This was a misleading statistic. The statistics are for deaths (143 in 2015) and include job related illnesses, auto and motorcycle accidents… I see a number of 66 shot and 1 stabbed in 2015:
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/causes.html
As others have stated, it’s not their intent to kill, it’s to eliminate the threat to the public and themselves.
I’d guess your source was from Wiki?
This is info. outdated, selective, and slightly inaccurate. You’re comparing apples to oranges on various key details.
Those countries’ populations combined (82 million) don’t add up to a quarter of the 325 million people in the US.
Which of those countries have a right to bear arms, similar to the 2nd Amendment in the US?
… have similar socio-economic classes?
… have massive urban centers comparable in size?
… have similar political histories?
etc…
Three main reasons, in my estimations:
[ul]
[li]The US is saturated with guns, which makes any police encounter highly fraught.[/li]
[li]Police are especially afraid of black people because of implicit bias and, less often, conscious racism. Some black people often react differently than police expect or understand because of past police interactions and trauma.[/li]
[li]Police in many jurisdictions are not adequately trained to manage mental health crises (which account for about half of fatal shootings).[/li][/ul]
So 1) I’ll stand there with a gun in my hand, 2) you spray me with pepper spray, then 3) I’ll spray the area in front of me with bullets, and 4) we’ll see what happens.
Do bullet stains wash out?
The reason more black people are shot by police is that the police arrestmore black people for serious crimes.
The first answer is correct, police treat most suspects as either armed or about to be armed. That ups the stakes of every encounter and means more shootings.
The differential arrest rates are both dependent and independent variable in implicit bias. Like all things in the real world, it’s complicated.
I imagine training is likely to be involved, considering that US police kill about 14,000 times more people per capita (4 orders of magnitude) than, say, UK police, while differences in actual violent crime or amount of guns are only around a single order of magnitude (or less) per capita.
I’ve been hearing/seeing a bit lately about police de-escalation training (for example, in the Salt Lake City police department) that, hopefully, can make police less “quick to kill.”
Sure, but that doesn’t mean before that they were trained to do the opposite.
A problem with training could be a lack of training as much as the wrong training. If cops are being trained to use force too quickly, that’s a problem. If cops simply aren’t being trained in ways to avoid escalating or using force, then that’s also a problem.
Of course it could be a problem. Anything could be a problem. My question was specifically addressing a claim that police are trained to be quick to kill.
Not to rain on the parade, but the Salt Lake City Police Department had an officer-involved shooting just this morning. The suspect was taken to the hospital in critical condition. You can see the Chief’s statement on their facebook page.
This is just one example of how quickly things can escalate. A Montana police officer made a routine traffic stop when the (drunk) driver suddenly decided the best thing to do was pull out a handgun and try to shoot the officer. The police officer shot him fatally in the next few seconds.
The video below is short and very violent but there is no visible gore. I am not sure what else the officer should have done. The driver tried to kill him but was also trying to flee while impaired and probably would not go down easily under any circumstances. The driver could have ended up killing someone else if the officer just let him flee. In any case, there wasn’t time for philosophical thought and he was just trying to remove the threat to himself and the general public. That is the way many of these scenarios play out and I would probably do the same thing. If you try to kill an officer, you are probably going to get killed right back and I don’t have a problem with that. To the officer’s credit, that is some pretty impressive shooting.
Are they? Do you have any evidence of this? I mean, sure, it SEEMS that is the case if you watch the news and you don’t put it in any sort of perspective. But I’d say to prove your case (you were planning to prove it, right?), you’d need to show that police confrontations where weapons are drawn and fired end in kills, generally, and that the number of police killings of civilians has gone up relative to the number of crimes being committed, and that the use of deadly force is trending upwards as a first response. You might also try and correlate the number of police deaths or injuries to the rising (if you prove that) number of police deadly shootings.
At 2am in fact…and the suspect confronted the police with a firearm. This would be one of those data points that I don’t think are going to support your assertion…unless you are really saying ‘why do the police shoot at suspects that come at them at 2am armed with a gun’, in which case the answer seems…well, self evident.
Well, yeah…I don’t think that if a suspect is armed with a gun you would really want to try and pepper spray them, or use a tazer. I don’t know if they tried to talk or not…it’s not evident in the article you linked too. However, at 2am responding to a call in for a disturbance and confronted by a suspect with a gun it’s hard to see how they could have done so easily, though you’d need more detail to really know.
I’ve noticed this is in the news a lot, lately…but I haven’t noticed any sort of evidence that this is some sort of new trend. I’d need to see a lot more data to reach the conclusion you seem to be reaching, since I think this is evidence on par with the white van always being on the corner, or my cow-orker always winning when she goes to the casino, or the fact that Nixon couldn’t possibly have won the election since none of MY friends voted for him, etc etc.
Does it? Really?
How many? More than other years? And has this been a trend or maybe it’s a year off the curve? As for the last, did the police know they weren’t ‘real gun’(s)?
I’m behind this 100%. Don’t make the cop nervous.
Because their wives and kids expect them home after the shift ends.
…removed by poster upon 2nd thought
I stumbled onto a channel on youtube called “Active Self Protection” It is used to train police officers. On the channel an expert analyzes real videos of shoot outs caught on sucurity tapes. He shows the videos and then analyses what the policeman did wrong or right in the shoot out. There are a lot of videos where the policeman did not shoot first and got shot himself. Watching them kind of makes you see it from the police officers side- it made me feel more sympathetic toward police. Everyone is used to seeing the videos in the media where the policeman is shown to be at fault- but you rarely see videos where the policeman probably should have shot sooner and didn’t and got shot because he hesitated.
Shooting someone who is determined to do you harm possibly won’t stop that person. Police officers are trained to empty their magazines into the region around a human heart in hopes of one of those shots puncturing the ascending or descending aorta and causing precipitous blood loss to *incapacitate the suspect by loss of blood pressure. *This is also fatal. This is what “stopping power” is. They in fact do shoot to kill, and if they don’t know they’re shooting to kill they are mistrained not to mention highly ignorant or highly stupid.
There was a time when we didn’t tell people just to do anything a cop says, wasn’t there?
"Shoot to kill" implies that killing is the goal and that the shooting will not stop until the person is dead. Killing is not the goal , eliminating the threat is the goal. Police don't aim at center mass because they are trying to hit the aorta- I have a better chance at hitting someone's arm than I have of hitting their aorta. They aim at center mass because a) it is a large target and b) hitting any part of it is more likely to incapacitate than hitting an arm or a leg. I can only cite my own training , but I have certainly not been trained to empty my magazine. I am trained to double tap and then reassess the threat. Can you cite an agency that trains officers to empty their magazine?