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The US is no5 in the world for police homicides, just behind countries like the Philippines, Syria, Brazil. Not a record to be proud of - 1,536 in 2019 accordin
by grey-area 6y ago
The US is no5 in the world for police homicides, just behind countries like the Philippines, Syria, Brazil. Not a record to be proud of - 1,536 in 2019 according to wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
Other countries manage to achieve numbers like 2 for Japan, 3 for the UK, 11 for Germany which is nowhere near even adjusted for population. American police kill more people per capita than almost every other country. Per 10 million people that's:
46.6 for the US
0.5 for the UK
0.2 for Japan
- jpxw 6y agoGuns
- baby 6y agoNot sure why you are getting downvoted. Guns are deadly weapons which are a problem in the US.
- agensaequivocum 6y agoGuns are a tool not a reason.
- baby 6y agoTool to kill yes
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoDo you think it's intellectually honest to compare countries with very, very low rates of firearms access to a country where firearms are available to anyone who wants one? You're comparing the USA, which has about 100k shootings per year, 36k deaths involving guns of which 33% (~12k) are homicides, to the UK which has 50-60 cases of homicide involving a gun per year. The fact is that the US police are far, far, far more likely to encounter a suspect with a gun in the course of their duty than the UK police are. 38 US police officers were shot dead in the line of duty last year. The UK had 3. They're not equatable.
- whymauri 6y agoBy all means, suggest a better country to draw a comparison with.
- toasterlovin 6y agoUnfortunately, the US is incomparable (in the neutral sense of the word) when it comes to most socio-economic issues. There literally is no other country that is similar to the US across more than one or two important factors.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoIt would seem more appropriate to compare each US state with another country of similar statistics.
- jessaustin 6y agoUSA is very comparable to Brazil in every sense except perhaps GDP. For now.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- toasterlovin 6y agoYeah, but GDP is one of the most important socio-economic factors there is. Which makes drawing analogies between the US and Brazil not very useful most of the time. And even race, where I think the comparison is most apt, there is an important difference, in that the US has more ethnic diversity among its elite class. I believe Brazil's elites are almost entirely descended from European Catholics, whereas the US elite class has been split between WASPs and Jews for at least 100 years and is now being cracked open quite rapidly by people of East Asian and South Asian descent.
- mdorazio 6y agoOk, how about if we compare to Canada? It sits at 9.7 per 10 million people.
- missedthecue 6y agoTo what do attribute the difference between US and UK police deaths? Do you think police brutality is the main factor?
- mhh__ 6y agoLack of guns and also a totally different attitude to policing. British policing isn't without problems but the idea of (say) police barging into someone's house guns blazing without announcing themselves (as happened recently) is absolutely unimaginable in the UK. British police operate on consent whereas American police operate on fear (is the stereotype)
- seer 6y agoIn Europe in general police operate on the principle of “plice lives < civilian lives”. This means that you as a police officer do not shoot if you are threatened, you shoot only if _other civilions_ are threatened. Or put it another way your job is to protect civilian lives, even at the cost of your own life. As far as I understand in the us its the other way around - “police lives > civilian lives” - e.g. shoot when threatened directly. Or it is acceptable to kill civilians to save police lives. In the long term that kind of doctrine is bound to have consequences on stats like deaths caused by the police, no matter how good / bad the intentions of individual officers are. And it frames how the public reacts to events as well. Like if you are a cop and you shoot a person trying to rob a bank in the US your friends and family might congratulate you on a job well done, where as in europe you’ll be looked at with disdain by your loved ones.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _-david-_ 6y agoWhat is the violent crime rates in those countries? If there are more violent crime its understandable that there would be more police killings,