I don’t believe the relatively small difference in crime rates justifies the utterly astronomical difference in police shootings. IIRC, when comparing the US and European countries, the difference in murder rates is within one order of magnitude, while the difference in police shootings per capita is more like three or even four orders of magnitude.
We have more KNIFE murders in the US than in most European nations for their entire murder rate for all types…generally by an order of magnitude or more. Some times by several. Then there are the gun murders. Seriously, where do you get the idea that it’s a relatively small difference??
Check the numbers:
We have about 3 or 4 times the murder rate of most European countries. The difference in police shootings is many orders of magnitude greater.
This is an exaggeration. Here are numbers of police killings, number of intentional homicides, and the former as a percentage of the latter:
US 1146/16214 = 7.1%
Canada 36/651 = 5.5%
France 26/779 = 3.3%
Germany 11/788 = 1.4%
Japan 2/334 = 0.6%
UK 3/809 = 0.4%
So the U.S. is worse than other developed countries in this ratio, but the difference is not so dramatic as you suggest.
But I’m not sure what to make of this ratio when the absolute numbers are both so much worse in the U.S. And the type of homicide is very relevant in terms of whether it’s likely to implicate police officers in a violent altercation.
Data from these sources, years may not be the same.
I can’t follow your numbers. Here’s what I found:
Cop killing rate:
US 34.8
France 3.8
Germany 1.3
UK 0.5
Other Euro countries are between France and the UK.
So I guess I exaggerated slightly, but aside from France, the difference in cop killings (compared to the US) are much, much greater than the difference in murder rates. So I stand by my argument, even if the difference isn’t quite as large as I thought.
You’re saying the difference in cop homicide rate is much bigger than the difference in total homicide rate. The obvious way to measure that directly is to divide one by the other to obtain a ratio (cop homicides as a fraction of total homicides), and compare that ratio among countries.
Okay. Looking at all these numbers, we should seek to emulate the UK and Japan.
For sure. But it’s a little surprising that the ratio in the U.S. is similar to that in Canada, and only about double that of France.
Except that both numerator and denominator in the ratio are just both so much higher in the U.S., we need to think carefully about what it means, probably means drilling down to the type of homicide.
Wouldn’t a better metric be cops killed by citizens rather than murder rate? Statistics are hard to come by but it looks like around 4 cops per year are killed by Germans compared to 50 cops per year intentionally killed by Americans and 50 killed accidently. In the UK about 1 cop per year is killed and most of those are hit by cars.
If I may junior-mod a bit, this thread is not asking for an omnibus overall cop/crime statistic chart comparison. I am asking about specific circumstances - much more immediate, pressing, scenarios - the ones like, “what if someone is running at you with a knife” or “what if you can’t tell if it’s a toy gun or real gun that he’s brandishing.”
No American police officer in his right mind, when faced with someone approaching him with a knife, is going to be mentally reciting charts about crime in France or cop statistics in Germany.
I’m saying that we should look at the policies of UK and Japanese police and emulate those. At least as a starting point.
Millions of peaceful and non-criminal Americans are afraid of cops and think cops are going to harm or kill them. That’s the fault of our law enforcement system. We need drastic change in order for these attitudes to change, and a good starting point for that change would be the policies and practices of UK and Japanese police.
You can always find edge cases in the law. But in general I would offer the guideline that being a policeman involves accepting a risk of physical harm so that some other member of the community doesn’t come to physical harm (even if that person is threatening harm).
It’s so sick in America that cops think that if someone is going to die tonight, it’s going to be someone other than the cop. And we pretend these people are brave heroes protecting us from harm! They’re no different from the rest of us.
Yeah I tried looking at that, but as you say numbers are hard to come by.
For the US its easy: as I linked earlier, 89 officers killed, of which 49 were killed by criminals, vs around 1,000 people shot and killed by police (doesn’t include people who died in custody like George Floyd). So between 10 to 1 or 20 to 1.
Outside of the US the best site I could find was the following.
In the United Kingdom, a total of 250 officers have been fatally shot since 1945. That’s fewer than four per year. Police, who are usually unarmed, shoot even fewer civilians. Since 1990, they have killed a total of 60 people — a little more than two per year.
In Germany, officers are usually armed. Last year, they shot eight people — about the average number for the last 10 years. Between 1945 and 2011, some 392 German police officers died in the line of duty — about 6 per year, although there have been fewer deaths in recent years.
In France, there’s a dearth of statistics on police killings. By one count, 54 people were killed by officers between 2005 and 2015, about five a year; and between six and 13 officers have died in the line of duty each year in 2008-15.
The numbers are so small that its hard to generalize, but it looks to be around 1 to 1, and in anycase much lower than in the US.
Point conceded. I probably shouldn’t have quoted your examples when trying to frame my larger point that we should move away from an officers feelings about the situation being the sole arbiter of whether force is justified. If the object is to all appearances exactly like gun we shouldn’t penalize officers for acting as though they know it is one. However if the perp is a 12 year old shouting “bang! bang!”, the probabilities change.
That’s the wrong metric. The metric is, “how dangerous is it to police when they are engaged in an arrest with a non-compliant arrestee?”. Because that’s when they fear for their lives and start exhibiting bad judgement.
The biggest problem with police isn’t the rules of engagement. The problems are:
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Terrible training in many forces. Police are humans, and when humans have their adrenaline pumping and are in fear for their lives, their judgement goes out the window. To prevent that requires serious training, and serious reccurrent training. Otherwise, you get cops with guns panicking and shooting. Training someone to stay calm and focused in high stress/high danger environments is hard, expensive, and must be repeated constantly. Very few cops get the training they really need.
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Poor screening of applicants. This goes hand-in hand with poor training. The RCMP in Canada require a 26 week boot camp for all cadets, where they get military-style training and get put through all sorts of stresses while the trainers look for people who can’t handle it. Those who have tendencies towrds violence, or who panic when put in stressful situations get washed out. But even there, they only get 94 hours of hand-to-hand combat experience and about 105 hours of firearms training. That’s still not very much, but it’s a whole lot more than many police forces require.
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Police unions. It’s well known that 80% of the problems come from 20% of the cops, and there are a lot of cops out there with multiple instances of unnecessary violence on their records, but whose jobs are protected by police unions. Get rid of unions for police, or reduce their ability to engage in that kind of legal work.
Not the only time. Sometimes something as simple as a routine traffic stop is enough.
Sometimes just for the crime of pulling into a gas station:
There are lots of bad cops out there, and some unstable ones who shouldn’t be anywhere near a gun. The Castillo shooting was tragic and unnecessary. But based on the facts, it’s hard to tell if the motivation was racism, or if there was just a young cop with shitty training, panicking.
It could be both. If the cop was a racist and believed black people are violent or criminals, he might have just freaked out when he found the guy had a gun, and panicked. A combination of racism and poor training, perhaps.
Again, better training, better screening of applicants, better processes for getting bad cops off the force.
The police shooting of Tamir Rice is one case where so much went wrong.
9-1-1 received a call that someone was waiving a “pistol” around and pointing it at random people. Understandably the police were dispatched. But 9-1-1 failed to inform the officers that the call reported that the gun was “probably fake” and that the person was “probably a juvenile.”
Police arrived on scene. The passenger in the police car was a rookie, Timothy Loehmann , who was still in training. The officers said they repeatedly yelled at the person, later identified as 12 year old Tamir Rice, to show them his hands. Rice reached to grasp the toy gun which was tucked in his waistband. Loehmann opened fire. The entire encounter took mere seconds.
Rice’s toy gun was found to have had its bright orange tip removed. Such colored tips became a feature of toy guns precisely to distinguish them from real firearms.
Had the 9-1-1 dispatch included relevant details from the caller then arguably the shooting could not be justified. Had Rice’s gun had its orange tip then arguably a properly trained officer should have recognized it as a toy and not fired.
Instead, after an investigation the evidence was presented to a grand jury which refused to indict the officers.
If the officers knew the totality of the circumstances the shooting was not justified. Shooting someone within seconds of making contact is not justified if you knew that person was “probably a juvenile” and who has a pistol that was " probably fake" according to the reporting party. Especially so if the pistol had a tell tale bright orange tip that was the hallmark of a toy gun.
But knowing only what the officers could have known at that moment the shooting was deemed justified. All the officers knew is of a report of someone waving a gun around and that person was reaching for what looked like a pistol tucked into his waistband. The waistband likely concealed the tip of the gun.
The video shows the cops in the Rice shooting were lying. They shot him immediately upon exiting the vehicle, about a second after arriving in the car. There was no time for them to give multiple instructions to Rice.