Given the makeup of the board, I imagine that the general reaction to the title of the thread will be, “No shit. The Pope is also Catholic.”
But, now that we’re well past the BLM era and into the Trump era and I’m not aware of any recent, big police killings, it seemed a reasonable time to revisit the topic while we’re not all in a partisan crisis and unwilling to be open to other possibilities.
As said, I think that the popular wisdom on the site is that the American Police Kill a Lot of People, as noted in the title. But, at one point the site also popularly believed that tasers kill people* and, since we all rely on the news, it is the common case that a lot of information in news is strongly misleading** on partisan issues.
So let us try making the assumption (which we will accept as a hypothetical, not a real world effect) that a person who wants to kill another person, will find a way to do so. No guns, they’ll use a bomb, knife, or vehicle to cause those same deaths. In Britain, where the police do not have guns, they might simply run the perp over, tie him up by the neck in jail, or whatever else. It is readily conceivable that British police might kill (but, obviously, not shoot) the people they deal with at an equal rate as the Americans, simply using other means to accomplish their aim. Whether you buy that hypothetical or not, I leave to you and other threads, but as said we will assume it to be true for the time being.
But, alas, the hypothetical does not prove out in this instance. American police kill at a much greater rate.
The IPCC (the Independent Police Complaints Commission of England and Wales) provides us with this data:
In the 2014/15 year, a total of 141 people died while dealing with or under the control of the police, in England and Wales. The population of these two regions in 2015 is estimated to have been 57,849,756.
For the US, I am using the numbers from this article:
In the US, in 2015, the Washington Post was able to identify 990 people killed, by the police, by shooting. That seems sufficiently specific and identifiable that, unless we are to assume sheer lying, I have to accept that this is a bare minimum for the total number of police-caused deaths in the USA. As such, the 1,357 killed, through all means, that was recorded by “Fatal Encounters” does not strike me as implausible. If anything, I could see it excluding something like suicides in custody, since that would probably not be considered a police killing.
But, for the sake of argument and the strong belief that the British police will use faked suicides or any other means to get around their lack of a gun, we will compare the full British tally to the (probably) suicide lacking Fatal Encounters number.
If we were to scale up the 141 British killings to the population size of the US (~320m), we would expect about 780 police-related deaths in the US. Instead, we see almost double that with our expected outcome of ~1,357.
We must also accept that at least some percentage of suicides are actual suicides. I would personally guess it to be the strong majority. Similarly, I would expect the strong majority of vehicular accidents to be completely benign and I would not be surprised if this number was also excluded from the Fatal Encounters metric.
While we do not know exactly what was included in the American numbers, and we do not know how much of each category to include in our tally of the British numbers, the fact that we can’t even hit the clear police shootings in the US, even when we throw everything into it, seems strongly indicative that American police kill a lot of people, pound for pound. And, personally, I would guess that the correct ratio is probably something like 4X the kill rate.
This could be due to guns, it could be due to income disparity and race metrics of the countries being compared. If anyone can fish up similar or better statistics for a variety of nations, and whether the police of those nations are armed with guns, I am happy to run the numbers. For the moment, I’m strongly willing to believe that the sheer ease of murder that a gun enables and its ease of access to an officer (who would have it right on his hip) is quite likely to be a strong cause of this effect.
Anyways, them’s the numbers for the moment. I don’t really have anything to debate as regards it, but it seems like the sort of material that seems liable to cause a debate. I’m largely sharing because I’d like to be able to point out my non-partisan cred in the future and link back to this OP.
- Tasers are implicated in the deaths of people at the same rate, per incident, as people who died when forced to lie on their chest. That is to say, it would seem that they can kill you only if you’re in amazingly poor health that almost anything could kill you at that moment in time. (Though, granted, if you’re in that poor of health, the need to tase you seems a bit questionable.)
** As best I can tell, the media doesn’t lie so much as they are selective in their hearing, and/or will faithfully report the lies that have been told to them by people who are plausible sources on that topic (political aides, scientists, etc.) It takes some close reading and smell tests to decide what seems trustworthy, but I think it’s safe to assume that the media generally reports what they have been told accurately.