In the UK, the police are on track to have killed 3 people in 2015[1]. In the US, the police are on track to have killed 1,200 people[2]. Adjusted for population, the US has a police homicide rate that is 79 times higher than in the UK. In some places, police violence is now the no. 1 form of homicide, ahead of gang violence, petty crime, domestic violence, child abuse, and any other category of violence.[3]

Actual homicide is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but if this doesn't qualify as "significantly and often" then I'm not sure what does.

This is not just a civilian attitude. There are plenty of (ex-) police who feel this way too.[4]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

2: http://killedbypolice.net/

3: http://www.sltrib.com/news/1842489-155/killings-by-utah-poli...

4: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/06/...

Mainly because police departments do not keep these kinds of statistics, so the data is horribly incomplete. And as anybody knows, you can massage the data to show anything you want when you don't have the complete picture:

Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement.

That number – which only includes self-reported information from about 750 law enforcement agencies – hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by police officers each year. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks “arrest-related deaths.” But the department stopped releasing those numbers after 2009, because, like the FBI data, they were widely regarded as unreliable.

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/0...

The other problem with your data is that there is no firm evidence how each of these scenario's played out. Did the person being shot pull a firearm? What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account. All people see is a cop who killed a citizen, nobody knows the exact circumstances around every single one of these instances - which makes ALL the data that much more suspect.

So yeah, when you look at the raw numbers, they look bad, but when you add in the circumstances by which these played out, you'd probably find out a lot of these were justified - which is why cops tend to get a lot of leeway in these kinds of scenarios, and are rarely charged.

That is true, but not to the US' credit. In the UK, the records are compiled nationally and are beyond question. There have been three fatal police shootings here in 2015; all of them were front-page national news.

The US keeps no such records, and until http://killedbypolice.net/ began compiling credible news reports, nobody was keeping national records. The numbers on killedbypolice.net are therefore an absolute minimum for how many people are killed by police in America. Killings which are not well-documented in the news aren't included. If the number is inaccurate, then the picture in America is even worse.

Undoubtedly many of them are justified. America is awash in guns, and if somebody is shooting at you, then undoubtedly you have the right to shoot back. However only 48% of those who were killed had a firearm on or near them (it doesn't necessarily mean they were using it).[1] Many of the remainder are classified as being "armed", but that includes cases like this mentally ill man who was killed for holding a screwdriver in an unthreatening manner[2], so those numbers should be considered suspect. Finally, there are hundreds of killings every year of people who cannot be considered "armed" by any definition. Many of these are well-documented on video; if you want to spend the next few hours watching snuff films, they're easy enough to find.

The punishment for the overwhelming majority of these killings is a paid vacation for the murderer.

Something is desperately wrong with America.

1: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...

2: https://www.rt.com/usa/252533-dallas-screwdriver-shooting-ju...

I may be a bit pedantic here, but I think that's an unfortunate choice of words. If I understand the legal situation in the US correctly, Culling of individuals by power of government can only be justified through a judge, and executed with consent from a state governor.

Some of the cullings may be defensible, given the nature of the police's job. But in my view, none are justified.

That is a big part of the problem itself.

What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account

.. and a number of recent high-profile cases involve the police claiming these things happened while the video footage showed they didn't.

The UK system is supposed to regard every death by police firearm as an incident that is fully investigated by the independent police complaints commission. (Does America even have one of those?) The system is not perfect (e.g. Mark Duggan, Jean Charles de Menezes) but it works reasonably well.

The Mark Duggan fiasco concerns me in that I think some of the bad relations between US police and the black public are "leaking" into UK culture.

So if that's true why isn't information gathered about every single round of ammunition that's fired? Because every time that trigger is pulled is a time when someone (the officer, a member of the public) is at risk of death, and pulling the trigger carries a very real risk of killing the alleged perpetrator. (Or innocent bystanders).

It's baffling to me that statistics like these are not kept.

Maybe this would be too high a burden. But at least they should keep numbers on how many people they kill, and what the precise situation was around that death.

This is true, for the US. It is also one of the symptoms of what is wrong with "enforcement" in that country.

Police officers in many other countries (such as Germany for instance) are explicitly instructed to shoot to wound if at all possible - and with good results both in terms of getting their suspects arrested but not killed, and in terms of not getting killed themselves. Indeed, this is not just the case for police worldwide, but even for the US armed forces when working under "nation building" rules of engagements rather than "total war" rules of engagements.

A shoot-to-kill doctrine is an obvious sign that rather than having an attitude of serving and protecting their community, the enforcers are serving/protecting themselves first.

And obviously this is not an isolated incident hence much of the anger directed at police. Guns should be last resort but sadly is not the case today.

[1] http://heavy.com/news/2015/12/san-francisco-sfpd-police-shoo...

Just because an officer kills, doesn't mean it was a crime and it doesn't mean the officer overstepped his bounds.

Those are all recent cases that I am personally aware of, as a non-US citizen, living in Europe. I'm sure there have been plenty of others.

So yes, not all police killings in the US are undeserved, but there sure are plenty that are, and that is what those statistics are showing.

Let me repeat: criminals in the US are 3.8 times more prevalent and/or violent than their UK counterparts, but police in the US are are 79 times more violent than their UK counterparts.

(I'm using homicide as a proxy for overall crime, because the definition, record-keeping, and rate of reporting for other crimes varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, whereas homicide is defined relatively consistently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and is almost universally reported.)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Yeah, it sucks when someone comes armed with facts, doesn't it?

And split it by areas. I don't think anyone would find if suspicious that cops kill more people in crime-infested poor neighborhood with constant gang violence than in a high-middle class London suburb.

Or maybe you meant to argue that crime rate is an indicator for general lawlessness of the population, in which case crime rate and police violence are two sides of the same coin?

How is it not obvious?

See the graphic at the bottom of this page and feel free to peruse the linked dataset as well.

http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/2015

But then again, you get stuff like this https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2015/12/los-angeles-deput...

Crime is correlated to localized socioeconomic situations. FTFY.

Single occurences are irrelevant if we're talking about trends. I can conjure an emotional story to prove any possible outlook on this problem.

Yes, crime is correlated to socioeconomic situations, that doesn't contradict anything in my comment.

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/06/29/many-countries-po...

ryana posted a link re crime rates not really making a difference.

"While some have blamed violent crime for being responsible for police violence in some communities, data shows that high levels of violent crime in cities did not appear to make it any more or less likely for police departments to kill people."

Your turn to back up your claim that "Crime rate is correlated with amount of situations where use of lethal force is necessary."

My initial assumption was based on the soviet research from the late 80s on this subject, but I couldn't easily find a link right now. (Yes, I know what you think of soviet police system, and you're right in general, but I know the people who did this research and the political climate itself was pretty vegetarian too at the time).

It's a bit curious that you haven't answered my original question, or come back with anything substantive apart from expressing surprise at someone not understanding what you meant by "Aren't?"

There shouldn't be that many "bad ones" to report, period. It's supposed to be a professional police force, not amateur hour of bigots, wannabe Rambos and trigger-happy Harry Callahans.

And since the casualty statistics across the board are awful, and a true shame compared to any other western country, it's not a matter of "reporting" bias either.

[added]

>One thing to remember about officers; they see the worst of US day in and day out, every single day.

They also represent some of what is worst about the US, day in and day out, every single day. Along with the prison system, the gun laws, and the often joke of a justice system, they help perpetuate and increase the criminals rather than reduce them (even if there are year over year decreases in crime rates, that are touted as big successes, the numbers are still ludicrous compared to any western european country).

You're absolutely right! But that's NOT what I was arguing against.

>They also represent some of what is worst about the US, day in and day out, every single day.

NO THEY DON'T! Only a few!!! That's my POINT.

Contrast with a place like the UK, where police are not even allowed to carry guns outside of special units.

What interactions have you had with police officers in the last few years? Because it sounds like the majority of your "experience" is coming from Mother Jones and MSNBC.

I sit on the Civil Service Commission for my township, which exists only because we have a small local police force. I deal with both police officers (e.g. the folks patrolling the street or doing traffic enforcement), management (lieutenant/chief, elected township officials), and police applicants in a professional context on at least a monthly if not weekly basis throughout the year.

Your comment has not even a passing affiliation with reality.

Maybe study the numbers or talk to people from big cities, and especially large urban centers?

Besides the homicides by police in the streets statistics, which are indisputable, confirmed by the police, and the worse by over 70x any western country, here are some other factoids:

Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a licence”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organising cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog. According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants in private homes.

He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s (there are around 18,000 state and local police agencies in America, compared with fewer than 100 in Britain).

Amusing. It's your job as part of the commission to evaluate the performance of your township's civil servants, a circumstance in which those you interact with are highly motivated to act professionally around you.

And yet you claim it's the ordinary citizen who is out of touch with reality.

Here is my own anecdote: Out of four lifetime interactions with functionaries of the law, four have ranged from negative to very negative.

US police kill very many more people than other first world police forces. It's not surprising that gets a lot of press coverage.

The US police forces seem to do a poor job of getting rid of the bad officers. Someone who is sacked from one force for being emotionally unstable should not be able to get a job with a gun on another force without jumping through considerable hoops. There are very many examples of this - officers with more than normal numbers of complaints for aggressive behaviour, with disciplinary action for aggressive behaviour, who then go on to murder the public.

Realistically, there will always be some incidents. Ideally, they should be as few as possible such that law enforcement is still effective (for whatever value of effective that society chooses). The severity also factors in: No one will probably care all that much if a cop screws up the exact wording of a miranda warning, but when the consequences are someone dead and police perjuring themselves, it takes a lot fewer of those incidents.

I'm not sure about the US, but in UK plenty of law is enforced less rigorously before it's scrapped.

Edit: If you had said "some" and not "majority", I'd have agreed with you. But "majority" is just cockamamey, made up BS!

That it's not the "general case" it's hardly any consolation.

If we consider "killing citizens" as "overstepping their bounds" (and I'd say is the most overstepping a policeman can do), then US police does it by about 1-2 orders of magnitude (70 - 100 times) more than other western countries...

Here are some actual hard numbers:

For instance, an April 2007 study of the Chicago Police Department found that out of more than 10,000 police abuse complaints filed between 2002 and 2003, only 19 (0.19%) resulted in meaningful disciplinary action. The study charges that the police department's oversight body allows officers with "criminal tendencies to operate with impunity," and argues that the Chicago Police Department should not be allowed to police itself.[29] Only 19% of large municipal police forces have a civilian complaint review board (CCRB). Law enforcement jurisdictions that have a CCRB have an excessive force complaint rate against their officers of 11.9% verses 6.6% complaint rate for those without a CCRB. Of those forces without a CCRB only 8% of the complaints were sustained.[30] Thus, for the year 2002, the rate at which police brutality complaints were sustained was 0.53% for the larger police municipalities nationwide.

Here are some more:

According to the 2014 Legatum Prosperity Index released in November, in the measure of personal freedom, the United States has fallen from 9th place in 2010 to 21st worldwide—behind such countries as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay and Costa Rica. Other such rankings systems show the US as low as 46.

Let’s look at our immediate neighbors to the north, Canada. The total number of citizens killed by law enforcement officers in the year 2014, was 14; that is 78 times less people than the US. If we look at the United Kingdom, 1 person was killed by police in 2014 and 0 in 2013. English police reportedly fired guns a total of three times in all of 2013, with zero reported fatalities. From 2010 through 2014, there were four fatal police shootings in England, which has a population of about 52 million. By contrast, Albuquerque, N.M., with a population 1 percent the size of England’s, had 26 fatal police shootings in that same time period.

China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded 12 killings by law enforcement officers in 2014. Let that sink in. Law enforcement in the US killed 92 times more people than a country with nearly 1.4 billion people. It doesn’t stop there. From 2013-2014, German police killed absolutely no one.

And more:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...

And let's not even get into BS like sending SWAT teams for any BS offense, like getting some stoned teenager...

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-america...

If it were an ordinary business, policing would be in a deep contraction, due to the steady drop in violent crime rates in the last two decades. Fewer people would have jobs as cops, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, bailiffs, and prison guards.

Instead of either laying off unneeded personnel, stopping new hires to let the numbers drop by attrition, merging municipal police departments or turning them into sheriff subsidiaries, or giving police employees the same benefits and pension plan cuts as all other municipal workers, municipalities just send their superfluous officers out to drum up more revenue.

That started out as selective enforcement. Certain crimes, if prosecuted vigorously, have enough statutory fines attached to make them actually profitable. Say hello to speeding and parking tickets. Certain towns turned themselves into speed traps to tax those passing through too quickly. More.

Then governments started expanding their malum prohibitum crimes. Crimes that didn't have fines attached got minimum sentences, and the courts and prisons became machines to turn tax money into guaranteed jobs in criminal justice. After all, you can't just let those violent criminals go. You would never get reelected if you did that. More!

Now, the cops just take your stuff on a civil forfeiture claim or as "evidence", and never return it (cash, vehicles), or they throw it to the ground and/or stomp on it (recording devices). Now, the courts tack on a bunch of extra fees for anyone issued a civil citation. Now, the prisons are run by for-profit corporations, with minimum occupancy agreements with the government authorities. If they want more, what could happen next?

I would think that cities like Chicago would be itching to reduce their future unsustainable pension obligations by investigating every complaint vigorously, and firing the highest-paid police officers for cause if there is even a whiff of official misconduct. Wouldn't that be better than going bankrupt?

It might, if there were even one uncorrupted public official left in that town able to do the job.

It's long past time for the law-and-order budgets to be brought back under control. The only places in the U.S. that should be hiring more cops are the oil and gas boom towns.

But it isn't about the rational course of action. It's all about the money that can't stop flowing through the system that is now too big to fail.