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Personally I think one of the main reasons US police don't hesitate to use deadly force is that they are not held accountable for it. In the UK it s a big deal

Personally I think one of the main reasons US police don't hesitate to use deadly force is that they are not held accountable for it. In the UK it s a big deal when an officer uses his weapon, there are investigations etc. In the US, as we've seen in the last couple of years, there can be start to finish video evidence of an officer using deadly force completely unnecessarily and he/she gets away with it. If you start prosecuting officers for using deadly force without proper cause I'm sure use of it would drop pretty dramatically.

dazc 10y ago
In the UK there may well be investigations but the end result is the same.
galfarragem 10y ago
>> If you start prosecuting officers for using deadly force without proper cause I'm sure use of it would drop pretty dramatically. Or yet more reasonable: police would not care to act. Why act if you can destroy your life and nobody protects you? The proper cause is very subjective and nowadays biased against police officers.
- RubyPinch 10y ago
  "not caring to act" would also be a very wrong thing and as one would expect from any other job, they should be fired for not working.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    And replaced by whom? We have enough trouble recruiting police officers as it is; it's a thankless, dangerous, ill-compensated, and often literally terrible job. Add to that the increasingly common perception that, in exchange for doing your best to protect and preserve your community and your society, you're liable to be thrown under the bus by everyone from your own chain of command to the national legislature and executive for purely political reasons - and is it any wonder that more and more police officers are losing their willingness to risk themselves for a society which, from their point of view, no longer has their back but rather looks for any excuse to plant a knife in it?
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      So basically, what you have is a broken system that neither the police nor the general public are happy about: the police because they worry they will be treated unjustly if they need to exercise deadly force, and the general public because they worry the police might kill them for minor traffic violations.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        No, it's a lot worse than that. Twelve percent of the general public, and that heavily concentrated in the Old South states plus a few conurbations almost entirely east of the Mississippi. Too, that twelve percent gives rise to a disproportionately large fraction of violent crime in the United States. These facts together have an amazingly wide range of deleterious effects.
stevekemp 10y ago
> In the UK it s a big deal when an officer uses his weapon, there are investigations etc. Agreed. Though even so they still shoot more than other (smaller) countries: http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_times_in_2013/7701005 http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_tim...
- berntb 10y ago
  Uh, no? The UK police seems to shoot less than the Finnish, despite Finland having a fraction of the population. Quick Google, for England and Wales: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/298435/Police_use_of_firearms_Commons.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... "The Police discharged a conventional firearm in 3 incidents (down from 5 incidents in 2011-12)."
jeffmould 10y ago
The problem is not the lack of prosecution in the US. There are in fact countless attempts to prosecute officers for deadly force. The problem is that the bar for determining justified vs unjustified is low in the US. This bar makes it extremely, if not almost impossible except in very rare cases, to prosecute an officer for deadly force. There were two Supreme Court rulings that created the bar that we see today. First is Tennessee vs. Garner and the second is Graham vs. Conner. The US has bigger issues that are at the root of police shootings in my opinion. These issues stem from extreme poverty, lack of jobs, disenfranchisement laws for convicted criminals, a lack of responsibility or taking responsibility for actions, and a growing distrust of the police that is so large community members would rather not report any crime. As an example, there is an article this morning in the DC news[1] calling for the police department to be completely eliminated and allow citizens to enforce the laws. I don't even know where to begin with that idea and I know it will never happen, but to have so much distrust that you call for eliminating the entire department shows a bigger problem. How do you fix it? That's a good question. I am huge proponent of community policing. Taking officers out of cars and putting them on foot in the communities. But unfortunately community policing creates another set of problems in the US. There are limited police resources and therefore those resources logically are deployed to areas that most need them. Right or wrong, these areas tend to be poor communities or inner city areas where minority populations are larger. In turn community policing is often viewed as targeting. I am not going to sit here and deny that "profiling" does not occur and that there have not been extreme instances of "targeting". It is easy for me as a white male to be numb to the day-to-day problems that minorities face. But these terms, in my opinion, have become overused and the media has no problem turning "community policing" into acts of "targeting" solely for profit. Instead of focusing on these isolated shootings (and they are isolated compared to the amount of policing that occurs daily) we, as a society, need to focus on solving the bigger issues. You start addressing the poverty, the education system, disenfranchisement laws, and working to build families instead of tearing them apart, only then will we see reduced incidents of officer involved shootings. [1] http://wjla.com/news/local/black-lives-matter-dc-speaks-out-against-killing-police-officers http://wjla.com/news/local/black-lives-matter-dc-speaks-out-...
- tremon 10y ago
  There are in fact countless attempts to prosecute officers for deadly force. The problem is that the bar for determining justified vs unjustified is low in the US To be fair, the GP talked about accountability of the officers. If 99% of the officers are prosecuted, acquitted, and they keep their jobs, in effect they are not held to account.

dazc 10y ago

In the UK there may well be investigations but the end result is the same.

galfarragem 10y ago

>> If you start prosecuting officers for using deadly force without proper cause I'm sure use of it would drop pretty dramatically. Or yet more reasonable: police would not care to act. Why act if you can destroy your life and nobody protects you? The proper cause is very subjective and nowadays biased against police officers.

RubyPinch 10y ago
"not caring to act" would also be a very wrong thing and as one would expect from any other job, they should be fired for not working.
- throwanem 10y ago
  And replaced by whom? We have enough trouble recruiting police officers as it is; it's a thankless, dangerous, ill-compensated, and often literally terrible job. Add to that the increasingly common perception that, in exchange for doing your best to protect and preserve your community and your society, you're liable to be thrown under the bus by everyone from your own chain of command to the national legislature and executive for purely political reasons - and is it any wonder that more and more police officers are losing their willingness to risk themselves for a society which, from their point of view, no longer has their back but rather looks for any excuse to plant a knife in it?
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    So basically, what you have is a broken system that neither the police nor the general public are happy about: the police because they worry they will be treated unjustly if they need to exercise deadly force, and the general public because they worry the police might kill them for minor traffic violations.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      No, it's a lot worse than that. Twelve percent of the general public, and that heavily concentrated in the Old South states plus a few conurbations almost entirely east of the Mississippi. Too, that twelve percent gives rise to a disproportionately large fraction of violent crime in the United States. These facts together have an amazingly wide range of deleterious effects.

stevekemp 10y ago

> In the UK it s a big deal when an officer uses his weapon, there are investigations etc. Agreed. Though even so they still shoot more than other (smaller) countries: http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_times_in_2013/7701005 http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_tim...

berntb 10y ago
Uh, no? The UK police seems to shoot less than the Finnish, despite Finland having a fraction of the population. Quick Google, for England and Wales: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/298435/Police_use_of_firearms_Commons.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... "The Police discharged a conventional firearm in 3 incidents (down from 5 incidents in 2011-12)."

jeffmould 10y ago

The problem is not the lack of prosecution in the US. There are in fact countless attempts to prosecute officers for deadly force. The problem is that the bar for determining justified vs unjustified is low in the US. This bar makes it extremely, if not almost impossible except in very rare cases, to prosecute an officer for deadly force. There were two Supreme Court rulings that created the bar that we see today. First is Tennessee vs. Garner and the second is Graham vs. Conner. The US has bigger issues that are at the root of police shootings in my opinion. These issues stem from extreme poverty, lack of jobs, disenfranchisement laws for convicted criminals, a lack of responsibility or taking responsibility for actions, and a growing distrust of the police that is so large community members would rather not report any crime. As an example, there is an article this morning in the DC news[1] calling for the police department to be completely eliminated and allow citizens to enforce the laws. I don't even know where to begin with that idea and I know it will never happen, but to have so much distrust that you call for eliminating the entire department shows a bigger problem. How do you fix it? That's a good question. I am huge proponent of community policing. Taking officers out of cars and putting them on foot in the communities. But unfortunately community policing creates another set of problems in the US. There are limited police resources and therefore those resources logically are deployed to areas that most need them. Right or wrong, these areas tend to be poor communities or inner city areas where minority populations are larger. In turn community policing is often viewed as targeting. I am not going to sit here and deny that "profiling" does not occur and that there have not been extreme instances of "targeting". It is easy for me as a white male to be numb to the day-to-day problems that minorities face. But these terms, in my opinion, have become overused and the media has no problem turning "community policing" into acts of "targeting" solely for profit. Instead of focusing on these isolated shootings (and they are isolated compared to the amount of policing that occurs daily) we, as a society, need to focus on solving the bigger issues. You start addressing the poverty, the education system, disenfranchisement laws, and working to build families instead of tearing them apart, only then will we see reduced incidents of officer involved shootings. [1] http://wjla.com/news/local/black-lives-matter-dc-speaks-out-against-killing-police-officers http://wjla.com/news/local/black-lives-matter-dc-speaks-out-...

tremon 10y ago
There are in fact countless attempts to prosecute officers for deadly force. The problem is that the bar for determining justified vs unjustified is low in the US To be fair, the GP talked about accountability of the officers. If 99% of the officers are prosecuted, acquitted, and they keep their jobs, in effect they are not held to account.