How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

Re:How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops by nkoren on Tuesday December 29, 2015 @12:23PM (#10807723)

If the US crime rate were 79 times higher than the British crime rate, then you'd be absolutely correct. However as far as homicides are concerned, it's only 3.8 times higher[1]. A 4-fold discrepancy would be completely understandable, and one could probably make a valid argument for a 10-fold discrepancy, based on a theory of necessary force multipliers or something like that, but a 79-fold discrepancy is utterly indefensible.

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...

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Re:How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops by Pinatubo on Tuesday December 29, 2015 @03:45PM (#10808945)

I think to get a complete picture we'd also need to consider the relative prevalence of firearms in the US versus the UK. There are fewer non-lethal options for dealing with someone armed with a guns as opposed to other weapons.

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