An unarmed man is physically assaulting an armed police officer. He gets his hand on the officer’s gun. Do you recognise that it is a valid response in this circumstance to shoot the man?
But is it? There’s, like 300 million in the U.S. Comparing it to a 60 million country is hardly a fair statistic. We need better data. What’s the rate in the whole of the US against the whole of the EU? In, say, a 5 or a 10 year period?
I’m curious how you jump an order of magnitude here and it makes me wonder if there is some question about the number of people killed by the police. Taking your 32 number and correcting it for population size to the UK the US’s policies would have led to 6 deaths so our rate is about double. If we correct for population to New Zealand then we’d have about one death every 3 years which I’m sure would cause a huge outcry.
With some variability around the number killed I would say our rate isnt too different from the UK and seems to be based more on number of opportunities then on culture.
That’s why per capita statistics exist. In 2011/2012 police officers in England and Wales discharged five bullets (and this does not seem to be a particularly remarkable year), killing two people, out of a total of 12,500 police operations where armed police were called to the scene. On average, American police forces kill around 400 people per year in what are termed “justifiable homicides” according to FBI statistics.
For reference, the population of England and Wales is ~56 million whilst population of the USA is ~316 million. Even when population-adjusted US police departments are killing significantly more people than their British counterparts.
That’s good. Can we find out the per capita on comparable countries that do allow for armed police, like say, France?
Because if it’s also a significantly smaller number than the US, then correlation wouldn’t necessarily mean causation.
I can’t find statistics for France (presumably they’re written in French what with the French phobia of providing any information in any other language than their own) after Googling. However, German police are armed (apparently every police office carries a pistol, and every car is equipped with an MP5) and there have been eight deaths from police shootings in the last two years and a total of 109 since 1998.
Population of Germany = 80.6 million. Again, America is killing massively more than in Germany even when population-adjusted.
As noted above. France zero, Germany three, Japan zero.
The first figure is Police officers shot on duty
The second is civilians shot by police officers.
409 per 350 million is more than one a million
average of 1 a year for UK is 0.02 per million
Two orders of magnitude less.
The problem is that because of having a gun and expectations the US police officer puts themselves in a position to have someone put their hand on their gun.
In the UK that situation would never happen- an armed police officer would never (has never) let themselves get into that position because of their training, expectation and mindset.
Consequently neither police nor civilians get killed.
That’s an oddly specific scenario. How long did it take you to find and draw your firearm, and when’s your daughter’s funeral?
First, change the police culture.
Second, change the law abiding citizen culture
Third, change the criminal culture.
Other countries have managed it. What is a valid excuse for allowing it to continue?
I agree with the OP.
It is simply stunning to me that policemen in my state are basically permitted to kill (at least, to kill poor black persons) on very little pretext. And it’s stunning to many of my countrymen. How did we get here? I think that the complex divided government in the USA is part of it. A law can be passed at a layer of government that is commonly ignored that allows police broad powers in the name of security, and people don’t notice until they see it in practiceat which point the authorities will insist this is normal and traditional.
Well, maybe it *was *normal and traditional once, on a plantation somewhere. And maybe not.
Much of this is mindset controlled.
I used to work in Mental Health on seriously disturbed units. We often had to control and restrain extremely agitated, angry, ill and sometimes downright evil people. We did this by using team work, training and support. No patient was ever seriously injured and no weapons were ever used; no person being restrained was hit, punched, kicked, kneed or otherwise struck- all control was by hands on pressure and occasional use of pain position- where moving out of a position would cause pain.
Meanwhile regular assessments of police cells, prison MUFTI ("Minimal use of force’!), secure children’s homes and so on regularly used and excused many such unskilled interventions. Until recently there was an agreed procedure in secure children’s units of a move laughingly described as defensive facial manoeuvre - punching the child between the nose and lips!
It all depends on mindset, training and expectation. Same with police firearms.
There is a line of thought that suggests much of the problem of police, correctional and other social control systems being oppressive is a continuation of Jim Crow laws by other means.
Pjen I notice you omit the Northern Ireland statistics. They’re part of the UK and the police routinely go armed. 
Switzerland has the third highest rate of gun ownership in the world (although with tighter controls than in the US. The NRA tends to omit that fact when they bring the Swiss up.) Their gun death and violence rates were higher than the UK but still lower than the US. Their total homicide rates run lower than the UK though (and honestly I might prefer getting shot to being hacked up with a machete. )
The gap in gun deaths between the US and UK is about an order of magnitude bigger than the gap in total homicide rates; we’re still more violent but it’s not as striking a difference. We use guns your countrymen have to make do with more primitive means. With guns my countrymen get the dirty deed done at a rate 4.7 times higher than yours. For that matter your country look mildly hotheaded compared to Germany that has lower homicide rates while still having armed police.
Maybe it’s not as simple as JUST the guns or the police culture. Maybe it’s the overall culture and how we relate to violence. Police culture is only a piece of what looks like an overall culture of violence. Homicides by police is only a small piece of the overall homicide rate. Changing some aspects of police culture probably can have some impacts by avoiding escalation. Police culture can’t exist completely outside the overall culture of violence though. Most police shootings involve armed suspects (predominantly armed with guns.) You don’t take a taser to a gunfight. The overall culture is harder to change since it’s not as simple as forcing it on those we hire to protect us if they want to keep the jobs.
There are three different police jurisdictions in the UK- Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland. Statistics are compiled individually.
In the last thirty years I can only find four cases where a RUC or PSNI officer shot and killed someone.
Of course the Army was on the streets in that time- much like the National Guard in Ferguson today. But we are talking about regular policing here, not insurrection or riot!
Total Intentional Homicide
USA 14,827 Rate 4.2
UK 653 Rate 1.0
Germany 662 Rate 0.8
I pulled the UN Office of Drugs and Crime data for 2002-2012. That shows my worse number of 4.7 ; either way we suck compared to most of Europe except for some exceptions like the Baltic Republics.
I had no idea that “changing the culture” was so simple and easy. Could you offer us some tips as to how you managed it, since us uncivilized Americans are too bloodthirsty and barbaric to figure it out on our own?