My math worked out to 14K, but I was comparing different things (the contemporary rate of shootings for US police vs the historical rate for the UK, since the US doesn’t have records nearly as far back as the UK).
Are you saying that there’s no number-value of the difference that would concern you, since US civilians also kill more people (about 4 times more, in fact)? I find the utterly colossal discrepancy interesting and concerning, and I think it warrants more than a shrug.
I’d be curious to know how our rate compared to Canada / Mexico, Australia, etc.
I figured we were comparing different things. Sorry, I didn’t look at your earlier post…I’m posting from an iPad in an airport so it’s kind of a pain in the butt. I probably shouldn’t have interjected into the conversation between you too, but just thought you didn’t actually mean 4 orders of magnitude.
As to your question, depends on what you mean by ‘no number-value of the difference that would concern you’. Does the number of civilian deaths due to guns in the US concern me? Sure. So does the number of civilian deaths due to alcohol and cigarettes. I’m not overly worried about it in the larger sense because my feeling is that in a society that allows things like alcohol, cigarettes or private ownership of guns (or speed limits over 70 MPH, or cheeseburgers or a host of other things), it’s going to cost some non-zero number of lives. The reality is that in the US gun deaths, while up a bit this year, have been trending down for decades now…as have deaths due to all those other things. But they will never be zero…or as low as they are in the UK, with their 500k guns in the hands of 65 million citizens verse 400 million guns in the hands of 360 million US citizens. The price we pay for allowing the private ownership of guns is that we have more deaths by gun in the US, including deaths from police shootings (and more police shot as well). I know that’s very hard for many Europeans (and Canadians, Japanese, Chinese and just about every other country…hell, it’s hard for many Americans to understand, come to that) to understand, but it’s part and parcel with allowing the right…just like the deaths due to alcohol would be much, much less each year if we banned it, and in a country that bans it they would look on the US death toll from alcohol each year in horror and confusion.
But what about the actual numbers? Are you saying that because the US has way more guns (about 5 times, per capita, IIRC), then there’s no value at which the discrepancy in police killings would concern you? It wouldn’t concern you, for example, if US police killed 10 million times more people than UK police, per capita?
I doubt your answer is “yes”, so the natural follow up question is at what value of a discrepancy between the two countries would you find it concerning? I find the 14K value, based on my math (yes, 4 orders of magnitude, per capita) very concerning, and I think it’s very likely that more factors are at play besides just differences in the number of guns and the amount of crime (both of those differences are under a single order of magnitude, per capita).
The headline of the article said it all (emphasis mine):
When someone pulls a gun on a cop, he’s gonna get shot. Period. There is no talking, there is no pepper spray, there is no holding hands and singing kum-ba-ya. Cops don’t have the luxury of time to second-guess. They can’t tell if the person is holding a real gun or a fake gun. If they take the time to try and determine the difference, they’re gonna get shot. Once deadly force is perceived, there is only one response and that is deadly force.
That’s the reality of the situation. It boils down to the old saying of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If you’re stupid enough to pull a gun on a cop…well, let’s just say you’re not gonna love the stupid prize you’ll win.
It wouldn’t concern me in the comparison because I live in the US, not the UK. Obviously, if the police killed 10 million times more than they do today, or even that the trend was up in the US, that would be a concern. But comparisons between countries, while they can be interesting, aren’t that much of a concern unless I’m planning to move there…or I’m interested in historical trends between the US and UK dating back to 1900.
I agree that there are a lot of factors that play into the difference, and more guns is only one of them.
I’m concerned precisely because I live in the US – I’m concerned that our police might be killing people too easily, and avoidably.
Well, that could be a valid concern, but not because of the comparison to the UK. It’s apples to bananas. The UK has few armed police…less so in the past than today, but even today many police aren’t armed. They have special units for that. Nearly every police officer in the US is armed. So, you are talking about a million verse a few 10’s of thousands. Then you have the fact that there are more guns in the US than there are people, while in the UK you have half a million or so guns distributed among 65 million. Then there are the cultural and ethnic differences between the two countries, and the historical differences as well (slavery, for instance, was resolved a lot differently in the US than in the UK…which means race relations, in general, are a lot different in the US than the UK).
I think when all that is factored in, it’s hard to make a comparison that is meaningful between the US and UK wrt police shootings per year per capita. Personally, I don’t think there is an inordinate number of police shootings per year in the US when you compare the number of civilian gun crime in the US per year and the number of civilians who shoot civilians in the US per year. The core issue is private gun ownership and socio-economics and race relations in the US. If you removed any one of those factors then you’d lower gun deaths per year in the US…take them all away and, well, we might be more like the UK just with several times more people. 
Though probably not.
The only thing about this that really concerns me is the poor data the US has kept on this in the past and even today.
I’m unconvinced that these factors explain/exculpate any more than a small part of the discrepancy (differences in police practices, including how armed they are, is not an excuse – perhaps we should consider emulating some of these practices), but at least we’ve found the root of our disagreement.
And yet, we have clear examples of police officers able to do their jobs without murdering people. Are those people superhuman? Or are the ones shooting unarmed, innocent people just unfit for duty?
You don’t find it compelling that over a million armed police officers in the US verse a couple 10’s of thousands in the UK would kill approximately 1000 more people a year?? Just that factor alone seems to point to why this is so…let alone the REASON every police officer is armed in the US verse only a small percentage in the UK. I mean, YMMV, but it seems to me that if you have a million people with a gun verse, say, 20,000 with a gun, and you have an armed population on one side verse what is basically a disarmed population on the other, probability wise alone you are going to account for most of the difference between 1 and 1000…heck, just based on those stats the US number should be a lot higher.
Those might be part of the explanation, but I’m saying that the UK may be doing things better than us – perhaps we should have fewer gun-armed cops, and cop-violence might go down. I’m saying that I’m very troubled by the discrepancy, and whether or not more armed cops contributes to this discrepancy does nothing to ease my concerns – maybe we have too many heavily armed cops (in addition to training, bias, and other problems).
Alternatively, maybe there are more people in the US that need killing*. It’s easy enough when you assume the correct answer. You could take the same set of information, and be troubled that there are so many people in the US that need killing vs the number of people in the UK that need killing.
*I don’t actually think this, but it’s indicative of the weakness of comparing across countries. It would be much more informative to compare across states or even cities of similar populations.
Yes, this is just a single data point (or a single comparison), and my concern is significant because of this and many additional factors – not just one.
Sure, I agree…which is why I listed several factors, not just one. The main point, though, is even looking at this one factor (i.e. a large number of police armed verse a small number), shows a profound difference in attitude, and explains a lot of the difference. Then you add in the large number of Americans who are armed or have access to a gun, the large number of guns available, the larger socio-economics differences, the different historical differences in race relations, and just the general difference in types and frequencies of crime between the US and UK, and it’s not that puzzling why there are differences.
As for learning lessons, I don’t see it to be honest. Unless you make fundamental and systemic changes to America and the American people you aren’t going to be able to get like results. Disarming the police in the US isn’t a way to fix the issue since it ignores WHY the police in the US are more heavily armed than their UK counterparts. Personally, I don’t find these sorts of comparisons beneficial at all. Better, IMHO, to compare like to like…compare the number of police shootings in the US today to 5 years ago, or 10…or 50. Has the general trend been up or down? What about civilian shootings, or shootings of police officers by civilians? What are the trends there? Then maybe look at general crime across the board. Then perhaps look at specific areas…states, cities or even countries. Maybe shootings by police in a certain region are up and it’s skewing the results…or maybe crime is up…or officer shootings are up. Or a host of other things. But comparing the US as a whole to the UK and expecting to glean some useful info from it is just not in the cards, IMHO. YMMV of course.
I do. There are many more police officers in the US shot at every year than in the UK. They need to be stopped by being shot back at, and that often results in death.
I know a lot of cops. I’ve had these types of discussions with them before. Many of them work in dangerous cities like Paterson, NJ and NYC. They walk into projects for calls and patrol. If they were no longer allowed to carry guns, I’ve been told they’d quit on the spot. It ain’t London in there.
Ah, if the issue were about cops’ shooting back at people then the question would be very different. I would favor much different standards for a cop’s shooting at someone who has already shot at him.
The issue for a couple of dozens of posts now has been largely about US police shooting vs UK. That’s what I’m responding to. Just looking at numbers doesn’t say much, but if we’re going to look at numbers, considering that US police get shot at much more than UK police do, shows us that we’re not dealing with similar landscapes to just judge shooting justification or justification for disarming police based on number comparisons of homicides by police of different countries.
Mostly because we haven’t created comfortable iron man armor for every day police use.
When you make cops virtually immune to small arms fire, they will start exhibiting much more restraint in the use of deadly force.
There are tons of variations in US police forces today – some departments have changed their training and practices and shoot far, far fewer people than they used to; others have made no changes. It’s not nearly as simple as armor.