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As a non-American I don't see this. The American police kills roughly as many whites per day as the Norwegian police have killed during their entire existence (

As a non-American I don't see this. The American police kills roughly as many whites per day as the Norwegian police have killed during their entire existence (it is 1 if you wonder). Making this about race only hides the elephant in the room: the American police is extremely brutal. It shouldn't be this way in a western nation, the police doesn't kill that many except for third world countries and USA. Even if we eliminated the racism and thus halved the number of blacks killed by the police it would still be a horrible amount of blacks killed! https://www.businessinsider.com/norway-america-police-killing-comparison?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/norway-america-police-killin...

40acres 7y ago
I think it's really difficult to see this as a non American, especially from a nation has homogeneous as Norway. The question must be asked: why is American policing so brutal? Why is the criminal justice system geared towards punishment instead of rehabilitation? Why are so many members of Congress former prosecutors? Why did the 13th amendment -- which abolished slavery, make an exception for those convicted of a crime?
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > Why did the 13th amendment -- which abolished slavery, make an exception for those convicted of a crime? Because conscripted labor was an independent tradition going back thousands of years. Compare the legal status of compelling people to work on the roads. There was also an exception for the military, though that wasn't written into the 13th amendment.
- username90 7y ago
  > as homogeneous as Norway I don't understand why this would matter. Why would homogeneity of the population have anything to do with how many people the police kill of the privileged race? Does the existence of black people in America increase the number of whites killed by police? When we compare crime and such between USA and Europe you always say "But USA is so diverse!", isn't that racism? I mean, you are basically saying that you have to live with crime, murder and such when you have a diverse population. Or do I misunderstand you?
  - 40acres 7y ago
    It's my belief that racist discriminatory policies have led to an "underclass" of people, who are primarily minorities, that are criminalized more often and deprived of services that would ultimately reduce crime. So yes, due to discrimination, the diversity of the US contributes to higher crime rates. There was a study recently produced that showed that simply installing street lights in a neighborhood reduced crime dramatically, when you take into consideration that installation would be funded by local property taxes, and that majority minority neighborhoods have lower property values, partly due to post war discriminatory housing policy, it is clear that there is somewhat of a self fulfilling cycle here.
  - _iyig 7y ago
    Homogeneity generally engenders more trust. More trust generally means less crime. This effect can be observed across the world. There are benefits to diversity, of course, but there are also downsides. Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Bosnia, and and Burma have all been riven by ethnic conflict as a result of their diversity, to give a few examples. The USA (and now also the UK, and some other Western European countries) are outliers when it comes to peaceful diversification, aka large-scale migration, and even there I would say the experiment has yet to deliver a conclusive result.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      > Homogeneity generally engenders more trust. Note that studies have confirmed this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and_trust_within_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...
    - lkjhdcba 7y ago
      What do you mean by homogeneity? Do you mean as opposed to heterogeneity such as what is found in the many different cultures, peoples and language across Swiss cantons or German landers, or is it really just "people looking different from one another"?
      - _iyig 7y ago
factsaresacred 7y ago
> the American police is extremely brutal. Have you seen the homicide rate in America? You cannot quell that level of violence with hugs. Police in the US operate in an environment where every person they encounter may have the means to kill them within seconds. This is not to ignore police brutality, but these details matter. To compare the situation to a tiny homogeneous country where guns are illegal is silly.
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  The homicide rate in the US is about 10x that of Norway. The rate of killings by the policy is about 10,000x higher. Also, guns aren't illegal in Norway, there are 31 per 100 inhabitants.
  - factsaresacred 7y ago
    You need to look at gun homicide: Norway has a rate of 0.10 per capita. The US is 4.46! Gun violence is a 45x bigger threat in the US which explains at least some of the disparity.
    - sweeneyrod 7y ago
      45 is still quite a lot less than 10,000.
      - factsaresacred 7y ago
        Police killing is 16x higher in the US. In a country with a 45x higher homicide rate. The 10,000 figure is nonsense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
        sweeneyrod 7y ago
        Mea culpa, my figure of 10,000x was not per capita and assumed that the above comment stating that Norwegian police has only ever killed 1 person was true, when in fact rate has been about 1 per seven years for the last couple of decades and there is not data available before that. But your 16x figure from Wikipedia is also not accurate -- it overestimates the Norwegian rate by about a factor of 7 for some reason. Using the historical data at the bottom of the page suggests that the rate of police killing in the US is around 60x higher than Norway, or 150x if we assume that there were no killings in Norway between 2017 and now. This is considerably greater than the 10x difference in homicide rate (you quoted that as 45x but as I said previously that is for gun homicide only, and you haven't given any reason why that is more relevant).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
justaguy500 7y ago
Lol. Do really you think the American police just randomly think "damn i'm blood hungry today i'll kill some innocent people'? No. They are violent because the criminals they are dealing with are violent. In Europe, the chance of a police officer getting shot at when approaching someone is closer to zero; in the US it's something that happens daily.
umvi 7y ago
Easy for Norway to say. America is 60x bigger population-wise, 30x bigger geographic-wise, and some order-of-magnitude more diverse (10x? 100x?) racially. While I agree America can do better, comparing the US to Norway is like saying "Yeah, our Norway.com servers have only crashed once. Twitter.com would do well to copy how we do things; they seem to have servers crashing way more often than we do" which completely ignore issues that come into play at orders of magnitude higher scales - for if you put Norway.com under the same strain as twitter, Norway.com's servers would be crashing left and right as well.
- username90 7y ago
  > America is 60x bigger population-wise Right, so if they had the same level of police brutality you would have 60 deaths in the history of American police, or about 1 killing per year. Even if the police were racists and killed twice as many blacks, that would still just be one black dead every few years, then it wouldn't matter. The rest of the differences are not important here. Racial diversity shouldn't be related to crime or shootings.
  - umvi 7y ago
    > Right, so if they had the same level of police brutality you would have 60 deaths in the history of American police, or about 1 killing per year Only if problems scale exactly linearly and there are no side effect emergent behaviors you have to account for. Otherwise when a big tech company goes from 1M to 10M users, they just need 10x as many servers, right? Problem solved. Nope, in real life each order of magnitude has required serious, difficult engineering to overcome the challenges, you should read up on how companies like Amazon/Facebook have scaled with users. I'll give you a hint though - they didn't just draw a line and extrapolate how many servers they would need for each year. Otherwise you could just say: "Oh, New Hampshire has a homocide rate of 1 per 100,000. New Hampshire has a population of 1 million, therefore that's 10 deaths per million, therefore by simple extrapolation, the USA should only have 3000 homocides per year!"
    - KptMarchewa 7y ago

40acres 7y ago

I think it's really difficult to see this as a non American, especially from a nation has homogeneous as Norway. The question must be asked: why is American policing so brutal? Why is the criminal justice system geared towards punishment instead of rehabilitation? Why are so many members of Congress former prosecutors? Why did the 13th amendment -- which abolished slavery, make an exception for those convicted of a crime?

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Why did the 13th amendment -- which abolished slavery, make an exception for those convicted of a crime? Because conscripted labor was an independent tradition going back thousands of years. Compare the legal status of compelling people to work on the roads. There was also an exception for the military, though that wasn't written into the 13th amendment.
username90 7y ago
> as homogeneous as Norway I don't understand why this would matter. Why would homogeneity of the population have anything to do with how many people the police kill of the privileged race? Does the existence of black people in America increase the number of whites killed by police? When we compare crime and such between USA and Europe you always say "But USA is so diverse!", isn't that racism? I mean, you are basically saying that you have to live with crime, murder and such when you have a diverse population. Or do I misunderstand you?
- 40acres 7y ago
  It's my belief that racist discriminatory policies have led to an "underclass" of people, who are primarily minorities, that are criminalized more often and deprived of services that would ultimately reduce crime. So yes, due to discrimination, the diversity of the US contributes to higher crime rates. There was a study recently produced that showed that simply installing street lights in a neighborhood reduced crime dramatically, when you take into consideration that installation would be funded by local property taxes, and that majority minority neighborhoods have lower property values, partly due to post war discriminatory housing policy, it is clear that there is somewhat of a self fulfilling cycle here.
- _iyig 7y ago
  Homogeneity generally engenders more trust. More trust generally means less crime. This effect can be observed across the world. There are benefits to diversity, of course, but there are also downsides. Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Bosnia, and and Burma have all been riven by ethnic conflict as a result of their diversity, to give a few examples. The USA (and now also the UK, and some other Western European countries) are outliers when it comes to peaceful diversification, aka large-scale migration, and even there I would say the experiment has yet to deliver a conclusive result.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    > Homogeneity generally engenders more trust. Note that studies have confirmed this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and_trust_within_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...
  - lkjhdcba 7y ago
    What do you mean by homogeneity? Do you mean as opposed to heterogeneity such as what is found in the many different cultures, peoples and language across Swiss cantons or German landers, or is it really just "people looking different from one another"?
    - _iyig 7y ago

factsaresacred 7y ago

> the American police is extremely brutal. Have you seen the homicide rate in America? You cannot quell that level of violence with hugs. Police in the US operate in an environment where every person they encounter may have the means to kill them within seconds. This is not to ignore police brutality, but these details matter. To compare the situation to a tiny homogeneous country where guns are illegal is silly.

sweeneyrod 7y ago
The homicide rate in the US is about 10x that of Norway. The rate of killings by the policy is about 10,000x higher. Also, guns aren't illegal in Norway, there are 31 per 100 inhabitants.
- factsaresacred 7y ago
  You need to look at gun homicide: Norway has a rate of 0.10 per capita. The US is 4.46! Gun violence is a 45x bigger threat in the US which explains at least some of the disparity.
  - sweeneyrod 7y ago
    45 is still quite a lot less than 10,000.
    - factsaresacred 7y ago
      Police killing is 16x higher in the US. In a country with a 45x higher homicide rate. The 10,000 figure is nonsense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
      - sweeneyrod 7y ago
        Mea culpa, my figure of 10,000x was not per capita and assumed that the above comment stating that Norwegian police has only ever killed 1 person was true, when in fact rate has been about 1 per seven years for the last couple of decades and there is not data available before that. But your 16x figure from Wikipedia is also not accurate -- it overestimates the Norwegian rate by about a factor of 7 for some reason. Using the historical data at the bottom of the page suggests that the rate of police killing in the US is around 60x higher than Norway, or 150x if we assume that there were no killings in Norway between 2017 and now. This is considerably greater than the 10x difference in homicide rate (you quoted that as 45x but as I said previously that is for gun homicide only, and you haven't given any reason why that is more relevant).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

justaguy500 7y ago

Lol. Do really you think the American police just randomly think "damn i'm blood hungry today i'll kill some innocent people'? No. They are violent because the criminals they are dealing with are violent. In Europe, the chance of a police officer getting shot at when approaching someone is closer to zero; in the US it's something that happens daily.

umvi 7y ago

Easy for Norway to say. America is 60x bigger population-wise, 30x bigger geographic-wise, and some order-of-magnitude more diverse (10x? 100x?) racially. While I agree America can do better, comparing the US to Norway is like saying "Yeah, our Norway.com servers have only crashed once. Twitter.com would do well to copy how we do things; they seem to have servers crashing way more often than we do" which completely ignore issues that come into play at orders of magnitude higher scales - for if you put Norway.com under the same strain as twitter, Norway.com's servers would be crashing left and right as well.

username90 7y ago
> America is 60x bigger population-wise Right, so if they had the same level of police brutality you would have 60 deaths in the history of American police, or about 1 killing per year. Even if the police were racists and killed twice as many blacks, that would still just be one black dead every few years, then it wouldn't matter. The rest of the differences are not important here. Racial diversity shouldn't be related to crime or shootings.
- umvi 7y ago
  > Right, so if they had the same level of police brutality you would have 60 deaths in the history of American police, or about 1 killing per year Only if problems scale exactly linearly and there are no side effect emergent behaviors you have to account for. Otherwise when a big tech company goes from 1M to 10M users, they just need 10x as many servers, right? Problem solved. Nope, in real life each order of magnitude has required serious, difficult engineering to overcome the challenges, you should read up on how companies like Amazon/Facebook have scaled with users. I'll give you a hint though - they didn't just draw a line and extrapolate how many servers they would need for each year. Otherwise you could just say: "Oh, New Hampshire has a homocide rate of 1 per 100,000. New Hampshire has a population of 1 million, therefore that's 10 deaths per million, therefore by simple extrapolation, the USA should only have 3000 homocides per year!"
  - KptMarchewa 7y ago