Amen. The problem is that it needs to be addressed from within the departments. Officers need to step forward and report those fellow officers who aren’t measuring up to responsible policing. I don’t think that’s something we can expect very soon.
And the huge conflict of interest faced by internal investigators and prosecutors who have to discipline or prosecute officers who shoot wrongfully.
Who says it’s a “problem”? Police shootings are scrutinized like crazy. Unjustified ones are dealt with. The OP infers they are not. That is untrue.
And who cares if a person shot is “crazy”? If someone is threatening my life I’m going to use the same amount of force to protect myself regardless of what I think the aggressors mental state is. It’s irrelevant.
Statistics. Either the United States contains a much greater proportion of criminals, or other nations find a way to handle their criminals without having to shoot so many of them in the street. The police in the United States kill more people than every other police force in the world combined.
Statistics are a lot more honest and hard to argue than the “internal investigations” of police shootings which always tend to find for the officer with the rarest of exceptions.
Your statistics are only that. Numbers. They don’t say it’s a problem. If those shootings were justified how is there a problem with the police? Sounds to me that the shit bags getting shot have the problem.
Show me that there is a large number of unjustified police shootings and then you’ll have a “problem”.
So you believe that the United States has more shit bags worthy of getting shot than anywhere else in the world?
You may factually be correct. The question is *why *are there so many shitbags?
- People have free will per Jebus, and are deciding to be shitbags
- We’ve created a society that fucks over a large percentage of it’s members somehow
- We have people who are genetically inferior to the populace of other countries.
The US allows guns. Gun ownership, gun sales, open carry, concealed carry, gun collections. Guns, guns, guns. Often times, even the scrappiest of petty criminals here have a gun. We seem to like it this way. Guns are our God given right and half a billion guns floating around society is in the Constitution.
Given this, the police here tend to be a bit paranoid and cautious and trigger happy.
Except you are comparing apples… and not even oranges… maybe wrenches. You described 1,150 deadly force encounters. At a minimum you have 2,300 people involved in 1,150 deadly force encounters half LEOs and half not. You adjust the odds of LEOs dying in all deadly force encounters (where your new standard actually has an effect). Depending on how much we reduce the survival rate for LEOs once they are in those encounters and what the rate of current encounters still being justified under your stricter standards we could end up in a situation where we end up total life negative. Let’s also not forget that part of the total lives benefit of this policy is the violent criminals who are actually attempting to murder the police. Those actually attempting murder are more likely to become successful murderers who get away.
Aside from a host of other second and third order efects of that policy we also have to consider the very real possibility of increasing the number of deadly force encounters between police and criminals. By giving them the initiative criminals who have the means of using deadly force now face lower risk of losing. We’ve effectively incentivized actually puling out the gun or knife. That likely increases the number of deadly force encounters.
I disagree (this is probably my biggest break with Republican law-and-order types). Police get more latitude to shoot people than your average citizen. During the Dorner manhunt, police shot the shit out of a bright blue Tacoma with two ladies inside delivering newspapers. Their department and DA investigated and concluded that the police were justified in trying to kill those newspaper ladies. That was bullshit.
I’d like to see violence by police reined in, but I have no idea how to accomplish that without having the police disengage from their jobs and leave their communities at the mercy of thugs and criminals (as seems to have happened in Baltimore and NYC after backlashes over deaths at the hands of police).
Well, that’s one way to cull the nation’s police departments, I suppose.
I assumed your solution was a joke so I responded in kind. If, perchance, there was some sincerity in your proposition that cops should be required to be shot at before defending themselves, then I’ll see your :rolleyes: and raise you :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
You want to make a high-risk job even riskier? What type of job applicants do you think you’re going to attract? Mr. Milquetoast accountant type candidates? Not bloody likely. You’re going to attract even higher testosterone level alpha males with aggression issues. Or, do you wish to have no law enforcement whatsoever? We all just get along like happy little bunny rabbits hopping about in the carrot garden, is that your fantasy? Give me a toke of what you are smoking.
How would your proposition even work in the real world? Let’s say a cop and a criminal suspect are face-to-face with handguns drawn, cocked and trained on each other. What’s the cop supposed to say? “You go first”?
Don’t get me wrong, I believe too many cops probably are too trigger happy, and some subset of them are racially motivated. But, the answer is to weed those bad apples out, not make the job even deadlier for those cops who do the right thing for the right reasons. There are ~900,000 cops in this country. A cite up-thread listed 1100 people killed by cops last year. So, keep in mind that the great majority of cops don’t kill anyone. And of those 1100, don’t you suppose some non-zero % actually did pose a deadly threat to the involved cops? Don’t you think an even higher % posed what could legitimately be accepted as the appearance of a deadly threat? Subtract those from the 1100 and you’re left with a significantly smaller number of people killed by cops unnecessarily, and they are the ones that need to be brought to justice. Don’t indict, or endanger the lives of the entire United States law enforcement personnel because of a minority few hundred bad apples.
Hard core criminals need hard core law enforcement, and America has hard core criminals. Blame easy access to firearms? Fine, ban firearms, I have no problem with that. But, until you do, don’t make rules where criminals get to shoot upon law officers or the general public first before you can defend yourself.
And I say this as someone who was very much a victim of the US judicial and federal law enforcement systems. I was royally screwed by an overzealous Assistant US Attorney and the FBI for 3 years straight (I discussed this in this forum years ago and don’t really wish to dredge it up again). And, thanks to my wacky wife (she’s a real knee-slapper) I was nearly shot by three city police officers ~8 years ago. The cop who later took my statement said if I didn’t drop to the ground when I did (i.e. immediately) I’d have been shot. It’s a funny story; I’ll tell it if you like.
But, the thing is, the cops did the right thing given the information they had at their disposal and what they thought they saw, so I don’t condemn them for drawing their guns on me. Granted, I wouldn’t be overly pleased if they pulled their triggers, but it was a high-tension ordeal, so who knows? They should have aimed their pistols at my wife, but that’s a topic for another day.
Another data point: my sister used to date a Philly cop back in the 70’s. He was a great guy; used to take me deep sea fishing when I was ~9. He was also an emotional wreck. He was big and tough, but he was not emotionally equipped to be a hard-core inner city cop. He degenerated to alcoholism and worse in the couple years I knew him. His little brother, when he returned as a decorated vet from Vietnam also joined the Philly Police department because he wanted to emulate his big brother. He liked to fish, too. He survived atrocities in ‘nam, but ended up putting his service revolver to his temple and pulling the trigger after 2 years as a cop.
It’s not easy being a cop, particularly one in a big city. Condemn the bad ones, but have some respect for the good ones. Most of them just want to do the right thing and return to their families in the evening. Is that too much to expect?
Of course, it’s not the trigger happy officers who end up picking up the tab for the lawsuit.
Short answer, I can’t agree that it’s primarily a policing problem.
Let’s compare to the US neighbor with good rule of law (as opposed to Mexico with their drug cartel related violence problem). It’s our Canadian neighbors with their reputation for being good natured and polite (at least off the hockey rink 
)
From thislist of killing by Canadian Law Enforcement:
2014 - 17
2015 - estimated annual rate of about 34 (17 through the end of June)
Controlling for populations is a pretty easy call. We’re 9 times bigger by 2013 population numbers. We should probably come up with some proxy for justification of police homicide. Let’s use homicide rates per capita since that shows a propensity for the culture to engage in deadly force. The most recent UN Office of Drugs and Crime homicide rateshave the US rate 2.94 times higher than Canada’s. If we want to look at how effective individual officers are in making deadly force decisions we should also control for per capita police numbers (more police means more police-citizen encoutners.) We have just shy of 2 times as many police per capita - 1.99 times.
The total adjustments for population, justification, and number of police is a factor of 52.66. Canada’s equivalent rates using that multiplier are:
2014 - 895
2015 1790 (annualized estimate) / 947 if deaths stop at the current 18)
I’d say on an officer by officer bases we at seem to be doing pretty well compared to Canada by the quick back of the envelop estimate. If I were Canadian I’d be particularly concerned that police homicides have been increasing faster than population (quick visual review of their list back across more years) despite stable homicide rates. The big difference is that in the US is we’re violent across the population. The sum of violence committed by police is more a symptom than a problem in and of itself. That doesn’t mean there improvements that can be made in policing. It’s easier to point fingers than look in the broader social mirror though. It’s not necessarily more effective though.
The nature of the job puts peace officers in different situations than a private citizen.
How often are you allowed to detain someone in public and start asking them questions about their activity? If you do and they start to assault you and you use force, could you articulate that you were justified in using said force when you had no authority to detain them in the first place? This is not the same as someone attacking you out of the blue which is not something that generally happens to police officers. It typically happens during a contact.
You offer up 1 lousy example of a police shooting and conclude all police shootings are not scrutinize? I haven’t read the findings on that investigation so I don’t even know if you are correct on your lone example.
So - how are you deciding that “this is a problem” before you actually know the answers to these questions?
In the actual real world, this may in fact work. The cops in the UK don’t even have guns, and they aren’t dying on the job as much as American cops. In real life, if a criminal wants to kill a cop, the cop’s dead. Period. All the criminal has to do is bring a rifle and shoot first (like Jordan Dorner did actually). Level III and below vests won’t stop most rifle rounds, the rifle has substantially more power and more accuracy, etc.
Reason cops aren’t dying that often is that criminals don’t plan to kill cops. They get caught in situations where it escalates. The police are often instigators who cause the escalation - such as bursting in instead of politely knocking on the door, etc.
There are ways to handle these encounters that can result in both people leaving alive. The way police currently do it is not that way.
Since it’s your intention to increase police deaths, I would never vote in favor of your proposed policy.
Why don’t you propose that people obey lawful police orders? Or stop committing crimes?
What makes my example “lousy”? It happens to be one of the most egregious police shootings in recent memory. I could offer up more anecdotal examples (like the surfer guy, David Purdue, in the black Honda Ridgeline that they tried to kill a short distance and a short while after the blue Tacoma shooting, but I don’t know what you’d consider compelling, so I’m just stabbing at it in the dark.
I’m not claiming that “all police shootings are not scrutinized”. Almost all of them probably receive some level of scrutiny. I just happen to believe it’s significantly less scrutiny than almost all citizen self-defense shootings.
By lousy I meant meager. You gave only 1 example and used it to infer that police shootings aren’t scrutinized much. Which is false.
Not only is a police officer put under the legal microscope when involved in a shooting, he is put under stress from his employer. This is beyond the level of scrutiny the average citizen would receive.
Last year a Milwaukee Police Officer was cleared in a shooting but still lost his job over it. This is a double whammy a cop has to face when involved in a shooting.
Do you have a cite for that, Ditka? I’ve been wondering about them and whether or not anyone would be disciplined for shooting at them, but I never saw any follow up stories.
Yeah, who cares if a policeman is killed – cops are evil, right? And it’s not like there might be others around they’re trying to protect.
Seriously, this is one of the most disgusting ideas I’ve heard here yet.