7 ms·

Police use of force policies can help to end police violence

73 points by js2 6y ago

corporateslave5 6y ago
The statistics show a rapid decline in police violence and do not support a racial bias in violence
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  So it’s getting better, but still sucks for everyone? Well...let’s just quit right now.
  - bassman9000 6y ago
    It should be easy to dismiss his claim. As it should be to prove it. FBI and others should have plenty of data about it.
    - corporateslave5 6y ago
      It’s very easy to prove. The data is everywhere. Unbelievable that this whole thing is false
      - bassman9000 6y ago
        Post it.
      - penagwin 6y ago
        Do you have any links on hand?
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  Citation please? Also, even if there was no racial disparity, the current situation is not ok.
  - corporateslave5 6y ago
    Just google it, the data is public
    - fzeroracer 6y ago
      The statistics I see from Google all indicate that police violence is going up, not down. So where are your sources?
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      If you won’t defend specific claims, why generalize? You’re not convincing anyone.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      I googled it and apparently there is evidence the world is flat and the moon landing was faked. I think I'm going to google a little bit more to see if 9/11 was an inside job. I'm getting pretty convinced.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  There are no statics because the police refuses to track it. The best we have show clear racial bias: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9
  - corporateslave5 6y ago
    About 1000 people were killed by cops last year. 41 of those were unarmed. Of those 41, 9 were black
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Murder is a subset of violence....
    - slg 6y ago
      Those 9 deaths are over 60% higher than they would be if the murder rate matched the demographics of the US population. The numbers you cite show the exact opposite of what you claim they show.
      - corporateslave5 6y ago
        You ever run the numbers on which race commits more crime? Or would that crush your brainwashing?
        Gibbon1 6y ago
        Most black people are completely squeaky clean and law abiding. Much more so than your typical white dude.
        onemoresoop 6y ago
        Anecdote: we, 3 white guys and a black dude driving upstate New York. Black guy is a geeky nerd and he’s driving. We’re pulled over by cop who wants to know what we’re doing around New Paltz. Cop intimidates/scares us to admit soemthing - he says he’ll bring a DEA team to search the car - when my friend(also white) admits we have a dime bag of weed (worth $20) in the trunk in his socks. The black guy doesnt do drugs nor drinks. We tell the cop its ours and he makes us throw it out and lets us go. Moral of the story: he stopped us because a black man was driving. If he wasn’t with white friends his treatemnt is likely to have been worse. I break the law once in a while in a minor way, few miles over speed limit, maybe more when i feel it’s safe. I never got stopped for it. If i was black forget it, I’d be to scared to do anything questionably illegal. It’s this bad, it’s this sad
- js2 6y ago
  Police kill about 1,000 people each year and that has not declined. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... As well: - According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. - U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times larger than the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer. - When considering shootings confined within a single race, a black person shot and killed by police is more likely to have been unarmed than a white person. About 13 percent of all black people who have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed, compared with 7 percent of all white people. - Police reform advocates and researchers as well at The Post’s own analysis has consistently concluded that there is no correlation between violent crime and who is killed by police officers. - A 2015 study by a University of California at Davis researcher concluded there was “no relationship” between crime rates by race and racial bias in police killings. A report released last week by the Center for Policing Equity, which reviewed arrest and use-of-force data from 12 police departments, concluded that black residents were more often targeted for use of police force than white residents, even when adjusting for whether the person was a violent criminal. - An independent analysis of The Post’s data conducted by a team of criminal-justice researchers concluded that, when factoring in threat level, black Americans who are fatally shot by police are no more likely to be posing an imminent lethal threat to the officers at the moment they are killed than white Americans fatally shot by police. - “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black,” said Justin Nix, a criminal-justice researcher at the University of Louisville and one of the report’s authors, said in April. “Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed. This just bolsters our confidence that there is some sort of implicit bias going on. Officers are perceiving a greater threat when encountered by unarmed black citizens.” Blacks are shot and killed by police at 2.5 times the rate of whites. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1...
- antoncohen 6y ago
  This isn't true. Each year about 25% of people killed by cops in the US are Black, while Black people only make up 13% of the US population. The amount of people cops have killed has not decreased, at has stayed steady at about 1,100 for six years[1][2][3]. In addition to that, 20% of the people cops shoot at are unarmed[4][5]. [1] http://useofforceproject.org/ http://useofforceproject.org/ [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [4] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xwvv3a/shot-by-cops https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xwvv3a/shot-by-cops [5] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-shootings-data https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-s...
  - corporateslave5 6y ago
    This ignores the fact that black people commit crimes at much higher rates. You ever take a statistics class? Learn to think independently
kmonsen 6y ago
Almost all of this is completely non-starters if we don't end the blue wall of silence and qualified immunity. The first autopsy in this case came back blaming existing health conditions and other causes (someone standing on his neck). If there had not been a video the cop would never have faced any action. That report, while possibly factually true, was written in a way to make it possible for the police officer to get off.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions. If the insurance companies don’t get to discriminate on these grounds, why do the police? The police and those defending their actions are basically saying the bar for acceptable police use of force for the general public is as much as deemed necessary by the individual officer in the field, up to and including killing a person. All for a nonviolent offense. To say that he died because of his health conditions is to say that “healthy” people wouldn’t, and so the officer’s use of force was therefore within acceptable limits. I guess the public doesn’t find that acceptable any longer. Good for them.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull. Literally double standards for police vs everyone else.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      I don't see it as a double standard if the incident occurs when police have done everything they can to de-escalate a violent situation, resort to the minimum force possible, and the suspect still gets hurt. But this is why things like body cams that are always on and robustly tamper proof are needed, along with strict discipline or automatic firing if the officer does manage to disable or obstruct the camera.
corporateslave5 6y ago
There’s no support in the data for a racial bias in police violence. Stop repeating it. It has happened in isolated cases. Otherwise police violence has been declining for decades
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Give me some data that supports that please. If not this data show clear bias: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9
  - hellotherebuddy 6y ago
    From a cursory look they don't seem to control for number of crimes identified in the race chart you're referencing.
    - corporateslave5 6y ago
      Honestly I cannot believe nobody understand how they are calculating these numbers.
  - thorwaawy 6y ago
    >How do racial biases play into deadly encounters with the police? Researchers wrestle with incomplete data to reach answers. >[...] But methods and interpretations vary greatly. A pair of high-profile papers published in the past few weeks1,2 come to seemingly opposite conclusions about the role of racial biases. >“It’s really contentious because there’s no clearly right answer,” says Seth Stoughton at the University of South Carolina in Columbia That entire article is about how the data doesn't definitively show any bias one way or another yet, why did you think that this article supported a "clear bias"?
  - seandoe 6y ago
    That first chart says that black males are at more than twice the risk to be killed by the police in there lifetime vs white males. Given that black males are 7 times more likely to commit violent crimes than white males (2013 I think), I wouldn't say there is necessarily a bias regarding police killings.
Someone1234 6y ago
Strongly disagree. "Use of force" policies are how we got into this mess. Essentially it is the honor code, where police can change it on a whim without oversight or public accountability, and when they're violated there's no clear framework. We should completely scrap "use of force" policies and create use of force LAWS, with special prosecutors and civilian oversight. Police shouldn't be policing each other. In fact police should be members of the public with limited additional powers, or "police are the public and that the public are the police" as Peel said. Doubling down on a toxic idea is wrongheaded.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ianai 6y ago
  I think reviews should be done by grand jury and maybe a three member judicial panel.
- optimiz3 6y ago
  Laws tend to lag technological capabilities. There have been rapid developments in lethal and non-lethal methods of force. Policy is needed for when it may be difficult to update laws and more agility is needed. There's a balance.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    I’m pretty sure killing someone by asphyxiation has been around for a while.
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    Good? Allowing additional modes of force should be slow and conservative, not rushed out into the field as quickly as possible in the name of "progress." We're talking about policing, not a Silicon Value startup. "Move fast and break things" shouldn't apply to members of the public, as the police test their new gadgets.
rowawey 6y ago
This is pie-in-the-sky for most cities right now. Municipalities must vote for enacting community-led policing boards that set law-enforcement policies, benchmarks, goals, and hiring standards. It will take time to change their individual departments, but it will work. See also: Michael A. Wood, Jr. https://youtu.be/Ndg-JGmYryA https://youtu.be/Ndg-JGmYryA https://youtu.be/BopwzJ-9G0Y https://youtu.be/BopwzJ-9G0Y https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33293421 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33293421
- ghthor 6y ago
  This seems like a great idea on paper, but I fear that adding more bureaucracy to the situation only introduces a new way to strangle our society.
mehrdadn 6y ago
It seems to me there are cities in that list with lots of red boxes that nevertheless haven't had significant problems with use of force by their police. I guess you can probably find room for improvement everywhere, but it seems potentially counterproductive to just treat them all the same way and assume the requirements listed are necessary or sufficient for reducing police violence?

73 points by js2 6y ago

corporateslave5 6y ago

The statistics show a rapid decline in police violence and do not support a racial bias in violence

germinalphrase 6y ago
So it’s getting better, but still sucks for everyone? Well...let’s just quit right now.
- bassman9000 6y ago
  It should be easy to dismiss his claim. As it should be to prove it. FBI and others should have plenty of data about it.
  - corporateslave5 6y ago
    It’s very easy to prove. The data is everywhere. Unbelievable that this whole thing is false
    - bassman9000 6y ago
      Post it.
    - penagwin 6y ago
      Do you have any links on hand?
jimktrains2 6y ago
Citation please? Also, even if there was no racial disparity, the current situation is not ok.
- corporateslave5 6y ago
  Just google it, the data is public
  - fzeroracer 6y ago
    The statistics I see from Google all indicate that police violence is going up, not down. So where are your sources?
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    If you won’t defend specific claims, why generalize? You’re not convincing anyone.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    I googled it and apparently there is evidence the world is flat and the moon landing was faked. I think I'm going to google a little bit more to see if 9/11 was an inside job. I'm getting pretty convinced.
kmonsen 6y ago
There are no statics because the police refuses to track it. The best we have show clear racial bias: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9
- corporateslave5 6y ago
  About 1000 people were killed by cops last year. 41 of those were unarmed. Of those 41, 9 were black
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Murder is a subset of violence....
  - slg 6y ago
    Those 9 deaths are over 60% higher than they would be if the murder rate matched the demographics of the US population. The numbers you cite show the exact opposite of what you claim they show.
    - corporateslave5 6y ago
      You ever run the numbers on which race commits more crime? Or would that crush your brainwashing?
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
        Most black people are completely squeaky clean and law abiding. Much more so than your typical white dude.
        onemoresoop 6y ago
        Anecdote: we, 3 white guys and a black dude driving upstate New York. Black guy is a geeky nerd and he’s driving. We’re pulled over by cop who wants to know what we’re doing around New Paltz. Cop intimidates/scares us to admit soemthing - he says he’ll bring a DEA team to search the car - when my friend(also white) admits we have a dime bag of weed (worth $20) in the trunk in his socks. The black guy doesnt do drugs nor drinks. We tell the cop its ours and he makes us throw it out and lets us go. Moral of the story: he stopped us because a black man was driving. If he wasn’t with white friends his treatemnt is likely to have been worse. I break the law once in a while in a minor way, few miles over speed limit, maybe more when i feel it’s safe. I never got stopped for it. If i was black forget it, I’d be to scared to do anything questionably illegal. It’s this bad, it’s this sad
js2 6y ago
Police kill about 1,000 people each year and that has not declined. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... As well: - According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. - U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times larger than the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer. - When considering shootings confined within a single race, a black person shot and killed by police is more likely to have been unarmed than a white person. About 13 percent of all black people who have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed, compared with 7 percent of all white people. - Police reform advocates and researchers as well at The Post’s own analysis has consistently concluded that there is no correlation between violent crime and who is killed by police officers. - A 2015 study by a University of California at Davis researcher concluded there was “no relationship” between crime rates by race and racial bias in police killings. A report released last week by the Center for Policing Equity, which reviewed arrest and use-of-force data from 12 police departments, concluded that black residents were more often targeted for use of police force than white residents, even when adjusting for whether the person was a violent criminal. - An independent analysis of The Post’s data conducted by a team of criminal-justice researchers concluded that, when factoring in threat level, black Americans who are fatally shot by police are no more likely to be posing an imminent lethal threat to the officers at the moment they are killed than white Americans fatally shot by police. - “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black,” said Justin Nix, a criminal-justice researcher at the University of Louisville and one of the report’s authors, said in April. “Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed. This just bolsters our confidence that there is some sort of implicit bias going on. Officers are perceiving a greater threat when encountered by unarmed black citizens.” Blacks are shot and killed by police at 2.5 times the rate of whites. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1...
antoncohen 6y ago
This isn't true. Each year about 25% of people killed by cops in the US are Black, while Black people only make up 13% of the US population. The amount of people cops have killed has not decreased, at has stayed steady at about 1,100 for six years[1][2][3]. In addition to that, 20% of the people cops shoot at are unarmed[4][5]. [1] http://useofforceproject.org/ http://useofforceproject.org/ [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [4] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xwvv3a/shot-by-cops https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xwvv3a/shot-by-cops [5] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-shootings-data https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-s...
- corporateslave5 6y ago
  This ignores the fact that black people commit crimes at much higher rates. You ever take a statistics class? Learn to think independently

kmonsen 6y ago

Almost all of this is completely non-starters if we don't end the blue wall of silence and qualified immunity. The first autopsy in this case came back blaming existing health conditions and other causes (someone standing on his neck). If there had not been a video the cop would never have faced any action. That report, while possibly factually true, was written in a way to make it possible for the police officer to get off.

aspenmayer 6y ago
There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions. If the insurance companies don’t get to discriminate on these grounds, why do the police? The police and those defending their actions are basically saying the bar for acceptable police use of force for the general public is as much as deemed necessary by the individual officer in the field, up to and including killing a person. All for a nonviolent offense. To say that he died because of his health conditions is to say that “healthy” people wouldn’t, and so the officer’s use of force was therefore within acceptable limits. I guess the public doesn’t find that acceptable any longer. Good for them.
- gruez 6y ago
  >There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull. Literally double standards for police vs everyone else.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    I don't see it as a double standard if the incident occurs when police have done everything they can to de-escalate a violent situation, resort to the minimum force possible, and the suspect still gets hurt. But this is why things like body cams that are always on and robustly tamper proof are needed, along with strict discipline or automatic firing if the officer does manage to disable or obstruct the camera.

corporateslave5 6y ago

There’s no support in the data for a racial bias in police violence. Stop repeating it. It has happened in isolated cases. Otherwise police violence has been declining for decades

kmonsen 6y ago
Give me some data that supports that please. If not this data show clear bias: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9
- hellotherebuddy 6y ago
  From a cursory look they don't seem to control for number of crimes identified in the race chart you're referencing.
  - corporateslave5 6y ago
    Honestly I cannot believe nobody understand how they are calculating these numbers.
- thorwaawy 6y ago
  >How do racial biases play into deadly encounters with the police? Researchers wrestle with incomplete data to reach answers. >[...] But methods and interpretations vary greatly. A pair of high-profile papers published in the past few weeks1,2 come to seemingly opposite conclusions about the role of racial biases. >“It’s really contentious because there’s no clearly right answer,” says Seth Stoughton at the University of South Carolina in Columbia That entire article is about how the data doesn't definitively show any bias one way or another yet, why did you think that this article supported a "clear bias"?
- seandoe 6y ago
  That first chart says that black males are at more than twice the risk to be killed by the police in there lifetime vs white males. Given that black males are 7 times more likely to commit violent crimes than white males (2013 I think), I wouldn't say there is necessarily a bias regarding police killings.

Someone1234 6y ago

Strongly disagree. "Use of force" policies are how we got into this mess. Essentially it is the honor code, where police can change it on a whim without oversight or public accountability, and when they're violated there's no clear framework. We should completely scrap "use of force" policies and create use of force LAWS, with special prosecutors and civilian oversight. Police shouldn't be policing each other. In fact police should be members of the public with limited additional powers, or "police are the public and that the public are the police" as Peel said. Doubling down on a toxic idea is wrongheaded.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ianai 6y ago
I think reviews should be done by grand jury and maybe a three member judicial panel.
optimiz3 6y ago
Laws tend to lag technological capabilities. There have been rapid developments in lethal and non-lethal methods of force. Policy is needed for when it may be difficult to update laws and more agility is needed. There's a balance.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  I’m pretty sure killing someone by asphyxiation has been around for a while.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  Good? Allowing additional modes of force should be slow and conservative, not rushed out into the field as quickly as possible in the name of "progress." We're talking about policing, not a Silicon Value startup. "Move fast and break things" shouldn't apply to members of the public, as the police test their new gadgets.

rowawey 6y ago

This is pie-in-the-sky for most cities right now. Municipalities must vote for enacting community-led policing boards that set law-enforcement policies, benchmarks, goals, and hiring standards. It will take time to change their individual departments, but it will work. See also: Michael A. Wood, Jr. https://youtu.be/Ndg-JGmYryA https://youtu.be/Ndg-JGmYryA https://youtu.be/BopwzJ-9G0Y https://youtu.be/BopwzJ-9G0Y https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33293421 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33293421

ghthor 6y ago
This seems like a great idea on paper, but I fear that adding more bureaucracy to the situation only introduces a new way to strangle our society.

mehrdadn 6y ago

It seems to me there are cities in that list with lots of red boxes that nevertheless haven't had significant problems with use of force by their police. I guess you can probably find room for improvement everywhere, but it seems potentially counterproductive to just treat them all the same way and assume the requirements listed are necessary or sufficient for reducing police violence?