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From your comment I'm not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me, but: 1)The US has six times the population of South Africa. Absolutely, thats why I

From your comment I'm not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me, but: 1)The US has six times the population of South Africa. Absolutely, thats why I said South Africa currently has about twice the police killings rate the US has. So the math is: South Africa police killings = 409 to be comparable on a per capita basis with the US rate of between 900 - 1200 divide by 6 = 150 to 200 death per year if the US had the same population as South Africa, which is a rate your linked article also supports. Compare that with the apartheid rate of 518 deaths over 4 years, so about 130 deaths per year. (But ok I have not taken 20 years of population growth into account). 2) A police officer killing someone, is not necessarily murder. You're going to have to break out how many of those are acts of self-defense, Absolutely, but that is a very difficult thing to do, especially only armed with google. Furthermore police statistics these days in South Africa is renowned to be of especially poor quality, so I have to work with what I have. 2) Some of America's inner cities are wildly violent, with murder rates on par with the worst areas of Latin America (ie some of the worst areas on earth for murder). Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years. Your joking right. South Africa has an average murder rate of 34 / 100 000 [1], seven times worse than the USA. And if you want to compare the worst with the worst (Detroit), compare it with our farm murder rate of around 300 / 100 000 [2] which is actually worse than most war zones. So in summary, police killings during the worst years of apartheid was less than or at least on par with police killings in the US currently and police killings in current day South Africa is about twice as bad as both. >>Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years. Yup...South Africa :D [1] https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-south-africas-201516-crime-statistics/ https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-south-africas-2... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_farm_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_farm_attacks

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TallGuyShort 10y ago
So your point here is that systematic racism isn't so bad because when the whites ruled the blacks the statistics were better? I.e. you're saying white people are objectively superior?
- kabouseng 10y ago
  No that's not my point at all, that's called setting up a straw man argument..., please don't do that. My point being, I disagreed that in your very first point you mentioned that police killings were a very common occurrence during apartheid ("some of the most chilling stories from South Africa during Apartheid"), and I argued that it was less common than current day USA and much less common than current day South Africa. Now there is one very interesting conclusion that you might have missed from my point, and that is that in terms of police killings, either currently the USA is as bad as apartheid South Africa was, or that apartheid South Africa wasn't as bad as you remember.
  - TallGuyShort 10y ago
    I didn't say anything about how common police killings were in Apartheid. If you could please also not engage in logical fallacies. I bring up Apartheid because they were notorious for covering up some truly horrific things that police did and the modus operandi was suppressing opposition. When I see similarities in the kind of things they try to pass off to explain deaths in custody, I think that connection needs to be made. What I take issue with is your dismissal of my negative remark about "big, bad Apartheid." Yeah, Apartheid was bad.
    - kabouseng 10y ago
      Apartheid was bad, absolutely. But then according to the stats, it was better than current day USA (which was perhaps the connection you wanted to make?) and much better than current day South Africa (at least insofar as police killings are concerned).

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TallGuyShort 10y ago

So your point here is that systematic racism isn't so bad because when the whites ruled the blacks the statistics were better? I.e. you're saying white people are objectively superior?

kabouseng 10y ago
No that's not my point at all, that's called setting up a straw man argument..., please don't do that. My point being, I disagreed that in your very first point you mentioned that police killings were a very common occurrence during apartheid ("some of the most chilling stories from South Africa during Apartheid"), and I argued that it was less common than current day USA and much less common than current day South Africa. Now there is one very interesting conclusion that you might have missed from my point, and that is that in terms of police killings, either currently the USA is as bad as apartheid South Africa was, or that apartheid South Africa wasn't as bad as you remember.
- TallGuyShort 10y ago
  I didn't say anything about how common police killings were in Apartheid. If you could please also not engage in logical fallacies. I bring up Apartheid because they were notorious for covering up some truly horrific things that police did and the modus operandi was suppressing opposition. When I see similarities in the kind of things they try to pass off to explain deaths in custody, I think that connection needs to be made. What I take issue with is your dismissal of my negative remark about "big, bad Apartheid." Yeah, Apartheid was bad.
  - kabouseng 10y ago
    Apartheid was bad, absolutely. But then according to the stats, it was better than current day USA (which was perhaps the connection you wanted to make?) and much better than current day South Africa (at least insofar as police killings are concerned).