Not a valid comparison. By definition folks killed by terrorists are innocents. Folks killed by cops may or may not be innocents.
Plus, police are active in every city in the country every single day. Terrorists only pop up every once in a while. Terrorism is bad, and police brutality is bad, but their scale of influence is completely different and it makes the comparison invalid.
Roughly 3000 people have died from peanut allergies since the year 2000, does that mean peanuts are more evil than terrorists?
So no one in any of the buildings on 9/11 were criminals? I find that hard to believe.
The apparent fact that “innocent until proven guilty” is no longer part of our legal code is equally hard to believe.
What part of “innocent until proven guilty” did you fail to comprehend?
Every single person killed by cops did NOT get their day in court.
Strangely, in other countries cops don’t kill people, irrespective of whether they may or may not be innocent. As an US American you may be surprised to find that there are other ways to deal with the guilty and those other ways appear to be more effective–i.e. cause less social damage and also help reduce violence…
Also very conveniently for the cops once the suspect is dead it’s unlikely we will ever know whether they may have been or may not have been innocent. Dead people don’t have a right to a trial, being judged by your peers and all.
just some thoughts
I’m sure at least some of the people killed in 9/11 were guilty of some kind of crime. But that’s not really the point. The point is that American law enforcement uses lethal force on a horrifyingly regular basis and we’ve somehow been convinced to accept it as the norm.
Know how many people were fatally shot by police in England and Wales in 2013? Zero. This was a welcome drop from the previous year, when two people were shot dead by police. 2013 was also the year when Iceland grieved for the very first person shot to death by its police force since the country became an independent republic in 1944.
Agree that it’s an invalid comparison. Disagree on why.
Pretending for a second that it’s a valid comparison, where in some alternate universe we have comparable numbers of police and terrorists, yeah, we could fairly say that there’s way more killings by the police according to the numbers.
In our universe, Terrorists are way deadlier per capita. That’s not really the interesting thing, though. We probably never find out about a large number of terrorists whose plots were thwarted (and the government really, really doesn’t want to share those numbers or details). The numbers we know look very different if you look at decades other than 2000-2009.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers told us that Terrorists actually weren’t all that deadly per capita, due to low competency and success rates. In terms of successful attacks on US Soil, 9/11 is definitely a statistical aberration.
(And no, most police do not count as terrorists. I just know that comment is coming…)
Even when people are not innocent … is the punishment for any crime instant death? Even criminals have human rights. A fact the US society forgot apparently.
absolutely stunning commnets.
basically, YOUR life is valuable, but someone else’s life is NOT valuable because ____________ [insert faulty reasoning].
Meteorites Meteoroids have killed more Americans that ISIS has, no?
And while hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars flowed into “homeland defense” boondoggles like pornoscanners. when it comes to an evidence-backed life-saving technology like police body-cameras, suddenly there’s no money or development. Departments are struggling to come up with funds for cameras, and have no clue how to store and process and secure all the video data, meanwhile they are being gifted armored military assault vehicles because the pentagon has so many it doesn’t know what to do with them all.
Police body-cameras would save more lives than police military-assault vehicles (both police and civilian lives). But that’s not where our priorities apparently lie.
everybody please STFU and push this giant rock up the hill, because somebody in charge said to. Our leaders have secret information that it needs to be done.
Go ahead and say it. I know you want to.
“Sheeple”
Came here to say this sarcastically.
Was surprised to see that someone had already said it, apparently sincerely.
I’ll just take this thinking to its logical conclusion:
Terrorists only kill good people
Cops only kill bad people
Cognitive dissonance: resolved!
and that’s why it’s so easy to sell shit.
I can’t help but feel a lot of the replies to you are being deliberately obtuse. I kind of assumed that when you said they “may or may not be innocents” you meant that some may have been violent criminals who were killed while attacking police or civilians (and yes, I mean legitimately attacking, not punching the officer’s fist with their face). But apparently most people assume you meant shoplifters or jaywalkers, and that when you said “innocent” in reference to people killed by terrorists, you must have meant people who have never done anything wrong, ever. Essentially, using semantics to turn your argument into a ludicrous strawman. Way to go, guys.
On top of that, this isn’t a valid comparison for other reasons, as xzzy pointed out. Cops murdering people and the government wasting money on fighting terrorists are both very valid concerns, but this comparison doesn’t prove or solve anything.
I think this stems from the selfish attitude that has cropped up in the US. Many people act in a fashion that is completely oblivious to their surroundings and with little regard as to how their actions affect other people. As far as they are concerned they are the center of the universe and everything/one else is just static.
This “Fuck you, Me First.” attitude can be seen everywhere, and it has bled into the police force. The motto “To Protect and Serve” has now become “I feared for my life, so I pulled the trigger until the bad thing went away, then hand cuffed what was left.” Not as catchy unfortunately.
**fixing when to went, damn proofreading.
What part of “may or may not be” did you fail to comprehend?
If only we could sic the cops on the terrorists, instead of the public… or visa versa…
