9 ms·

Police Kill Too Many People–White and Black (2016)

39 points by miles 6y ago

mk81 6y ago
I don't disagree. However, the outcome of this experiment will be more people killed in total, just not by police.
ALittleLight 6y ago
Behind a paywall for me: https://archive.is/N1SNR https://archive.is/N1SNR This article doesn't seem to make the case that the police kill too many people. It's just observations that the police sometimes kill people. What nobody ever seems to discuss is how many we should expect the police to kill. If the murder rate is 4 per 100k in the US, and there are a million police officers in the US, shouldn't I expect something like 40+ police officers murdering a year? Maybe a little higher because police tend to be male, younger, have guns, and are frequently in high stress situations. I'm not saying we should excuse the murders or murderers, but obviously we expect some to happen in the same we expect some number of truckers, taxi drivers, programmers, whatever to commit murder every year.
- taeric 6y ago
  Can't you make a reasonable comparison to other countries? At the least, it should be possible to see if there is a relationship between police killings and murder. Seems an even chance that they are rather unrelated.
  - rootsudo 6y ago
    No, the police dept in USA deals with alot more than what other police departments do in the world. For example, you can argue that the NYC police department is bigger than several countries. At those density levels, how can you compare a city to an entire country?
    - taeric 6y ago
      This is silly. If you have to, compare different states to get some signal. If there is a relationship as implied, it should be easy to prove it. At the least, decent correlation could be displayed to hint that a causal relationship could be found.
- losteric 6y ago
  > Maybe a little higher because police tend to be male, younger, have guns, and are frequently in high stress situations. And many are ex-military as well
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It's not unreasonable to demand a higher standard of the police. The real flaw is in assuming that all "police killings" are murders. You would expect some proportion, and a higher number than the general population because of the nature of the job, to be legitimate self-defense or defense of others. So then you need to distinguish those cases from wrongful killings. Which is hard, because the usual way to do that would be to look at how many of them are convicted of murder. But if the case you're trying to make is that not enough of the actual murders are successfully prosecuted, that's not satisfactory. And then what? Data not available, so everybody assumes what they want based on their own politics.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Or you could go through them all, and judge how murdery each case was. (I couldn't deal with doing that, but some could.)
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I think it is unreasonable to demand a higher standard of the police. "Don't murder" is what we ask of everyone in society. If we had a reliable way to preemptively detect murderers we'd solve a lot of problems. Given that we don't, how could we expect to prevent murderers from being police officers? On top of that police are typically younger men - the demographic that commits almost all murders. Police always have guns. They are the kind of people willing and able to deal with hostile and potentially violent people. They have natural inclination to violence, to be able to deal with and dispense it. Personally, I'd expect the police to be more likely than average to become murderers, not less.
- bastawhiz 6y ago
  > If the murder rate is 4 per 100k in the US, and there are a million police officers in the US, shouldn't I expect something like 40+ police officers murdering a year? Right now, police in the US kill about 1000 people each year. That amounts to about one in 15-20 non-suicide deaths caused by gun violence. You can argue that 40 is too many, but it's two orders of magnitude lower than the current number. 40 is the number of people killed by the Chicago police alone every 2-3 years.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    You're conflating police murder with police homicide. The difference is that some (hopefully almost all) of the time the police kill someone, they are justified in doing so. 40 is what we should expect for murders - i.e completely unjustifiable killings. This is also blurred a bit further because we can imagine a class of killing that's "kind of justified" that we'd expect the police to sometimes engage in. Something like killing through negligence or incompetence. A certain fraction of people are likely negligent or incompetent. If you're an incompetent plumber, pipes may burst. If you're an incompetent, lazy, whatever police officer you may cause someone to die. We should also expect some level of this too.
- himinlomax 6y ago
  > This article doesn't seem to make the case that the police kill too many people. It's just observations that the police sometimes kill people. What's the rate compared to other countries?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- watwut 6y ago
  > Maybe a little higher because police tend to be male, younger, have guns, and are frequently in high stress situations. Cops in other countries tend to be young males, frequently in high stress situations and have guns. Also, civilians in the same stressful situation are supposed to keep calm and control over their fears.
unanswered 6y ago
This could never get published today.
- minimuffins 6y ago
  Maybe so but could you say why?
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Probably because it doesn't focus on Black victims exclusively and is therefore adjacent to All Lives Matter and being White Supremacist.
    - thatswrong0 6y ago
      If you've for some reason been listening exclusively to the anti-BLM garbage being spewed by right wing media, sure, I guess that's a reasonable thing to believe. But there's a massive difference in saying "Policing in this country is broken - cops kill too many people" versus "Cops and lot of white _and_ black people.. see? BLM is a pointless movement". Right wingers seem to love to pretend they're saying the former when they actually mean the latter.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        You're projecting. "BLM is a pointless movement" isn't a point of critique. It's "... and BLM only focuses on the Black victims". There's a reason why mentions of studies that are including white victims quickly get flagged on HN, as this article was, obviously.
        thatswrong0 5y ago
        Projecting in the sense that.. my personal experience with this viewpoint has been exclusively made by friends, family, and randos on social media parroting this exact viewpoint for the exact reason I posited. Sure. But yeah such political content is unfortunately bound to be flagged in HN unless it has some sort of explicit tech connection.
trhway 6y ago
the police express it better themselves: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56897186 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56897186 "US police officers are seen mocking a 73-year-old woman with dementia as they watch video of her shoulder going "pop" during her forcible arrest," How they enjoy themselves and congratulatory fist-bump each other on achieving that "pop" tells everything one needs to know about police brutality. All that while the woman with all those injuries to her shoulder (and still handcuffed - basically being subjected to medieval torture) was sitting right around the corner - something like for more than 2 hours before getting medical attention. That psychopathic-level lack of empathy resulting in the culture of total disregard for human life and wellbeing is why other police were standing guard while Chavin was enjoying himself torturing Floyd to death for almost 10 minutes. One can imagine all the fist-bumps and high-fives he got after that.
- Google234 6y ago
  Here’s a video with a few people In x group doing a horrible thing and celebrating. This proves that x group is terrible.
  - trhway 6y ago
    exactly. If committing horrible things is a business as usual that is the firm basis for getting organizations listed as terrorist, criminal (RICO), etc.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    It's evidence, not proof. Now, if we saw this kind of thing tens or hundreds of times a year, that would be proof… wait.
  - watwut 6y ago
    I mean, if that behavious is on the job and is not punished or disincentivised by management, civilian companies are blamed for it. Like, Google is blamed for bad copyright enforcement on HN right now.
  - bjornsing 6y ago
surfsvammel 6y ago
Should this be rather "American Police Kill too Many people"? Or maybe even "American Police Kill too many Innocent people". Also, what would be the right amount of innocent people for the police to kill? Edit: I reacted instinctively without thinking it through. I agree with the comments below that the word ‘innocent’ should have nothing to do with it.
- taeric 6y ago
  I rather liked the meme that police shouldn't kill guilty people either. So, the ideal number is clearly zero. Just the same as the ideal number of people to die in car crashes. Yes, you can acknowledge that zero is likely not going to get attained. No, you don't give up and argue over the number as a distraction.
  - User23 6y ago
    Ideally criminals wouldn’t kill people either. If you had the choice of the police killing a criminal or same criminal killing you or a loved one, which would you choose?
    - bastawhiz 6y ago
      There's not a binary of "one person must die or another person must die". You can still arrest someone without killing them.
      - User23 6y ago
        I certainly can’t. I can readily imagine scenarios where I would be unable to stop a criminal from taking lives without using deadly force. Perhaps that’s just a failure of my imagination though. Please elaborate on how you would effect the arrest of a criminal who is actively using deadly force in an attempt to cause grave bodily harm or death to yourself or other innocent persons? I’m quite serious by the way. Using deadly force in self defense is a nightmare of legal fees and moral anguish under the best circumstances, so I’m very interested in reliable and reliably non lethal methods to stop, which is to say “arrest,” someone who is physically my superior and in a frame of mind where he intends to do grave bodily harm to me or persons I’m meant to protect.
didibus 6y ago
> Moreover, many would argue that disproportionate poverty levels among black people render them more likely to encounter police officers in the first place—vastly unfair, but different from the problem being simply cops’ standing racist bias Actually that's exactly the problem of systemic racism. Racism is at the level of the system and not the individual (though there are still individual racists out there for sure). Cops kill and injure way too many people (of all races) (without due cause), and encounters with Police escalate much too quickly. This is a problem, and that's why a big conversation on the role and responsibility and methods of policing is happening. Though Police too exists within a system, such as the possibility of any civilian to be armed and carrying at any time, and so all that context must be considered. Blacks are disproportionately a victim of this, so obviously they are more invested in this conversation, and leading the charge on pushing for changes. It turns out that one of the likely reason for their disproportionate encounters with Police is their disproportionate socio-economic situation, which was likely created as a result of the racist history of the country and the heritage and legacy (or lack thereof) it left their communities with. And that would make it a systemic racism issue.
- ttt0 6y ago
  The amount of policing in this or other community does not change the fact that black people do commit a lot of crimes and more policing is at least to some extend justified. I'm not talking about bullshit, almost petty in comparison crimes like drugs or theft, but serious crimes like murder. There is a dead body and you have to find who did it and police can't just ignore it or turn a blind eye if it turns out that the murderer was white.
  - js2 6y ago
    Poor people commit a lot of crimes, and black people are disproportional poor due to centuries of racism. This is besides the point. We have a real policing problem in America which we can see by the rate that U.S. police injure and kill citizens as compared to other countries. It's not even close. There are many reasons for this, but we have to start by recognizing that there's a problem.
mrwh 6y ago
Checkout 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... The USA is an outlier, by quite a margin, amongst rich countries. Of course there are differences in methodologies etc etc but nonetheless: USA is 34.8 per 10 million people. That puts it between Uruguay and Angola. Canada is 9.7. France, which has plenty of armed officers, is 3.8. The UK is 0.5. I come from the UK, it has plenty of violent people in it. It's not enough to say this-is-just-how-it-is in the US, because the US is weird here. It's not normal for the security services to kill so many people in a rich country.
- trident5000 6y ago
  The US has probably one of the most disrespectful and outlandish fringe populations with higher crime overall than other rich countries. Compare the US to how people behave in Australia, Norway, Germany, etc... Have a feeling this will get down voted but you know its true.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    As someone who actually likes and owns guns, I really think most (it's obviously complicated and multi-faceted) of this can be explained simply by saying "guns"
    - mrwh 6y ago
      I mean... yes. That does seem to be it basically. Or not just guns (the Swiss have A LOT of guns) but guns + an attitude to them. The closest equivalent where I'm from in the UK (and I do live in the US now) is boy racers. Young men driving obnoxiously and thinking they have every right to drive obnoxiously. And they definitely do kill people, though as a side-effect, as it were. Seems like there's a similar attitude to guns in the US, but legally buttressed. My outsider's perspective anyway.
      - zepto 6y ago
        > Seems like there's a similar attitude to guns in the US, but legally buttressed. There really isn’t. Almost no gun owners do anything unsafe with guns or ever shoot anyone. US gun culture is extremely safety focussed. The media paints a completely bizarre and distorted picture of gun owners in general, picking the stupidest or most outlandish examples they can. Most people who are involved in shootings in the US are in deeply underprivileged areas where there is a lot of crime in general, and ineffective policing and a dearth of opportunity. It is often not irrational for young men in these circumstances to get involved in gang or crime related activities given the lack of alternatives, and it’s also not irrational to carry a gun under these circumstances, and it does lead to a lot of shootings. This has very little to do with gun ownership and gun culture in the US in general.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
omosubi 6y ago
Honestly I'm i Surprised that the number is as low as it is. There are probably >100,000 cops on the streets at any given moment in the us and most have guns. There's also nearly 300MM guns owned in the country. Police make 10MM arrests for everything from traffic violations to murder. The fact that this only results in 1k deaths is impressive
LatteLazy 6y ago
You can have massive poverty, guns everywhere, a war on drugs, police as a revenue source and an uber "macho" culture OR you can have a reasonable number of police shootings (eg 10 a year). You can't have both.
pembrook 6y ago
The reason for this is pretty simple. A) the US allows for a greater dispersion in economic outcome. More poverty = more crime B) the US has more citizens owning weapons per capita than any other nation. More guns = more gun deaths C) When you combine above average crime levels with above average levels of gun prevalence, you get more dangerous police encounters and more deaths While this is extremely easy for the rest of the world to understand, I’m confident the US will never figure this out because: D) the US is above-average at monetizing their media industry and creating distracting narratives, so they will spend decades of attention on the wrong things

39 points by miles 6y ago

mk81 6y ago

I don't disagree. However, the outcome of this experiment will be more people killed in total, just not by police.

Behind a paywall for me: https://archive.is/N1SNR https://archive.is/N1SNR This article doesn't seem to make the case that the police kill too many people. It's just observations that the police sometimes kill people. What nobody ever seems to discuss is how many we should expect the police to kill. If the murder rate is 4 per 100k in the US, and there are a million police officers in the US, shouldn't I expect something like 40+ police officers murdering a year? Maybe a little higher because police tend to be male, younger, have guns, and are frequently in high stress situations. I'm not saying we should excuse the murders or murderers, but obviously we expect some to happen in the same we expect some number of truckers, taxi drivers, programmers, whatever to commit murder every year.

taeric 6y ago
Can't you make a reasonable comparison to other countries? At the least, it should be possible to see if there is a relationship between police killings and murder. Seems an even chance that they are rather unrelated.
- rootsudo 6y ago
  No, the police dept in USA deals with alot more than what other police departments do in the world. For example, you can argue that the NYC police department is bigger than several countries. At those density levels, how can you compare a city to an entire country?
  - taeric 6y ago
    This is silly. If you have to, compare different states to get some signal. If there is a relationship as implied, it should be easy to prove it. At the least, decent correlation could be displayed to hint that a causal relationship could be found.
losteric 6y ago
> Maybe a little higher because police tend to be male, younger, have guns, and are frequently in high stress situations. And many are ex-military as well
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
It's not unreasonable to demand a higher standard of the police. The real flaw is in assuming that all "police killings" are murders. You would expect some proportion, and a higher number than the general population because of the nature of the job, to be legitimate self-defense or defense of others. So then you need to distinguish those cases from wrongful killings. Which is hard, because the usual way to do that would be to look at how many of them are convicted of murder. But if the case you're trying to make is that not enough of the actual murders are successfully prosecuted, that's not satisfactory. And then what? Data not available, so everybody assumes what they want based on their own politics.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Or you could go through them all, and judge how murdery each case was. (I couldn't deal with doing that, but some could.)
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I think it is unreasonable to demand a higher standard of the police. "Don't murder" is what we ask of everyone in society. If we had a reliable way to preemptively detect murderers we'd solve a lot of problems. Given that we don't, how could we expect to prevent murderers from being police officers? On top of that police are typically younger men - the demographic that commits almost all murders. Police always have guns. They are the kind of people willing and able to deal with hostile and potentially violent people. They have natural inclination to violence, to be able to deal with and dispense it. Personally, I'd expect the police to be more likely than average to become murderers, not less.
bastawhiz 6y ago
> If the murder rate is 4 per 100k in the US, and there are a million police officers in the US, shouldn't I expect something like 40+ police officers murdering a year? Right now, police in the US kill about 1000 people each year. That amounts to about one in 15-20 non-suicide deaths caused by gun violence. You can argue that 40 is too many, but it's two orders of magnitude lower than the current number. 40 is the number of people killed by the Chicago police alone every 2-3 years.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  You're conflating police murder with police homicide. The difference is that some (hopefully almost all) of the time the police kill someone, they are justified in doing so. 40 is what we should expect for murders - i.e completely unjustifiable killings. This is also blurred a bit further because we can imagine a class of killing that's "kind of justified" that we'd expect the police to sometimes engage in. Something like killing through negligence or incompetence. A certain fraction of people are likely negligent or incompetent. If you're an incompetent plumber, pipes may burst. If you're an incompetent, lazy, whatever police officer you may cause someone to die. We should also expect some level of this too.
himinlomax 6y ago
> This article doesn't seem to make the case that the police kill too many people. It's just observations that the police sometimes kill people. What's the rate compared to other countries?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
watwut 6y ago
> Maybe a little higher because police tend to be male, younger, have guns, and are frequently in high stress situations. Cops in other countries tend to be young males, frequently in high stress situations and have guns. Also, civilians in the same stressful situation are supposed to keep calm and control over their fears.

unanswered 6y ago

This could never get published today.

minimuffins 6y ago
Maybe so but could you say why?
- luckylion 6y ago
  Probably because it doesn't focus on Black victims exclusively and is therefore adjacent to All Lives Matter and being White Supremacist.
  - thatswrong0 6y ago
    If you've for some reason been listening exclusively to the anti-BLM garbage being spewed by right wing media, sure, I guess that's a reasonable thing to believe. But there's a massive difference in saying "Policing in this country is broken - cops kill too many people" versus "Cops and lot of white _and_ black people.. see? BLM is a pointless movement". Right wingers seem to love to pretend they're saying the former when they actually mean the latter.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      You're projecting. "BLM is a pointless movement" isn't a point of critique. It's "... and BLM only focuses on the Black victims". There's a reason why mentions of studies that are including white victims quickly get flagged on HN, as this article was, obviously.
      - thatswrong0 5y ago
        Projecting in the sense that.. my personal experience with this viewpoint has been exclusively made by friends, family, and randos on social media parroting this exact viewpoint for the exact reason I posited. Sure. But yeah such political content is unfortunately bound to be flagged in HN unless it has some sort of explicit tech connection.

trhway 6y ago

the police express it better themselves: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56897186 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56897186 "US police officers are seen mocking a 73-year-old woman with dementia as they watch video of her shoulder going "pop" during her forcible arrest," How they enjoy themselves and congratulatory fist-bump each other on achieving that "pop" tells everything one needs to know about police brutality. All that while the woman with all those injuries to her shoulder (and still handcuffed - basically being subjected to medieval torture) was sitting right around the corner - something like for more than 2 hours before getting medical attention. That psychopathic-level lack of empathy resulting in the culture of total disregard for human life and wellbeing is why other police were standing guard while Chavin was enjoying himself torturing Floyd to death for almost 10 minutes. One can imagine all the fist-bumps and high-fives he got after that.

Google234 6y ago
Here’s a video with a few people In x group doing a horrible thing and celebrating. This proves that x group is terrible.
- trhway 6y ago
  exactly. If committing horrible things is a business as usual that is the firm basis for getting organizations listed as terrorist, criminal (RICO), etc.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  It's evidence, not proof. Now, if we saw this kind of thing tens or hundreds of times a year, that would be proof… wait.
- watwut 6y ago
  I mean, if that behavious is on the job and is not punished or disincentivised by management, civilian companies are blamed for it. Like, Google is blamed for bad copyright enforcement on HN right now.
- bjornsing 6y ago

surfsvammel 6y ago

Should this be rather "American Police Kill too Many people"? Or maybe even "American Police Kill too many Innocent people". Also, what would be the right amount of innocent people for the police to kill? Edit: I reacted instinctively without thinking it through. I agree with the comments below that the word ‘innocent’ should have nothing to do with it.

taeric 6y ago
I rather liked the meme that police shouldn't kill guilty people either. So, the ideal number is clearly zero. Just the same as the ideal number of people to die in car crashes. Yes, you can acknowledge that zero is likely not going to get attained. No, you don't give up and argue over the number as a distraction.
- User23 6y ago
  Ideally criminals wouldn’t kill people either. If you had the choice of the police killing a criminal or same criminal killing you or a loved one, which would you choose?
  - bastawhiz 6y ago
    There's not a binary of "one person must die or another person must die". You can still arrest someone without killing them.
    - User23 6y ago
      I certainly can’t. I can readily imagine scenarios where I would be unable to stop a criminal from taking lives without using deadly force. Perhaps that’s just a failure of my imagination though. Please elaborate on how you would effect the arrest of a criminal who is actively using deadly force in an attempt to cause grave bodily harm or death to yourself or other innocent persons? I’m quite serious by the way. Using deadly force in self defense is a nightmare of legal fees and moral anguish under the best circumstances, so I’m very interested in reliable and reliably non lethal methods to stop, which is to say “arrest,” someone who is physically my superior and in a frame of mind where he intends to do grave bodily harm to me or persons I’m meant to protect.

didibus 6y ago

> Moreover, many would argue that disproportionate poverty levels among black people render them more likely to encounter police officers in the first place—vastly unfair, but different from the problem being simply cops’ standing racist bias Actually that's exactly the problem of systemic racism. Racism is at the level of the system and not the individual (though there are still individual racists out there for sure). Cops kill and injure way too many people (of all races) (without due cause), and encounters with Police escalate much too quickly. This is a problem, and that's why a big conversation on the role and responsibility and methods of policing is happening. Though Police too exists within a system, such as the possibility of any civilian to be armed and carrying at any time, and so all that context must be considered. Blacks are disproportionately a victim of this, so obviously they are more invested in this conversation, and leading the charge on pushing for changes. It turns out that one of the likely reason for their disproportionate encounters with Police is their disproportionate socio-economic situation, which was likely created as a result of the racist history of the country and the heritage and legacy (or lack thereof) it left their communities with. And that would make it a systemic racism issue.

ttt0 6y ago
The amount of policing in this or other community does not change the fact that black people do commit a lot of crimes and more policing is at least to some extend justified. I'm not talking about bullshit, almost petty in comparison crimes like drugs or theft, but serious crimes like murder. There is a dead body and you have to find who did it and police can't just ignore it or turn a blind eye if it turns out that the murderer was white.
- js2 6y ago
  Poor people commit a lot of crimes, and black people are disproportional poor due to centuries of racism. This is besides the point. We have a real policing problem in America which we can see by the rate that U.S. police injure and kill citizens as compared to other countries. It's not even close. There are many reasons for this, but we have to start by recognizing that there's a problem.

mrwh 6y ago

Checkout 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... The USA is an outlier, by quite a margin, amongst rich countries. Of course there are differences in methodologies etc etc but nonetheless: USA is 34.8 per 10 million people. That puts it between Uruguay and Angola. Canada is 9.7. France, which has plenty of armed officers, is 3.8. The UK is 0.5. I come from the UK, it has plenty of violent people in it. It's not enough to say this-is-just-how-it-is in the US, because the US is weird here. It's not normal for the security services to kill so many people in a rich country.

trident5000 6y ago
The US has probably one of the most disrespectful and outlandish fringe populations with higher crime overall than other rich countries. Compare the US to how people behave in Australia, Norway, Germany, etc... Have a feeling this will get down voted but you know its true.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  As someone who actually likes and owns guns, I really think most (it's obviously complicated and multi-faceted) of this can be explained simply by saying "guns"
  - mrwh 6y ago
    I mean... yes. That does seem to be it basically. Or not just guns (the Swiss have A LOT of guns) but guns + an attitude to them. The closest equivalent where I'm from in the UK (and I do live in the US now) is boy racers. Young men driving obnoxiously and thinking they have every right to drive obnoxiously. And they definitely do kill people, though as a side-effect, as it were. Seems like there's a similar attitude to guns in the US, but legally buttressed. My outsider's perspective anyway.
    - zepto 6y ago
      > Seems like there's a similar attitude to guns in the US, but legally buttressed. There really isn’t. Almost no gun owners do anything unsafe with guns or ever shoot anyone. US gun culture is extremely safety focussed. The media paints a completely bizarre and distorted picture of gun owners in general, picking the stupidest or most outlandish examples they can. Most people who are involved in shootings in the US are in deeply underprivileged areas where there is a lot of crime in general, and ineffective policing and a dearth of opportunity. It is often not irrational for young men in these circumstances to get involved in gang or crime related activities given the lack of alternatives, and it’s also not irrational to carry a gun under these circumstances, and it does lead to a lot of shootings. This has very little to do with gun ownership and gun culture in the US in general.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

omosubi 6y ago

Honestly I'm i Surprised that the number is as low as it is. There are probably >100,000 cops on the streets at any given moment in the us and most have guns. There's also nearly 300MM guns owned in the country. Police make 10MM arrests for everything from traffic violations to murder. The fact that this only results in 1k deaths is impressive

LatteLazy 6y ago

You can have massive poverty, guns everywhere, a war on drugs, police as a revenue source and an uber "macho" culture OR you can have a reasonable number of police shootings (eg 10 a year). You can't have both.

pembrook 6y ago

The reason for this is pretty simple. A) the US allows for a greater dispersion in economic outcome. More poverty = more crime B) the US has more citizens owning weapons per capita than any other nation. More guns = more gun deaths C) When you combine above average crime levels with above average levels of gun prevalence, you get more dangerous police encounters and more deaths While this is extremely easy for the rest of the world to understand, I’m confident the US will never figure this out because: D) the US is above-average at monetizing their media industry and creating distracting narratives, so they will spend decades of attention on the wrong things