Here’s an article summarising the proportion of foreign born individuals in the US. It’s fluctuated from a high of 14.8% in 1890, to a low of 4.7% in 1970. It’s currently at 12.9%.
I have no idea how you can say this, as the UK and Ireland have such an intertwined history. The history of the UK dates back just as far as Ireland.
Did the Irish ever kill 3% of their own population in a civil war? Americans did.
I agree. Frankly, I think looking at demographics or gun ownership or other stuff is largely beside the point. It comes down to attracting and accepting the wrong type of people into the police (authoritative, aggressive, violent), and poor training on how to handle different situations. The problem is exacerbated by the “I’m going home to my family tonight” mindset, as well as the propensity for police to protect their own when something horrible happens. Whether it’s the the guy shot in a Walmart aisle, or the kid shot at the park, or the people shot in the SUV (I am purposefully leaving Ferguson out of this list), the police were FAR too quick to shoot. They shot before they sized up the situation or thought of alternatives.
Shooting the guy in the back after a traffic stop is so far beyond the pale that it isn’t even remotely defensible. It does, however, provide some evidence of police propensity to shoot first and ask questions later.
Oh, and the boy in the park was not waving a gun around. It was a toy.
Right - which the police could easily see, because no one had altered the pistol to make it look like a real one.
Well, actually someone did, but nonetheless the police could easily see that the gun was fake because the kid reacted in a way totally different from someone would who had a real gun and wanted to shoot cops.
Well, actually, no, he didn’t, but nonetheless the police have magic mind-reading powers and can tell the instant they get a complaint call about someone with a gun in a park that it is a fake.
Well, actually, no they don’t. So I guess it is pure racism.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s not “pure racism”, although I think it’s hard to argue that racism doesn’t play any part in such shootings. However, there’s some middle ground between acting totally without caution (eg, walking up to the kid and asking him to hand over what could be a real gun) and shooting him virtually on sight.
Most of this post has nothing to do with this thread.
Ireland as ‘a social entity’ is beside the point. The point is the relationship and interaction between the police and the citizens. In terms of having its own police force, and its own citizens, and developing its own relationship between the two, Ireland is less than a century old.
I assume you’re talking about the whole island, rather than the country. I’m not sure why. Northern Ireland isn’t the same nation as the republic. It has a different police force and a VASTLY different relationship between the police and the citizens. When it comes to the question posed in this thread, the two are totally separate entities.
I’d like a cite for the rate of violent crime in Ireland being ‘vastly’ higher than that of the USA.
Don’t you have to establish that racism does play a part in such shootings? Unless accusations of racism are un-falsifiable.
No doubt such accusations are intended to be so, but that doesn’t make them valid. And they can’t be established as valid, because it is mostly anecdote, selective perception, and a good big dose of false accusations (“Michael Brown was shot in the back/Zimmerman was a racist/Garner was killed for being black/it’s racist to expect the people of Ferguson to pay their traffic tickets/etc.”
Regards,
Shodan
Surely you remember Cork in the 1920s when rival alcohol distributors tommy-gunned each other on the streets ? Or the hell-hole of devastation that was Kerry in the 1950s when the bodies piled up on the rolling hills over the merits of communist theory ? Not to mention the ‘Thrilling Times’ in County Roscommon during the 1970s when farmers came to knife-fights over the best way to plough a field…
If one is making a definite point with certainty, sure. But it’s reasonable to suspect that racism, in some form, may have been involved.
Do you think racism was a part of any police shootings of black people in the 1890s? If so, how much? 50%? 90%? I know we couldn’t say with certainty, but what do you suspect?
Do you think the number was still significantly higher than zero in 1930? Or 1950? 1980? How about now? How close to zero do you think it is now? I think it’s still not that close, based on the incredible disparities in places like Ferguson and elsewhere. But these are opinions and suspicions based on history and statistics, and not factual assertions, because it’s nigh-impossible to factually assert that any particular police shooting was based on racism unless the shooter admits this.
Here is an interesting statistic:
52 people were killed by the RUC during the Troubles, some of these killings are listed in the wikipedia entry cited in the article you quote but many aren’t.
Actually, that catchphrase is nothing more than a rationalization for violence, uttered long after the common carrying of weapons had diminished while civility had increased. There is a reason that “the Wild West” passed into history only after Dodge, Abilene, and other communities banned the carrying of weapons on their streets.
I don’t disagree. What I’m trying to say (poorly) is that in the US a gun is viewed as a viable tool to solve problems. This attitude filters its way to the police, who use their guns more than any other westernized police force.
… and that might conceivably be construed, tentatively, by some no doubt limp-dicked effete numbnuts, as something tangentially akin to perhaps the hint of the shadow of the indication of maybe possibly a kind of sort of type of the problem ? Possibly ?
I believe it is a problem but since part of it is due to the gun culture of the US it’s hard to deal with. I don’t believe the use of guns by cops can be attributed just to yahoos or racism (although certainly they are partly to blame). When all sides (cops, criminals, and citizens) are armed and ready to use them it’s not gonna be fixed by some extra training.
Here’s the UK story of a manic who beheaded a woman in her garden, armed cops where called and they dealt with it without killing him. A few cops where also injured.
I’d be amazed if this guy had of had less than 100 bullets in him if it happened in the US.
Don’t get me wrong I’ve no problem with this fuck dying but I think it does show a difference in training and attitude that the UK cops seems to try to deescalate the situation and control it and only use lethal forced if needed and not just as a response to aggression.
Obviously there are lots and lots of great cops in the US that respect life but IMO there is unquestionably a cultural element to this.
I think it’s been established that the US, for whatever reason, has higher levels of violence than most or all other ‘developed nations’, but this is just confirmation bias here. There are nearly a million police officers in the US, and they are dealing with issues every day. You only hear about things on the news when they go completely off the rails wrt killing someone. Otherwise there would literally be millions of civilians killed every day by police if your musings were reality. That doesn’t happen, however…in fact, we are talking about less than a thousand civilian deaths by police per year (the actual figure varies, but figured I’d go for the high end). Yeah, that’s a lot compared to the other civilized nations on the planet, but in a country of over 400 million with nearly a million police it’s a relatively small number, and one that you shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the US police would have acted that much differently than your UK police did in a given situation.
Here in Salt Lake City, there’ve been 13 fatal police shootings this year. We’re not even halfway through the year, yet. In fact, “use of force by police is the second-most common circumstance under which Utahns kill each other, surpassed only by intimate partner violence.”
Yes, you’re more likely to be killed by the SLC police than you are by the criminals. That goes a bit beyond “confirmation bias”, I think.
Bolding mine. To pick a nit, US population currently stands at about 324 million.
All it takes is a good guy with a gun?