If patrolling US soldiers can avoid shooting civilians, why can't US cops stop murdering unarmed black men?

boing
45

Citation needed.

We are involved in something like 134 wars right now. If they were routine as you say, questions like “If patrolling US soldiers can avoid shooting civilians, why can’t US cops stop murdering unarmed black men?” wouldn seem a bit hollow yet for most it rings true. But perhaps I’m wrong.
Police killed 1,129 people in 2017. Most of the people killed (718) were suspects in nonviolent offenses, were stopped for traffic violations or had committed no crime at all. 13% (147) of people killed by cops were unarmed. Only 12 officers were charged with a crime.
We can see that over half of the people killed by police were wrongfully killed. Are over half the killings by soldiers wrongful? I can’t seem to find anything suggesting that is the case.

2 Likes
46

The military’s record of civilians dead vs bad guys dead is nowhere near as good as the police. Thus the idea they do better doesn’t make sense.

Furthermore, over there the civilians are generally simply there, not trying to interact with the soldiers. Almost 100% of the people the police shoot are resisting arrest. (And in the few that aren’t the police are generally prosecuted.) Once again it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Also, when you look at the number killed vs the number arrested the police are actually slightly less likely to shoot blacks than whites.

47

Now that needs some serious citation. Keep in mind, “resisting arrest” is defined by police as asking them to repeat anything, not bending one’s body in a way it can’t go as an officer tries to dislocate a joint, or doing everything they tell you to but they say “stop resisting” as a mantra so they can use it as an excuse when the video shows them beating the shit out of a handcuffed person who is face down on the ground.

11 Likes
48

Yup. Also, lying down limbs outstretched when instructed to do so is also considered resisting arrest and grounds for being shot. All the cop got was attempted manslaughter.

As far as I’m concerned shooting someone in that situation is attempted murder.

11 Likes
49

"Amid the debate over increasingly dangerous, and in some cases lethal, police tactics, a recent report by WNYC has discovered a disturbing reality about the way that New York’s police officers operate.

According to their findings, just 15% of New York Police Department arresting officers generate over 50% of all “resisting arrest” charges, while an even smaller group of just 5% accounted for over 40% of those incidents.

That statistics again: Just 5% of the entire NYPD (roughly 34,500 officers) were involved in over 40% of the city’s “resisting arrest” incidents.

In the 51,000 cases that WNYC identified, over 20,000 were reported by that 5% of officers.

Since it’s so easy to claim a suspect was “resisting” as a justification to deploy excessive force, officers who regularly claim suspects resisted arrest might be lying. Or perhaps they’re being overly aggressive when confronting suspects, leading to unnecessary violence. Either way, something’s not quite right here.

With evidence like this, it seems these 5% officers should possibly be flagged as potential future offenders like New York’s Officer Daniel Pantaleo and Ferguson, Missouri, Officer Darren Wilson — people who needs to be watched to ensure they’re not a threat to the public. Police unions would raise hell over this, but there’s ample evidence to suggest most police get along just fine without anyone resisting: Since 2009, around 60% of officers have never claimed a single case of resisting arrest. "

6 Likes
50

I have seen enough videos to know this isn’t the case. I am even willing to give some leeway to the cops for grey area shoots. But with out a doubt there is a portion where if you or I did the same thing with an intruder in our house, we would be up on murder charges. Period. And very rarely they are brought up on charges.

Near my home town the victim of a SWATting was shot by an armored cop with a rifle behind cover. The guy was on his porch, unarmed, and I would estimate at least 50 yards away.

The number shot is disproportionate to the population. Though I would be interested on stats of per encounter, per arrest, and number shot broken down by race.

I believe about 10% of the homicides in America are by the cops. Even if MOST of them are fully justified, there are a lot that are not. I am asking for accountability in the bad shoots.

5 Likes
51

Ah, so we need to go all 2nd Amendment on grenade launchers, IEDs and whatnot, if we want our streets safe.

52

That gets into a loop - Cops are more likely to stop people of color, and therefore more likely to arrest people of color, which means that crime rates are higher in neighborhoods inhabited by people of color, and so cops focus on neighborhoods where people of color live, which means cops are more likely to stop people of color, and therefore more likely to arrest…

Ok, very oversimplified, but even if the rates of police shootings per arrest turned out to be similar for blacks and whites, it wouldn’t suggest that whites are as likely as blacks to get killed by cops.

6 Likes
53

Hiring vets doesn’t seem to help. Michael Brelo was an Iraq war vet.

He had to reload by getting more ammo from his trunk, then he jumped on the hood of the car and continued when everyone else had stopped. Verdict - not guilty. Five of the six cops who fired 137 times are back on the police force.
SMH

1 Like
54

That’s true, one needs proper analysis and presentation of numbers.

I often read that red cars are pulled over for speeding more frequently, but that makes me wonder if they are TARGETED more often, because everyone knows they are more likely to speed.

1 Like
55

The vast majority of which were due to bombs and missiles, not small arms.

1 Like
56

Really? :thinking:

57

I gotta remember that phrase! :joy:

58

Jesus Fucking Christ on toast!
Let me guess, you’re a cop?

59

You find crime where you look for crime. It really is that simple. The other problem is that poor people are more likely to reach desperation and desperate people are more likely to commit crimes. When you take into consideration the systemic racism of our housing, urban planning, education, police, and criminal justice systems it becomes clear why there are more poor black people than any other minority.
So, we end up keeping the black community poor, poverty leads to increased crime, increased crime leads to increased policing, increased policing leads to more arrests of minorities and the racist basis for our systemic problems are reinforced by amplification.

It’s fun to make up imaginary meaningless metrics and then make no attempt to back them up.

Of course, when it comes to killing unarmed people, the police win that contest hands up… dont shoot.

1 Like
60

It’s the wrong metric.

My claim was not “most killings by the military are war crimes”, it was “war crimes going unpunished is a routine event”. The comparison is not “what percentage of the killing was unlawful?”, it’s “of the unlawful killings committed, what percentage go unpunished?”.

For both military and police, it’s “almost all of them”. Prosecutions are rare, and meaningful punishment is even rarer.

Most war crimes go undetected: the victims are unable to report them on account of being dead. Militaries also tend to be strongly disinclined to make any serious effort at discovering crimes by their own side; it’s not as if they actively investigate every killing.

Even when a war crime is detected and investigated, justice is very rarely delivered. See My Lai, see Haditha, see No Gun Ri, see Abu Ghraib, see the still unpunished torture regime of the Bush years. Given the obvious contempt for justice in response to the high profile massacres, why do you think they’d do any better for the crimes that are out of the media spotlight?

Every factor that allows police to get away with murder is also in effect for the military, often to a much stronger degree. The only people whose lives are worth less to the US authorities than American people of colour are non-American people of colour.

It’s obviously not the sort of thing in which hard numbers are readily available, particularly for wars that are still ongoing. But there is a mountain of qualitative evidence to suggest that unpunished war crimes are a very common occurence.

For example:

Or this book:

Note that my claim is not that US soldiers are notably worse than other soldiers. Pretty much every honest war memoir in print, regardless of nationality, contains some mention of unpunished war crimes.

Soldiers in action will commit war crimes; this is pretty much inevitable. Young men, trained to celebrate violence, placed under extreme stress, facing people who they are encouraged to dehumanise (and who are often racially and culturally distant from them), will predictably do horrific things. Not all of them, but some of them.

You can reduce the incidence of war crimes by (a) stomping the perpetrators hard when they occur, and (b) not deploying military force unless there is no other option. The fact that atrocities are an apparently inevitable part of war needs to be part of the calculation when evaluating the cost of military action.

The US is a notable failure at (a) as well as (b), and has been throughout its history.

4 Likes
61

Why does anyone think that anyone who gets close to the border won’t be shot? Actually, I’ve heard that reserve troops have been sent to the border in the past exactly to shoot at possible border jumpers. So this time it’ll be different?

62

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.