damn it, now you’re just making me regret not shooting the police all those times it would have been justified.
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Your use of diverse to justify killings… I read that as the increased killings are due to those people.
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Yeah, that’s all well and good, except for the document examples where they are trying to kill you or people around you.
Again I am 100% against improper use of force and lethal force, but there are times and places for it, unfortunately.
So being mentally ill means the police get a pass when they kill you? Um. Um. No.
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So why don’t you tell me about your mother?
Oh, and most of the anarchists I know don’t have a trust fund or attack the police as a lifestyle or hobby. The police (especially the TSG) do seem to like attacking anyone who is protesting though.
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Partly. But given that the identifiable group^ of strangers killing the largest number of Americans is the US police; only partly.
^ aside from gimme groupings like ‘males’ or ‘white males’
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As a blithe, bland statement that is hard to disagree with. However the devil is in the detail, and I strongly suspect - to put it mildly - that there is a wild variance between what you and I would consider ‘the time and place.’
Let’s put some meat on that idea, taking the numbers in the original article.
1,500 police killings/year (one every six hours!) in the US is roughly 1 per 200,000 population. In my country that would equate to about 20 per year. Instead the police here have killed^ 29 people in the last 65 years.
So, yeah; there is a time and place, and if the US total were on the order of 100/yr - rather than 1,500/yr - I’d be inclined to agree with your line of argument. But as it stands, at a first blush I’d say that the vast majority are unjustified.
^ that’s 29 shot over 65 years, so understates the total by a little, but shooting is the primary killing mechanism for the police.
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Try thinking outside of your box … 
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So, 1/3 of the “murders” by strangers are from strangers we pay to stand between us and the other 2/3? Plus the unlisted number of non-strangers? Stand between us and risk being shot at or even targeted? In the most gun-loving country on the planet? I was surprised the total number wasn’t higher.
Firemen put out a lot of fires. Plumbers fix a lot of leaks. Police kill a lot of bad people that mean to harm them or me (or them while protecting me). In an environment that produces threads like this one.
I grew up in the era where soldiers were called “baby killers” and cops had “pride, integrity, guts”. That fad has now flipped. I’m not mentioning this because I believed it back then, but that it was a fad back then, as this is now.
You can’t tell if the shootings are justified from just statistics. Yeah, maybe the numbers are high, yet justified. You have to view each case. I’ve seen many a video where it is very cut and dry that the officer acted in defense. I’ve seen some that were a grey area, and some not justified at all. I’d like to see some analysis on what percentage a neutral 3rd party would find justified or not.
Also I am having a hard time coming up with the same estimates in the article that lead them to conclude 8-10% of all homicides are caused by the police. I realize that Chicago is just one city, but I have very detailed stats on them an in 2015 there were only 9, out of over 500 deaths.
ETA - there is a saying - never invite the man into your life.
No. You don’t. What you’re proposing is a classic misdirection technique “let’s study this tree, rather than observing this fucking enormous forest.”
The whole point of statistics is that it allows us to understand large swathes of reality without getting pointlessly bogged down in details.
Not only do you reject reality, you reject mathematics. As I’ve noted before, you’re barely worth pity.
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Come on now, statistics are very useful but useless with out analysis. I mean statistics 101 is correlation doesn’t equal causation.
To use your forest analogy, you can’t look at a dead tree and conclude the whole forest needs to go. You can use the stats to see how many dead trees there are to get an overall sense of the health of the forest. But if you want to go in and cut trees down, you need to look at each one individually.
Individual analysis doesn’t mean you don’t look at the big picture as well.
Training them in how to shoot more people?
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Yet again we have the inklings of yellow Journalism. Note the following in your article…
Statistician Patrick Ball runs an NGO called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, which uses extremely rigorous, well-documented statistical techniques to provide evidence of war crimes and genocides; HRDAG’s work has been used in the official investigations of atrocities in Kosovo, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Syria and elsewhere.
HRDAG is called upon to estimate the full scope of killings by soldiers and police.…
How can you describe estimates as “extremely rigorous and well-documented”?
In what possible world can you compare the work and relationship between a solider and solider with a policeman and civilian? TWO impossibly different tactics and techniques. Not to mention you attempt to morally equate such areas of the world where population variations in both morals and ethics are vastly different to what your readers would normally encounter and in some areas where life has all the value of a bent coin in an arcade.
While I like and respect you as an author and understand your global kumbaya attitude it does appear you think that the people you’ve met are a microcosm of the whole rather than outliers who want you to think of them as typical.
Welcome to BoingBoing. Glad you were able to create an account to stand up for the police, in a comment thread about an article which shows, statistically, using science, that if I’m killed by a stranger in America, it shouldn’t surprise me to learn that my murderer is a police officer, and that the number of those particular murders is greater than the threats against which those police purport to protect.
"America is a land ruled by fear. We fear that our children will be
abducted by strangers, that crazed gunmen will perpetrate mass killings
in our schools and theaters, that terrorists will gun us down or blow up
our buildings, and that serial killers will stalk us on dark streets.
All of these risks are real, but they are minuscule in probability:
taken together, these threats constitute less than three per cent of
total annual homicides in the US.[8]
The numerically greater threat to our safety, and the largest single
category of strangers who threaten us, are the people we have empowered
to use deadly force to protect us from these less probable threats. "
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So don’t allow the police to carry guns? (outside of special response units)
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“building community outreach and boosting its presence on social media.” (source)
So, teaching them spin and facebook, it seems.
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I really dig the use of the terms ‘war crimes’ and ‘police homicides’ in the same sentence.
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