The fact that the deaths of 20,000 people were justified by a flawed system does not make it right.
And you are defining “innocents” as being solely people who were killed by police and the officer was charged and convicted.
Whereas part of the problem is that police officers are hardly ever charged, and are rarely convicted.
What about the thousands of people in which it was acknowledged after the fact that the person was killed due to an officer thinking he saw a weapon that wasn’t really there?
I’ve given links to many egregious cases in which people were killed by police. In none of these examples were the police charged and convicted. So by your definition none of these people are innocent.
I addressed this. You defined “criminals” as everyone killed by police (all 20,000 of them according to you) except for the 35 “innocents” in which the police officer was charged and convicted.
That is obviously nonsense, as a perusal of the half-dozen or so cases I’ve cited in the thread shows, and the larger omnibus thread here:
Including police. Policing is on the list of dangerous jobs mostly due to traffic accidents.
How much is “massively”? Because if it tripled the number of police officers killed, but cut the number of people killed by police by 10%, that’d still be an improvement.
100% of the people killed by the police were not convicted of the supposed crimes that led to the encounters.
Yes, and for the reason i already gave- no motive. There are about 75 people killed each yeah in hunting accidents, and AFAIK, none are convicted of Murder (once in a while, someone is convicted of the lower levels of Manslaughter for “Criminally Negligent Homicide”.
Why?- no motive. The hunter who accidentally kills someone does not have a motive for murder. And- they are not police officers either. Same with car accident, with over 36000 people killed, and unless the driver was drinking or something (Criminally Negligent Homicide) they are almost never charged with murder. And not cops either. See- it is very very hard to convict someone of murder without a strong motive.
And in two of those cases, the shooting was brought before a jury- and the Jury did not convict.
Of the 81 officers killed last year 53 were intentionally killed in the line of duty.. 22 died due to car accidents.
So yes, traffic accidents are a significant cause of officer deaths, but getting murdered is #1.
Over on Quora.com I once asked what would happen if a city mandated that its police had to go back to being armed with six-shot revolvers instead of semi-automatics. About half the respondents who are or were police said that they’d be okay with that; the other half said no f’n way.
Or the reason that I posited in the OP in the first place: police prioritizing their own personal safety at the expense of the public.
The apparent thinking is that if they (the police) shoot and kill anyone who poses a threat—however remote—or possible threat, or theoretical threat, then they get to go home. And if thousands of civilians have to die in the process because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or twitched when they should have frozen, or reached for their phone or their wallet, then oh well.
This is exacerbated by training that tells police that every encounter is a possible threat to their life, and that they should be prepared to respond in an instant with overwhelming lethal force.
And because they are very rarely held to account, then there is no incentive whatsoever for police to change their practices.
Whereas at least 1,200-1,300 civilians were killed by police last year. That’s about 25 times as many deaths for those keeping score at home.
I agree completely, and since you bring it up, I’ll relate the following:
As I mentioned upthread, as part of my job, we are required to hire private-duty police officers for traffic control on utility construction projects.
Not only is it a scam paying their outrageous rates (costing nearly 10% of my entire construction budget on a $12 million project) just for them to simply sit (and sleep) in their cruisers with the lights flashing, but they are actually a detriment to the project. They show up late (or not at all) and leave early while telling us we can’t work without them being present.
It is impossible to talk to them or give them direction. As a rule, they are belligerent and do whatever they want to do.
So we don’t even bother trying to talk to them anymore, because they’ll just abruptly shut the job down, delaying our work and costing us thousands of dollars. We ultimately had to hire a retired police lieutenant to act as a liaison with them.
Are you referring to the private-duty police for traffic control that we are required to hire? The ones who get get paid $200/hour to do nothing but sit (and frequently sleep) in their cruisers on a roadway construction project with their lights flashing?
We don’t need them for security. We [supposedly] need them for traffic control. At the insistence of the municipality who owns the road in question.
Because the answer is yes, we can provide everything we need without them. Because they simply sit in their cruisers and refuse to actually direct traffic, we also have to hire multiple certified flaggers (aka flagmen) to do this. And the flashing police lights don’t add much either. We have plenty of flashing yellow lights on multiple construction vehicles along with light-up lane closure signs.
And the icing on the cake is that if no off-duty cops are available, the municipality and police department are fine with us proceeding without them. So if they are available but just late, we can’t start work, but if they are not going to show up all, then we are allowed to proceed with our own flashing lights and flaggers. Makes perfect sense, right?
It actually only makes sense if the sole intent to give the police officers in question lots of off-duty extra pay and to pad their pensions under the guise of public safety.
Almost all of those shooting are
found to be justified.
This rather biased against police cites
Research by Bowling Green State University professor Philip M. Stinson reveals that “almost all” police shootings are ultimately deemed justified by the authorities or the court. According to a 2021 USA Today report, police officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter in approximately 1% of fatal shootings since 2015.
Then there is this scholarly study-
The research, although far from perfect, has demonstrated that race does not play any significant role in the shootings of Black suspects. Police officers have nothing to gain to use lethal force, in fact, the use of any degree of force results in investigation and unwanted professional, departmental, and public scrutiny. The frequency of officers drawing their gun or firing their gun in the line of duty is quite rare.1‒4 Miller3 estimates that police use of force against citizens occurs in less than 1.5% of police contacts and that deadly force is used in approximately 360 cases per year compared to 60,000 reported cases of assault against police officers each year.5…
In approximately 90% of cases of police shooting fatalities the suspect had a weapon.8 When people hear of a shooting, it is easy to fear that police shootings are a common occurrence and that the police shootings are occurring all of the time when in fact if people slow down and examine the overall statistics, they would realize that police shootings are uncommon in the daily activity of law enforcement.9 Despite those handful of cases, less than approximately 1-3% of police shootings are deemed unjustified when all the facts and the full context of the circumstance (context) was examined.
So. let us take the high figure- 3%. And 1000 police shootings. So, 30 are unjustified vs 53 Police officers murdered.
You keep talking about shootings of civilians being “justified.” And defining “justified” as being any killing by a police officer in which the officer is not charged and convicted.
So that means that the killing of Philando Castile was justified according to you.
And twelve-year old Tamir Rice playing with a toy gun and immediately shot by police within two seconds of their arrival. He didn’t even have time to drop it.
And the gunning down of unarmed Daniel Shaver as he begged for his life.
All of these killings are justified according to you, @DrDeth. That’s the only way you can come up with such a ludicrously small number of unjustified killings. If you can’t see the problem with this line of thinking, I’m not sure what to say.
But I will say that any system that allows and condones this is fundamentally broken and unjust.
Yup, because they aren’t even required to keep track of how many people they kill. The fact that there’s no real way of knowing is, itself, evidence that the police are murdering way too many people.
Yup, and if we turn that around, 0% of the people killed by police get charged and convicted, and therefore we can conclude that 100% of police shootings are unjustified.
Castile was not justified. The officer was charged, but found not guilty by a jury of his peers. So, it was not justified but not a crime. There is a large gap between those. The family got a settlement of $2.995 million.
Rice was not justified- the Officer was fired. There was a settlement of 6 million, But the Grand Jury said there was not enough evidence to Indict, so no crime.
Clark was a violent criminal who was was thought to be carrying a gun. He ran, and did not follow police orders to “show me your hands” Clark then pulled a dark object- in the dark- and pointed it at the officers. It was a cell phone. From wiki-
On March 2, 2019, Sacramento County district attorney Anne Marie Schubert announced that her office would not be filing criminal charges against the police officers involved in Clark’s death.[23] Schubert stated that the officers had probable cause to stop and detain Clark and that they were legally justified in using deadly force against him.[8] On March 5, 2019, California attorney general Xavier Becerra announced that his office could not file criminal charges for Clark’s death.[24][25]
On September 26, 2019, US attorney McGregor Scott and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced there was “insufficient evidence” to bring federal civil right charges against the officers.
I think that shooting was justified. There was a settlement.
Shaver. Not justified. However-
On December 7, 2017, after a six-week trial, a jury acquitted Brailsford of all charges
So not a crime either. The family got a large settlement.
They most certainly are. However, there are about 18000 law enforcement agencies, and the FBI has not organized a way for them all to report, now to mention, Congress has yet to pass a law requiring them to report. So, what someone would have to do is sue each of 18000 agencies or demand under FOIA their figures, then correlate them themselves.
I did not define it that way. In fact I said in most of those the cops made mistakes. However, an error , while perhaps making the shooting unjustified, does not translate to a criminal act. In most cases, those examples turned out to be a Civil act, leading to a settlement.
In none of your examples did the officers commit murder-in fact in many cases a jury of their peers agreed they did not.
I think you are conflating two different things. You said:
So according to you, there are only 30 unjustified shootings of civilians per year. But that 3% figure comes from a study that is very slanted toward the police and provides no cite for where they came up with that figure. Instead they simply vaguely (and inartfully) say, “…less than approximately 1-3% of police shootings are deemed unjustified when all the facts and the full context of the circumstance (context) was examined.” No footnote was provided for this statement, despite ample footnotes elsewhere. And examined by whom?
It doesn’t really matter whether a cop that killed a person was criminally responsible or not, or if the family got a settlement (which is inevitably paid by the municipality, not the officer) or not. The victim is still dead.
What does matter is why police evidently feel the need to kill so many people.
I seem to recall the topic of how police officers are trained coming up in one of those news magazine shows like 20/20 or Dateline back in the 1990s. The story featured an “expert” who was regularly booked to speak to and consult police departments on training and he really went hard with the idea that tany encounter could end with the officer dead. Critics at the time felt this inculcated a culture of viewing the public as the enemy instead of a group they’re charged with protecting and serving.
While I disagree with the OP’s idea that cops can’t shoot until someone literally takes a shot at them first, it seems clear to me that we need to examine how we’re training police officers.
That is a peer reviewed punlished article. Got a cite it is biased? It also has no less than 20 references- which is how they got that number.
It most certainly does. And yes, just like outside police shooting, often a settlement is made even if they are sure they are right.
Because in 97% of the time, the police are shooting a dangerous armed felon who is quite willing and capable of killing the police not to mention whatever innocent bystanders get in their way.
The gunman fired more than 100 rounds at multiple locations, including the Mexican Consulate, the U.S. federal courthouse, and the Austin Police Department (APD) headquarters. He also attempted to set the Mexican Consulate on fire with an incendiary device
As a Texas grand jury declined to indict the police officer who killed a mass shooter at an outlet mall in May, authorities released dramatic body camera video Wednesday of the officer racing toward the gunfire and taking down the assailant accused of shooting 15 people, eight fatally.
Police released video footage on Wednesday of an officer killing a neo-Nazi gunman, quickly ending a mass shooting that left eight people dead and seven others wounded at a Dallas-area shopping mall.
The edited five-and-a-half-minute video details the final moments of Mauricio Garcia, 33, after he unleashed a rain of bullets from an AR-15-style rifle at the Allen Premium Outlets on May 6.
Those killed included three members of a Korean American family including a 3-year-old child, two young sisters, a security guard and an engineer from India.
Remember, besides the 1000 “police shootings” there are 14000 murders per year in the USA. yes, the police often end up killing one of them. That is why the police need to kill so many people.
More training is a good idea, and more “less lethal” weapons.
This quote stating that 97% of the time “the police are shooting a dangerous armed felon who is quite willing and capable of killing the police not to mention whatever innocent bystanders get in their way” is immediately followed by some individual cases that support the viewpoint of police on individual matters.
Now, if I state as fact that 95% of pet dogs are so dangerous that they should be put down, and follow that up with links to stories involving some dogs that are dangerous, would you call those stories about some individual cases supportive of my claim that 95% of pet dogs are dangerous enough to be put down?
