, show how other countries addressed similar crime rates without lethal force. Single occurences are irrelevant if we're talking about trends. I can conjure an emotional story to prove any possible outlook on this problem. Yes, crime is correlated to socioeconomic situations, that doesn't contradict anything in my comment.
        11y ago
at-fates-hands 11y ago
>> Actual homicide is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but if this doesn't qualify as "significantly and often" then I'm not sure what does. Mainly because police departments do not keep these kinds of statistics, so the data is horribly incomplete. And as anybody knows, you can massage the data to show anything you want when you don't have the complete picture: Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement. That number – which only includes self-reported information from about 750 law enforcement agencies – hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by police officers each year. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks “arrest-related deaths.” But the department stopped releasing those numbers after 2009, because, like the FBI data, they were widely regarded as unreliable. source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/08/how-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-knows/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/0... The other problem with your data is that there is no firm evidence how each of these scenario's played out. Did the person being shot pull a firearm? What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account. All people see is a cop who killed a citizen, nobody knows the exact circumstances around every single one of these instances - which makes ALL the data that much more suspect. So yeah, when you look at the raw numbers, they look bad, but when you add in the circumstances by which these played out, you'd probably find out a lot of these were justified - which is why cops tend to get a lot of leeway in these kinds of scenarios, and are rarely charged.
- DanBC 11y ago
  As I understand it (I don't know much about guns) a weapon is a measure of last resort. The officer should only discharge the weapon if someone is about to die and all other efforts have failed. And when they discharge their weapon they must shot for "centre mass" - shoot to wound is a myth. So if that's true why isn't information gathered about every single round of ammunition that's fired? Because every time that trigger is pulled is a time when someone (the officer, a member of the public) is at risk of death, and pulling the trigger carries a very real risk of killing the alleged perpetrator. (Or innocent bystanders). It's baffling to me that statistics like these are not kept. Maybe this would be too high a burden. But at least they should keep numbers on how many people they kill, and what the precise situation was around that death.

by nkoren 11y ago

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

Nice statistics. Just because an officer kills, doesn't mean it was a crime and it doesn't mean the officer overstepped his bounds.

anu_gupta 11y ago
> Nice statistics Yeah, it sucks when someone comes armed with facts, doesn't it?
antimagic 11y ago
So what, you're postulating that US citizens justly deserve to be killed by police 79 time more than their British counterparts? I mean the police is only supposed to kill to protect their, or a bystander's, life. We know from the few times that police-caused deaths have been caught on video in the US that this is often not at all the case. The guy shot down as he walks down the middle of the road. The guy who's neck gets broken in a police van, the young kid shot down in a park because he's playing with a toy gun. The guy that is choked to death because he's selling loose cigarettes in the street. Those are all recent cases that I am personally aware of, as a non-US citizen, living in Europe. I'm sure there have been plenty of others. So yes, not all police killings in the US are undeserved, but there sure are plenty that are, and that is what those statistics are showing.
nkoren 11y ago
If the US crime rate were 79 times higher than the British crime rate, then you'd be absolutely correct. However as far as homicides are concerned, it's only 3.8 times higher[1]. A 4-fold discrepancy would be completely understandable, and one could probably make a valid argument for a 10-fold discrepancy, based on a theory of necessary force multipliers or something like that, but a 79-fold discrepancy is utterly indefensible. Let me repeat: criminals in the US are 3.8 times more prevalent and/or violent than their UK counterparts, but police in the US are are 79 times more violent than their UK counterparts. (I'm using homicide as a proxy for overall crime, because the definition, record-keeping, and rate of reporting for other crimes varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, whereas homicide is defined relatively consistently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and is almost universally reported.) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
- Pinatubo 11y ago
  I think to get a complete picture we'd also need to consider the relative prevalence of firearms in the US versus the UK. There are fewer non-lethal options for dealing with someone armed with a guns as opposed to other weapons.

golergka 11y ago

Don't you think you should also include crime rate in this analysis? And split it by areas. I don't think anyone would find if suspicious that cops kill more people in crime-infested poor neighborhood with constant gang violence than in a high-middle class London suburb.

tremon 11y ago
No. The prevalence of crime should not in itself be an excuse for the police to use lethal force. Or maybe you meant to argue that crime rate is an indicator for general lawlessness of the population, in which case crime rate and police violence are two sides of the same coin?
- golergka 11y ago
  No. Crime rate is correlated with amount of situations where use of lethal force is necessary. How is it not obvious?
  - newman314 11y ago
    Because as other countries have shown, it's possible to resolve a situation WITHOUT having to resort to lethal force. But then again, you get stuff like this https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2015/12/los-angeles-deputy-shoots-partner-blames-suspect-both-kill-suspect-in-retaliation/ https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2015/12/los-angeles-deput... Crime is correlated to localized socioeconomic situations. FTFY.
    - golergka 11y ago
      Please, show how other countries addressed similar crime rates without lethal force. Single occurences are irrelevant if we're talking about trends. I can conjure an emotional story to prove any possible outlook on this problem. Yes, crime is correlated to socioeconomic situations, that doesn't contradict anything in my comment.
      - 11y ago

at-fates-hands 11y ago

>> Actual homicide is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but if this doesn't qualify as "significantly and often" then I'm not sure what does. Mainly because police departments do not keep these kinds of statistics, so the data is horribly incomplete. And as anybody knows, you can massage the data to show anything you want when you don't have the complete picture: Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement. That number – which only includes self-reported information from about 750 law enforcement agencies – hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by police officers each year. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks “arrest-related deaths.” But the department stopped releasing those numbers after 2009, because, like the FBI data, they were widely regarded as unreliable. source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/08/how-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-knows/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/0... The other problem with your data is that there is no firm evidence how each of these scenario's played out. Did the person being shot pull a firearm? What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account. All people see is a cop who killed a citizen, nobody knows the exact circumstances around every single one of these instances - which makes ALL the data that much more suspect. So yeah, when you look at the raw numbers, they look bad, but when you add in the circumstances by which these played out, you'd probably find out a lot of these were justified - which is why cops tend to get a lot of leeway in these kinds of scenarios, and are rarely charged.

DanBC 11y ago
As I understand it (I don't know much about guns) a weapon is a measure of last resort. The officer should only discharge the weapon if someone is about to die and all other efforts have failed. And when they discharge their weapon they must shot for "centre mass" - shoot to wound is a myth. So if that's true why isn't information gathered about every single round of ammunition that's fired? Because every time that trigger is pulled is a time when someone (the officer, a member of the public) is at risk of death, and pulling the trigger carries a very real risk of killing the alleged perpetrator. (Or innocent bystanders). It's baffling to me that statistics like these are not kept. Maybe this would be too high a burden. But at least they should keep numbers on how many people they kill, and what the precise situation was around that death.