Strange how justified police shootings are so much more frequent per-capita in the US than in Australia, Canada, France, Germany or the UK, though.
Very curious; perhaps there’s a common factor.
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Flint’s current problem was caused by the residents having their franchise removed by the Governor of the state. However, it has absolutely fuckall to do with police committing waaaaay too many homicides for a first-world nation.
Those goalposts, just keep trying to move em. I’m sure no one will notice.
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Why does everyone think the US should look just like those other countries? The US isn’t those other countries, we have a different culture than those other countries. We have different people speaking (in some cases) different languages, with different backgrounds, living in different places with different social safety nets (or lack there of).
Honestly, it feels like your step mom saying, “Why can’t you be more like your big [step] brother, Bob?”
Again, I am completely for revising the police force and locking up bad cops. Heck, you know what, even “Mr. Smaller Government” would feel good about a FEDERAL oversight entity that explored the validity of a police shooting.
But at the same time, and maybe some of you non-Americans are just unaware, there are people who have no qualms about shooting police. This poor lady was shot and killed on her first day during a domestic call. And, hey, look at that, the cops didn’t even shoot the guy. He ended up surrendering to another cop and the brought him in. It isn’t like all cops are just waiting to waste some perp.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/28/us/prince-william-county-officer-shooting/
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@anticfox compared the US to Brazil, you said the US is not comparable to any other country. I don’t understand the reasoning for this: The killed by cop count is remarkably high (I think we can agree on this?) and using a much poorer country as benchmark or claim exceptionalism does neither explain nor change the situation.
Do you think the police killings are fine and shouldn’t be lowered?
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Here, you can see the FBI information for 2014 concerning homicide by age, race, and sex:
And no 1,500 is not nearly a third of them.
That isn’t at all what I am saying. Police should strive to keep that number as low as humanly possible. I am asking to temper the pitchforks and mob mentality with acknowledgement that while this number is high (and IMHO, possibly not accurate, the ESTIMATES in the article may not reflect actual numbers), some shootings ARE justified. Some deaths ARE accidents as well (non-shootings).
Is that number bad or not? Are a majority of those shootings justified or not? As I said, I have seen videos where the shooting clearly weren’t justified, and others that clearly were. And then there are some grey areas where it’s hard to make a decisive conclusion based on evidence alone. But until we have an analysis and can say X% were justified, Y% were probably justified, and Z% were not justified, it is impossible to tell how big of a problem we have. Because right now, we just have some number and the rest are anecdotes. Your conclusions on this matter is primarily a result of all the negative videos you have seen. But as you know, just seeing one set of outcomes doesn’t give you perspective of it’s over all impact. To use our forest analogy, if someone showed you just a picture of every sick/dead tree in the forest, you would conclude that the whole forest is sick and needs cut down, even though you don’t actually know what the actual percentage of sick trees there are.
And for the record, I am being optimistic that a vast majority of police shootings ARE justified. But I freely admit I don’t have enough information to conclude that is the case. But at the same time, we don’t have the information to conclude most are not.
It isn’t always helpful to compare other countries on issues such as this. Because the reasons for this issue are going to be different than other countries. For example, the UK has never had the amount of gun violence in the US (even before their new laws) nor was their homicide rate as high. Now why is that? Why are there so many areas in Africa still awash in civil wars and brutality? Why is the suicide rate in Japan soooo high compared to everyone else? All those areas have unique make ups and cultures, and thus different problems and different outlooks on those problems.
The US is also MASSIVE. We have little subsets of culture in the various areas of the US. We share a common language and national allegiance but our cultures and environments greatly differ. I mean there is the obvious differences as say small town farm area midwest, and the hustle and bustle of NYC. West Coast vs East Coast. North and South. Pepsi and Coke. Pop and Soda and coke. Pot or meth. etc etc. So even when looking at our own problems internally, we have to be sensitive to the differences in the people who live in various areas.
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Agree 100% on this. I’m always a little amazed when people from other countries start chiming in and saying how we need to be more like them or some other country… It’s like people have forgotten that we had a civil war only 150 years ago. I mean, yes that is a long time, but it’s not that far removed from history either. A war that only killed over 600,000 people. So realistically we kind of have a history of violence. That’s not totally an excuse but there really isn’t another country like ours to be compared to.
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Or that they forgot that anytime two different groups in Europe didn’t like each other, they made a NEW country and/or made war on someone else. The first time in like EVER there hasn’t been a large war in Europe in 75 years and they act like suddenly their poo doesn’t stink.
The fact we somehow managed to keep this melting pot from not getting to hot, melting the pot, and spewing it’s contents everywhere is really quite an unprecedented feat.
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The media documented number of police killings was <a href=“http://killedbypolice.net/“target=”_blank”>1205 people last year. Why does an estimate that accounts for under-reporting of truly marginalized people killed by police strike you as so implausible?
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RTFA much?
You used to work as an apologist for the tobacco industry, right?
“Yes, that is weird that all these people are dying. Maybe there’s some common correlation, but I think it’s more important that we spend the next 20-30 or even 40 years individually analysing each death in minute detail, rather than looking at the population and quickly determining if there is actually a problem.”
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Because the numbers I am reading don’t line up for 1500 a year, especially over a multiyear period where the last number 1205, was high compared to years before.
That and there is a site that very carefully tracks Chicago’s statistics, which has one of the worst homicide rates in the US, shows of the homicides in the city, the police account for 1.7% of deaths and .97% of ALL shootings (fatal and non fatal). Which is a far cry from 8-10%. Now maybe Chicago is an outlier, but one would think one of the hot spots for homicide and a city where cops would be on edge, it would be closer to the proposed average.
But again, this stresses the point we need more detailed analysis. If the average IS 8-10%, and a murder factory like Chicago is only 1.7%, then there has to be some cities where the average is ungodly high to make the numbers work.
I think you correctly identify upthread that a huge part of the problem is the “Thin Blue Line” and, more generally the way we view each case is extremely unlikely to turn up any convictions even when there is wrongdoing. Until that changes, the amount of wrongdoing (“wrongdoing” being a euphemism for “murder”) will just continue to increase because there’s nothing getting in the way of it.
But I disagree that we can’t say there is something wrong from the stats alone. The stats tell us there is definitely something wrong, even if no individual officer can be shown to have acted improperly. Whether it’s that police are trained to systematically overreact, or social conditions create more violent crime in America that police have to deal with, or the number of guns makes interactions with police substantially more deadly (police might justifiably assume all criminals have guns), or the number of police deaths and the harshness of American justice make people think they might as well have a shootout rather than surrender. It could be all of these things and many more things that don’t really put blame on individual officers. Whatever it is, though, it’s a huge problem, and we know that just from stats.
So I disagree with your point about needed to figure out how many killings are justified in order to know how big the problem is. If all the killings are justified then it’s a big problem. It’s just a different kind of problem. The actual police murders are the low-hanging fruit in this, though apparently even they are out of reach.
I don’t agree that we can jump to that conclusion. But also, where are you getting 8-10% from? Are you comparing police killings to the murder rate? Because as you point out, killings are not murders.
Also, media reports of police killings have been substantially up over the past year or two, but we don’t have a good reason to think that the killings are way up, just that it’s become a story the media follows. If 1205 was high, we really don’t have a good reason to think it was a high year for killings so much as a high year for reporting (we are in the dark, at least, about how much of a factor each was). And really, if 1205 are reported by media, then 1500 sounds completely reasonable. How many killings escape the notice of the media? How many are never tied back to police? Does the idea that “20% of killings by police are unsolved” sound really high? To me it sounds low.
Well, if I’m needlessly killing a lot of people, maybe my step mom could be forgiven for the comparison. But also, it isn’t like that at all. Different countries are different for a lot of reasons, but groups of people are far more similar to one another than individuals are to one another, and the larger the group the more they are predictable by statistics. Traffic deaths happen more on badly designed highways than on well designed ones. Good policy can change things.
Most universities have introductory courses in statistics - available by distance education if that suits you - that would show you various ways to create extremely rigorous and well-documents estimates of a variety of things. That would be a good place to start. For a very brief overview, I’d read the wikipedia article on Estimation.
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You believe there’s no possibility at all that the number of police killings making it into media reporting isn’t increasing rather than the number of people police kill in any given year?
Interesting.
I agree. Also when we have oversight, it still tends to be the “fox watching the chicken coop” sort of thing. I think it would behoove us to have a better system in place. Someone less biased.
Ok, that I can agree with. It is a problem. But how bad and who is to blame isn’t clear. I didn’t mean to make it seem like that even if 100% of the shootings were justified, that it wasn’t still an issue. It would just mean its not an issue with the police. Like another post on BB today, it isn’t going to be black and white. Certainly cops are part of the problem some times, and other times it is the criminals.
Where did I get that? I swear it was in a post above, but I don’t see it, so it was perhaps edited or deleted?
At any rate, ~15000 are killed by guns a year (homicides). Whether the 1500 estimated to be killed by cops per year is included in those stats I don’t know, but if that estimate is correct then about 8-10% of people killed per year are killed by cops - that was what lead to that statement.
At any rate though, that site I linked to tracks every killing, including those by cops. If this estimate is accurate, I would expect Chicago to be much higher than it is, but again I concede that is just one city and it doesn’t refute the estimate, just doesn’t clearly reflect it.
All good points.
Again, I am not saying that we shouldn’t strive to lower the numbers. But it isn’t as simple as just saying “stop it” or “be like us” because the reasons we have these issues may not exist there.
I am not clear on your statement/question.
I agree there is more media reporting. I don’t know what you mean by the second half.
I am saying that the estimate of under reported/unreported shootings by police may not be accurate. But I admit it could be. But I am not really arguing that point as much as the point that the number alone doesn’t help much determine where to go from here.
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In Canada I see this very plainly in different jurisdictions. I don’t think anywhere has really good police oversight, but there is certainly a lot of variance and some places are better than others. When investigations of police are left up to the police, you can see how it affects police behaviour, and how it creates an atmosphere where the idea of charging an officer with a crime is seen as an attack on the police.
I get this point. Even if we agree it’s a problem there is no point in telling an alcoholic to stop drinking. Achieving cultural change in American police forces is a problem I can’t say I know how to tackle.
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Somebody misspelled “paid vacation.”
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I fail to see this version of “Order” as being intrinsically better.
Or this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
Or these ones:
Or this one:
I can keep going, but this is going to get exhausting. Not because the research is so hard, but because finding these is so easy and I could be here all night.
So I offer you the choice: Stats, anecdotes, or both. No picture you can possibly paint using facts makes the police in this country look good.
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