Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2022/01/24/u-s-cops-killed-at-least-1134-people-last-year.html
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really?
i never would have expected that 
because of my younger son’s wild years as a teenager and a twentysomething i’ve had wayyy more interactions with law enforcement officers than i ever would have wanted and, even on those few occasions when they were in my presence because i needed their help, virtually every interaction with them lowered my respect for police and sheriff’s deputies and increased my contempt for them. because of that, the first time i heard the slogan “defund the police” my first thought was “it is about fucking time!”
@beschizza , everything about the information you’ve provided above both confirms my absolute disgust with american policing and intensifies my desire to see law enforcement organizations defunded and disbanded to be replaced by something else.
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I still hate twitter for trying to convey meaningful information, but those are some nice charts and graphs.
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They have masks on in the picture, just not the right kind of masks.
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It seems to me that, though this has always been the case to some extent, the fact that the police were not created to protect the population, that they never have and they still don’t by design, has really been lost in the debate on “police reform”.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that police have no duty to protect citizens, from each other or from the police themselves.
I could go on but others can do a better job than me. Here’s something quickly googled that nutshells the things on my mind. There’s plenty more to be found.
Any debate centered on the premise that things have gone awry and need to be corrected through whatever means back to some previous baseline where everything was okay is relatively pointless.
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Meanwhile, my country (Switzerland) had exactly 0 police killings last year. Admittedly we are only about 8 Mio people, but comparably loaded with automatic guns per capita like the US. It’s really not normal for police to kill, they should be seen and see themselves as servants of the people.
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One of the reasons American cops get away with killing so many people is that they can plausibly claim they were in fear for their lives because many American criminals are armed. Meanwhile one of the reasons so many Americans are armed is because they can plausibly claim that they need to defend themselves from the government. The result is mostly that a bunch of people are shooting each other and nobody is really protected from anyone.
It’s a big ol’ Circle of Death.
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My wife is a nurse and just started working at our local juvenile hall. It’s been pretty eye opening. She as telling me yesterday that under Obama they finally stopped throwing kids in juvy for truancy.
We all know what color skin most of the kids being punished for this were (and are).
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So. According to statistics, Cops are not people.
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Biden said the other day that erasing student debt is not a priority, but increasing funding for police is. My expectations for his administration were very low, but he has still managed to impress me with how mediocre he is.
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Nearly half the killings were mental health/welfare checks.
And right there is the argument for “defunding” the police.
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Mental health “check” = Lethal “aid”.
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Just for comparison. In Germany for 2019 it were 14. (2020 numbers not out yet)
(Germany has about a fourth of the inhabitants of the US, so if Germany had as many inhabitants as the US and the same rate of killing would be 56)
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