3 ms·

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'

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.

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.