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> so maybe you can gather some statistics on that Here's what a quick google search turned up. This link [0] shows that US police kill over three times as man

> so maybe you can gather some statistics on that Here's what a quick google search turned up. This link [0] shows that US police kill over three times as many people, per capita, than Canadian police. However, I think there are other issues, like easy access to guns, that affect this stat so this isn't really a very useful stat for our discussion. This group [1] has been collecting info on arrest related deaths but a quick look only showed me links to how they collect data and not the actual data. It also looks like they stopped their surveys in 2012. This paper [2] has some of the most relevant stats I've found for our discussion and covers use of lethal force by police between 2009-2012. From their numbers, 83% of victims were armed or believed to be armed (this includes toy guns, etc) and over 93% of the deaths were from firearms. If we assume that the 7% of deaths were the police didn't shoot all apply to unarmed victims then 10% of the people killed by police were unarmed and shot. Their stats also show LEOs being killed in less than 2% of these incidents. Their numbers do show 9% of these cases resulting in an injury to LEOs but we don't have numbers on non-fatal police caused injuries so I don't want to compare apples to oranges. [0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ [1] https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=82 https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=82 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/

giantg2 6y ago
I think I remember this paper from a while back, but read it based on a different perspective (ethnicity). Unarmed in the context of this paper would only be as it applies to deadly weapons. The suspect could still pose a threat with an alternative weapon (such as a pipe) or even pose a threat with bare hands too. The percent of people killed without posing an immediate threat would be more appropriate, and was 5% (would like to see the details of those with prosecution metrics). I would guess that 5% that mostly fits in the 7% you mentioned (which includes cars, suffocation, falls, etc), but unfortunately the paper doesn't seem to get granular enough for that. So I don't think we can draw a good conclusion from this paper that there were more civilians unjustly shot by police than the police being shot by civilians (the paper leaves out non-fatal incidents too). On that note too, the 2% officer fatality rate you show would not be fully encompassing. Meaning, it would be missing encounters in which the suspect killed the officer without also being killed.

giantg2 6y ago

I think I remember this paper from a while back, but read it based on a different perspective (ethnicity). Unarmed in the context of this paper would only be as it applies to deadly weapons. The suspect could still pose a threat with an alternative weapon (such as a pipe) or even pose a threat with bare hands too. The percent of people killed without posing an immediate threat would be more appropriate, and was 5% (would like to see the details of those with prosecution metrics). I would guess that 5% that mostly fits in the 7% you mentioned (which includes cars, suffocation, falls, etc), but unfortunately the paper doesn't seem to get granular enough for that. So I don't think we can draw a good conclusion from this paper that there were more civilians unjustly shot by police than the police being shot by civilians (the paper leaves out non-fatal incidents too). On that note too, the 2% officer fatality rate you show would not be fully encompassing. Meaning, it would be missing encounters in which the suspect killed the officer without also being killed.