6 ms·

Except police killings are not a "distinctly" American problem. Just because it doesn't happen as often in other wealthier western countries doesn't mean it onl

Except police killings are not a "distinctly" American problem. Just because it doesn't happen as often in other wealthier western countries doesn't mean it only happens in the US. Moreover, statistically it's still very rare despite the increase in sensationalized media coverage.

dls2016 6y ago
> Just because it doesn't happen as often in other wealthier western countries doesn't mean it only happens in the US. Ok, but you're looking at the rank #1 member of a power law distribution. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ > Moreover, statistically it's still very rare despite the increase in sensationalized media coverage. Police killings are just the tip of the spear. The US also locks up an enormous swath of its population... comparable to El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Rawanda... even 2x the rate of the country we're told is so dangerously authoritarian: Iran.
- spazrunaway 6y ago
  Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately. The only way in recent history the US managed to lower its violent crime rate was by locking up more people via the 1994 crime bill, which is now panned as "racist". America has an underincarceration problem, and is seeing double to triple digit increases in murder over the past year following bail reform and prosecutorial discretion putting more future recidivists into the streets instead of jail.
  - dls2016 6y ago
    > Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately. I know! Wage thieves, environmental criminals, bankers, the Sacklers...
    - spazrunaway 6y ago
      I'd love to lock them up too.
      - pksebben 6y ago
        just get me a tree and some rope
      - effingwewt 6y ago
        This always makes me think the people who scream this have never been to jail/prison. I'm sure solutions exist, I'm sure what we have now doesn't work. We need rehabilitation instead of the 'gladiator schools' we have now.
  - DiNovi 6y ago
    If you believe the us has a more violent population than anywhere else in the world, have you ever bothered to interrogate as to why that is? Or could it be the us has an issue with whay and for How long we allow police and our court systems to punish people? Could it be the us is simply over policed? No shortage of research on this. I ask you take the time to look into this
    - splithalf 6y ago
      Perhaps we’re subject to demoralization and whipped into fear and agitation by our own news media, goaded into street violence, justice warriors fighting law enforcement, our culture more or less in tatters. I doubt all that’s caused by over policing seems like cultural social problems to me. But if you believe that overpolicing is the root problem, the easiest way to reduce policing is not to call them. All it would take is a concerted effort in the high crime areas to boycott the police; fewer crimes reported leads to fewer cops. Otherwise, politicians are always going to feel obligated to add police to areas where folks are getting robbed, raped, murdered, etc... Seems underreporting of crime, citizens boycotting 911, is the only way forward if the problem is overpolicing. Am I mistaken?
      - dls2016 6y ago
        > Am I mistaken? Yes, we can defund them. Here in Pennsylvania, numerous rural (read: white) communities have disbanded their local police departments. Lack of tax dollars and, as I like to think, it's stupid to pay for overtime, SUVs and army gear so that police can harass people for traffic violations and drug possession. The problem now is that these communities don't pay any extra for state police emergency coverage... so they get to have their cake and eat it, too. (That is, they get to whine about how "defund police" is a communist plot while everyone else pays for their emergency coverage... money which is supposed to be spent on road repairs.)
        splithalf 6y ago
        Places without high crime (armed robbery, murder,etc) can decrease policing because those areas don’t have high crime. Those are not the areas where police violence is an issue. So your solution effectively does nothing.
  - jdmichal 6y ago
    You're saying that the US, which is also number one on incarcerated population per capita, doesn't put enough people in jail? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra... If recidivism is the issue, then the way the US treats prisons, prisoners, and especially ex-convicts is the source. The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues.
    - spazrunaway 6y ago
      Yes. >The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues. The problem is, we're not doing that anymore, and crime is returning to its worst levels in history, as bad as the 70s and 80s. A man on parole for killing his mother just beat an Asian woman half to death in NYC. There's currently a manhunt for a man in Texas who raped a 16 year old, spent a little over two weeks in jail before bailing out some paltry sum, then proceeded to shoot 2-3 people. This is a daily reality.
  - foobiter 6y ago
    Incarceration is a total failure to address root causes. To say we should incarcerate more people, as the country that already incarcerates many more people than any other, seems absurd. It’s additionally absurd considering we’re also a total failure at maintaining humane prison conditions... the majority of federal prisoners are non-violent offenders... we imprison disproportionately more people of minority races... It’s incredibly obvious that we’re screwing many things up here.
  - jnwatson 6y ago
    America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The historical reduction in crime started before 1994, so there's not good evidence for a causal connection (controversially, Dubner and Levitt in Freakonomics argued it was Roe v Wade that was largely responsible). Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems. It would be much cheaper to tackle the problem at its source: structural racism and poverty.
    - spazrunaway 6y ago
      >Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems Agreed. Any chance they're committing more crimes? Or over half of all murders? We can control for poverty, which has been found to have a much weaker correlation with criminality than race. Systemic racism is a meaningless act of circular reasoning, because it seems to be defined only by statistical disparities, which themselves are attributed to systemic racism.
      - bingbong70 6y ago
        American racism is clearly systemic/institutionalized... >And according to exoneration data, innocent African American suspects are 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of murder than innocent white suspects. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840501 Unfortunately spreading misleading information without second thought is yet another feature of white supremacist systems, not a bug.
        spazrunaway 6y ago
        From your source: "Judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people. A major cause of the high number of black murder exonerations is the high homicide rate in the black community—a tragedy that kills many African Americans and sends many others to prison. Innocent defendants who are falsely convicted and exonerated do not contribute to this high homicide rate. They— like the families of victims who are killed—are deeply harmed by murders committed by others." 7x more murders per capita, 7x higher rates of false conviction. It's simple scaling. That means the system is being perfectly equitable.
- CountDrewku 6y ago
  Are you arguing that Iran is more safe due to the fact they lock up less people? You've provided a list of obviously more dangerous countries and then tried to use that as example of why incarceration, police, the system is corrupt in the US.... I'm confused. You think less police and less incarceration will suddenly make the US a less dangerous place?
  - pksebben 6y ago
    he's not, but I will. our prison system creates repeat offenders, and makes violent offenders out of previous nonviolent offenders. less policing and less prison will absolutely make the US a safer place
    - CountDrewku 6y ago
      Stats and facts please. Sounds like a lot conjecture from certain sources pushing an agenda. There are very specific areas where this violence keeps happening and to claim it's due to the fact that they're being locked up more seems pretty dubious and simplistic to me.
  - dls2016 6y ago
    > Are you arguing that Iran is more safe due to the fact they lock up less people? No, I'm stating the fact that the nytimes (and the like) will repeat US gov propaganda about how Iran/terrorist-org-du-jour is so authoritarian that we need to "fight them over there to protect our way of life over here"... while nytimes (and the like) completely ignores the story of how our police are trained. And if you google "killology" for ten seconds, I think you'd agree a great way to describe it is "authoritarian". > You think less police and less incarceration will suddenly make the US a less dangerous place? No, it will take time. I mean there are entire generations of black males missing from their familial units. That kind of trauma don't heal "suddenly".
    - CountDrewku 6y ago
      "No, it will take time. I mean there are entire generations of black males missing from their familial units. That kind of trauma don't heal "suddenly"." So, leaving criminal black males with their familial units will fix it then? You realize children raised with abusive (possibly violent) parents are statistically more likely to turn into criminals too right? Just having a father figure present doesn't suddenly mean things will improve.
DiNovi 6y ago
Not sure how you look at charts like this and not see that is is a rather unique issue to one country https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/policekillings_rates.png https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/policekillings_rates....
- CountDrewku 6y ago
  You realize that chart only shows 10 1st world countries right and conspicuously very specific wealthy nations? Seems like someone is pushing an agenda. Maybe try a source that calculates every country? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-killings-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...
  - DiNovi 6y ago
    lmao "Uh, actually, the US is ranked the same as syria and brazil, sounds like someone has an AGENDA" isn't the red hot rebuttal you think it is I agree the US has a violence problem on par with third world and war torn nations. However, the US is neither of these. Why does the violence persist?
jdmichal 6y ago
It's statistically less rare than airline flight disasters, and yet those rightfully get plastered all over the news. https://policeviolencereport.org/ https://policeviolencereport.org/ 1,127 people killed by police in the US in 2020. https://www.airfleets.net/crash/fatalities_year.htm https://www.airfleets.net/crash/fatalities_year.htm https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra... Somewhere between 422 and 561 people killed in 2018, a year I specifically anti-cherry-picked as being particularly high within the last few years. At what point is cops killing people "statistically significant" for you? Because many people think that should be pretty close to zero. Especially when, as indicated in the first link I have below: * Only 16 cases, 1.42%, resulted in any kind of judicial action. * 601 of those cases were "police responding to suspected non-violent offenses or cases where no crime was reported." * "121 people were killed after police stopped them for a traffic violation."
- lacker 6y ago
  I think you’re picking the wrong stats here. The article says that 55 unarmed people were killed by police last year. If armed people are killed by police in a shootout, that isn’t the same sort of obvious tragedy that a plane crash is.
  - wombatpm 6y ago
    Statistics around this are hard to verify. Chicago just had a 13 yr old killed. Police thought he was pointing a gun. Toy gun found on scene. But camera footage showed no gun and hands up when he was shot. Is that classified as an armed or unarmed shooting? Philando Castile had a gun is his car of which he informed the officer. Was that an armed or unarmed shooting?
  - jdmichal 6y ago
    The source I provided has the following: * 80 unarmed. * 65 "armed" with a vehicle. * 180 armed with a knife or other sharp object. * 59 armed with "another object". * 670 armed with a gun. * 73 undetermined. So sure, let's just handwave that all those armed with a gun and also undetermined were justified self-defense, with whatever definition that carries. That still leaves 384 deaths. See my other response here regarding my thoughts around "justified" killings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26865592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26865592

dls2016 6y ago

> Just because it doesn't happen as often in other wealthier western countries doesn't mean it only happens in the US. Ok, but you're looking at the rank #1 member of a power law distribution. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ > Moreover, statistically it's still very rare despite the increase in sensationalized media coverage. Police killings are just the tip of the spear. The US also locks up an enormous swath of its population... comparable to El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Rawanda... even 2x the rate of the country we're told is so dangerously authoritarian: Iran.

spazrunaway 6y ago
Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately. The only way in recent history the US managed to lower its violent crime rate was by locking up more people via the 1994 crime bill, which is now panned as "racist". America has an underincarceration problem, and is seeing double to triple digit increases in murder over the past year following bail reform and prosecutorial discretion putting more future recidivists into the streets instead of jail.
- dls2016 6y ago
  > Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately. I know! Wage thieves, environmental criminals, bankers, the Sacklers...
  - spazrunaway 6y ago
    I'd love to lock them up too.
    - pksebben 6y ago
      just get me a tree and some rope
    - effingwewt 6y ago
      This always makes me think the people who scream this have never been to jail/prison. I'm sure solutions exist, I'm sure what we have now doesn't work. We need rehabilitation instead of the 'gladiator schools' we have now.
- DiNovi 6y ago
  If you believe the us has a more violent population than anywhere else in the world, have you ever bothered to interrogate as to why that is? Or could it be the us has an issue with whay and for How long we allow police and our court systems to punish people? Could it be the us is simply over policed? No shortage of research on this. I ask you take the time to look into this
  - splithalf 6y ago
    Perhaps we’re subject to demoralization and whipped into fear and agitation by our own news media, goaded into street violence, justice warriors fighting law enforcement, our culture more or less in tatters. I doubt all that’s caused by over policing seems like cultural social problems to me. But if you believe that overpolicing is the root problem, the easiest way to reduce policing is not to call them. All it would take is a concerted effort in the high crime areas to boycott the police; fewer crimes reported leads to fewer cops. Otherwise, politicians are always going to feel obligated to add police to areas where folks are getting robbed, raped, murdered, etc... Seems underreporting of crime, citizens boycotting 911, is the only way forward if the problem is overpolicing. Am I mistaken?
    - dls2016 6y ago
      > Am I mistaken? Yes, we can defund them. Here in Pennsylvania, numerous rural (read: white) communities have disbanded their local police departments. Lack of tax dollars and, as I like to think, it's stupid to pay for overtime, SUVs and army gear so that police can harass people for traffic violations and drug possession. The problem now is that these communities don't pay any extra for state police emergency coverage... so they get to have their cake and eat it, too. (That is, they get to whine about how "defund police" is a communist plot while everyone else pays for their emergency coverage... money which is supposed to be spent on road repairs.)
      - splithalf 6y ago
        Places without high crime (armed robbery, murder,etc) can decrease policing because those areas don’t have high crime. Those are not the areas where police violence is an issue. So your solution effectively does nothing.
- jdmichal 6y ago
  You're saying that the US, which is also number one on incarcerated population per capita, doesn't put enough people in jail? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra... If recidivism is the issue, then the way the US treats prisons, prisoners, and especially ex-convicts is the source. The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues.
  - spazrunaway 6y ago
    Yes. >The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues. The problem is, we're not doing that anymore, and crime is returning to its worst levels in history, as bad as the 70s and 80s. A man on parole for killing his mother just beat an Asian woman half to death in NYC. There's currently a manhunt for a man in Texas who raped a 16 year old, spent a little over two weeks in jail before bailing out some paltry sum, then proceeded to shoot 2-3 people. This is a daily reality.
- foobiter 6y ago
  Incarceration is a total failure to address root causes. To say we should incarcerate more people, as the country that already incarcerates many more people than any other, seems absurd. It’s additionally absurd considering we’re also a total failure at maintaining humane prison conditions... the majority of federal prisoners are non-violent offenders... we imprison disproportionately more people of minority races... It’s incredibly obvious that we’re screwing many things up here.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The historical reduction in crime started before 1994, so there's not good evidence for a causal connection (controversially, Dubner and Levitt in Freakonomics argued it was Roe v Wade that was largely responsible). Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems. It would be much cheaper to tackle the problem at its source: structural racism and poverty.
  - spazrunaway 6y ago
    >Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems Agreed. Any chance they're committing more crimes? Or over half of all murders? We can control for poverty, which has been found to have a much weaker correlation with criminality than race. Systemic racism is a meaningless act of circular reasoning, because it seems to be defined only by statistical disparities, which themselves are attributed to systemic racism.
    - bingbong70 6y ago
      American racism is clearly systemic/institutionalized... >And according to exoneration data, innocent African American suspects are 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of murder than innocent white suspects. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840501 Unfortunately spreading misleading information without second thought is yet another feature of white supremacist systems, not a bug.
      - spazrunaway 6y ago
        From your source: "Judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people. A major cause of the high number of black murder exonerations is the high homicide rate in the black community—a tragedy that kills many African Americans and sends many others to prison. Innocent defendants who are falsely convicted and exonerated do not contribute to this high homicide rate. They— like the families of victims who are killed—are deeply harmed by murders committed by others." 7x more murders per capita, 7x higher rates of false conviction. It's simple scaling. That means the system is being perfectly equitable.
CountDrewku 6y ago
Are you arguing that Iran is more safe due to the fact they lock up less people? You've provided a list of obviously more dangerous countries and then tried to use that as example of why incarceration, police, the system is corrupt in the US.... I'm confused. You think less police and less incarceration will suddenly make the US a less dangerous place?
- pksebben 6y ago
  he's not, but I will. our prison system creates repeat offenders, and makes violent offenders out of previous nonviolent offenders. less policing and less prison will absolutely make the US a safer place
  - CountDrewku 6y ago
    Stats and facts please. Sounds like a lot conjecture from certain sources pushing an agenda. There are very specific areas where this violence keeps happening and to claim it's due to the fact that they're being locked up more seems pretty dubious and simplistic to me.
- dls2016 6y ago
  > Are you arguing that Iran is more safe due to the fact they lock up less people? No, I'm stating the fact that the nytimes (and the like) will repeat US gov propaganda about how Iran/terrorist-org-du-jour is so authoritarian that we need to "fight them over there to protect our way of life over here"... while nytimes (and the like) completely ignores the story of how our police are trained. And if you google "killology" for ten seconds, I think you'd agree a great way to describe it is "authoritarian". > You think less police and less incarceration will suddenly make the US a less dangerous place? No, it will take time. I mean there are entire generations of black males missing from their familial units. That kind of trauma don't heal "suddenly".
  - CountDrewku 6y ago
    "No, it will take time. I mean there are entire generations of black males missing from their familial units. That kind of trauma don't heal "suddenly"." So, leaving criminal black males with their familial units will fix it then? You realize children raised with abusive (possibly violent) parents are statistically more likely to turn into criminals too right? Just having a father figure present doesn't suddenly mean things will improve.

DiNovi 6y ago

Not sure how you look at charts like this and not see that is is a rather unique issue to one country https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/policekillings_rates.png https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/policekillings_rates....

CountDrewku 6y ago
You realize that chart only shows 10 1st world countries right and conspicuously very specific wealthy nations? Seems like someone is pushing an agenda. Maybe try a source that calculates every country? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-killings-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...
- DiNovi 6y ago
  lmao "Uh, actually, the US is ranked the same as syria and brazil, sounds like someone has an AGENDA" isn't the red hot rebuttal you think it is I agree the US has a violence problem on par with third world and war torn nations. However, the US is neither of these. Why does the violence persist?

jdmichal 6y ago

It's statistically less rare than airline flight disasters, and yet those rightfully get plastered all over the news. https://policeviolencereport.org/ https://policeviolencereport.org/ 1,127 people killed by police in the US in 2020. https://www.airfleets.net/crash/fatalities_year.htm https://www.airfleets.net/crash/fatalities_year.htm https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra... Somewhere between 422 and 561 people killed in 2018, a year I specifically anti-cherry-picked as being particularly high within the last few years. At what point is cops killing people "statistically significant" for you? Because many people think that should be pretty close to zero. Especially when, as indicated in the first link I have below: * Only 16 cases, 1.42%, resulted in any kind of judicial action. * 601 of those cases were "police responding to suspected non-violent offenses or cases where no crime was reported." * "121 people were killed after police stopped them for a traffic violation."

lacker 6y ago
I think you’re picking the wrong stats here. The article says that 55 unarmed people were killed by police last year. If armed people are killed by police in a shootout, that isn’t the same sort of obvious tragedy that a plane crash is.
- wombatpm 6y ago
  Statistics around this are hard to verify. Chicago just had a 13 yr old killed. Police thought he was pointing a gun. Toy gun found on scene. But camera footage showed no gun and hands up when he was shot. Is that classified as an armed or unarmed shooting? Philando Castile had a gun is his car of which he informed the officer. Was that an armed or unarmed shooting?
- jdmichal 6y ago
  The source I provided has the following: * 80 unarmed. * 65 "armed" with a vehicle. * 180 armed with a knife or other sharp object. * 59 armed with "another object". * 670 armed with a gun. * 73 undetermined. So sure, let's just handwave that all those armed with a gun and also undetermined were justified self-defense, with whatever definition that carries. That still leaves 384 deaths. See my other response here regarding my thoughts around "justified" killings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26865592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26865592