I’m hoping there’s a GQ answer to this - debating the issue may come later - but I’m having trouble bringing up appropriate statistics.
The posit is that in a country where there is a death penalty, a villain may have nothing to lose by shooting it out and possibly killing policemen whereas in a country without a death penalty, the villain knows that he can survive. And thus it’s better for the police for there to be no death penalty.
But do the statistics back that up? I’ve not found them one way or the other. Can you?
I don’t know how many law enforcement officers are killed over here, but I know that in Paris urban area (around ten millions people) the police fired 24 shots last year. Making the assumptions that :
Police officers return fire when shot at
Police officers sometimes open fire when nobody is trying to kill them
Police officers will usually fire more than one shot when they actually use their weapons
I would suspect that very few people actually tried to kill them.
By the way, discovering this figure, some months ago, made me understand that the quaint British custom of having unarmed police officers actually makes sense, since apparently the police uses firearms way more rarely than I believed (I assume that the situation in Paris and London is relatively similar crime-wise).