If you look at the rate per 10 Million people, we're right in-between Mexico and Bangladesh with 28.4
Germany is 1.3, UK is 0.5, Japan is 0.2
That tells me there's a problem that isn't solved by breaking the numbers into two columns of justified and non-justified.
If you think the police are going to kill you either way, you might as well go out shooting! In the UK you know the police are going to respectfully arrest you and treat you well, so might as well give in rather than escalate it to a firefight.
But generally I think it's crazy that the police in the US are armed. Most policing doesn't need lethal weaponry, and community officers shouldn't be armed. Leave guns to specialist units when required.
I know Floyd wasn't killed with a gun, but I think disarming the police would be the right response and first step towards reducing police violence, as it de-escalates every interaction.
I agree this will be the case most of the time, but it's worth pointing out this is not always the case.
The MET in particular are rather infamous for their level of institutionalised racism, which while undoubtedly better than it used to be, still leaves much to be considered.
Anecdotally, I have family members in the police force in London and in Scotland. The ones in London like to regale others with tales of how much they enjoy donning their riot gear and using any excuse to batter people, especially if they are black. The ones in Scotland tell of how prisoners are routinely abused - usually at a "minor" level, such as slapping a prisoner for no reason, but in one indicent a prisoner's head was smashed off a radiator.
If this is true then you need to immediately report it to MPS DPS and IOPC.
Unless you are lying, you absolutely have a civic duty to report what you heard.
> you absolutely have a civic duty to report
Real-life is just a tad more complicated than that.
As much as I abhor what they've said, they are family, and I'd liklely be ostracised by other close family members. In any case, effectively the evidence is my word against theirs from something they said a few years ago. Something they could simply claim didn't happen, or that they were just kidding around. If I was going to report it, the time to do so would have been then. Should I have done so? I battled with decision at that at the time, but ultimately didn't for the reasons I already mentioned.
As I said, it's complicated.
I was trying to say that you had no reason for not reporting it (based on what you had said - it's too old, it's my word against theirs etc).
Obviously now you've suggested you have your own personal reasons. That's completely different and totally up to you. I was only commenting on the objections you had raised previously, which suggested you thought your information had no value, when it does.
UK police are racist and they subject black people to disproportionate use of police powers.
The reasons for this are many fold, ranging from poorer opportunities and education to more severe punishments for crimes committed.
That said, extrajudicial killings are extraordinarily rare in the UK. I don't think anyone, even someone from those communities, would ever expect to die during an interaction with the police in normal circumstances. While in the US it's becoming clear that there is a real fear of any police interaction being escalated to that point.
It does happen though, and it disproportionately happens to black people. https://twitter.com/korrinesky/status/1267085008210210816?s=...
Moving away from law enforcement to mental health treatment we see black people are more likely to be detained under the mental health act, spend longer in detention, are more likely to be on CTOs, are more likely to be on forensic sections. In hospital they're more likely to be subjected to seclusion, restraint, and rapid tranquillisation.
Criminals carry guns because other criminals carry guns, and because prospective victims generally do not carry guns.
Most criminals are not going to be interested to pull a gun on the police. If they can make the gun disappear when encountering the police, they will.
> In the UK you know the police are going to respectfully arrest you and treat you well, so might as well give in rather than escalate it to a firefight.
In the UK you also don't face the same penalties. If it's twenty-five to life, people are likely to resist arrest by all means.
> But generally I think it's crazy that the police in the US are armed. Most policing doesn't need lethal weaponry, and community officers shouldn't be armed. Leave guns to specialist units when required.
Sure, most policing doesn't need arms, but most behavior doesn't need policing either.
If you were a police officer, would you, unarmed, engage another person wielding a hatchet? I'd say that's unlikely. Would you even take the job if you were unarmed?
Of course that means police kill/injure fewer people, but they also prevent fewer people from killing or injuring others.
> I know Floyd wasn't killed with a gun, but I think disarming the police would be the right response and first step towards reducing police violence, as it de-escalates every interaction.
It would de-escalate in the sense that there won't be any policing. Officers aren't going to engage a potentially armed criminal with just pepper spray.
If you could assume that the person you are trying to arrest most likely does not carry a gun, like in Europe, it would be different. That's just not going to happen in the US.
Great example! Here's how the UK engage someone wielding a machete, without guns or any other weapons beside extendable batons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mzPj_IaMzY
They try to deescalate, they bring in reinforcements, they surround, then they disarm him using shields, not weapons, and he survives to stand a fair trial. No guns needed.
And if they thought they couldn't arrest him using shields they could call in a specialist firearms unit, who are specifically trained, authorised, and accountable.
Look, in this case maybe the screaming guy didn't actually intend to hurt anyone. You can tell by the fact that he isn't actually attacking. There also weren't any victims or bystanders involved.
Now, what happens if somebody actually tries to assault people? The perpetrator gets shot from a safe distance when those "special units" finally arrive:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-50594810
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51349664
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/09/westminster-...
In the US, this man would be dead. Here, he survived. That's not ridiculous.
> Now, what happens if somebody actually tries to assault people? The perpetrator gets shot from a safe distance, when those "special units" finally arrive:
Yes - that's how it should be. Leave an actual firefight to specially appointed marksman with specialist weapons, not day-to-day officers waving pistols around. And they don't need those weapons when attending other incidents.
Well alright, that's one machete-wielding life that was saved. How many non-machete-wielding lives are lost by having an underpowered police force?
I guess we'll never know.
> That's not ridiculous.
It's ridiculous that it takes six or seven officers so long to neutralize the threat, which may not even have been a real threat.
> Yes - that's how it should be. Leave an actual firefight to specially appointed marksman with specialist weapons, not day-to-day officers waving pistols around. And they don't need those weapons when attending other incidents.
So, you get called to a minor domestic disturbance, the unarmed cops show up and it turns out that the guy in question "upgraded" to a kitchen knife. They'll better be good at keeping him occupied with trivia questions until the properly equipped force shows up.
I'm sure there's a trade-off between having police officers armed and dangerous versus having them be harmless. However, most countries in Europe - even those with low crime rates - choose to arm their officers. Deadly incidents remain rare:
So just kill people to save a handful of officers having to spend 15 minutes sorting a situation out?
> So, you get called to a minor domestic disturbance, the unarmed cops show up and it turns out that the guy in question "upgraded" to a kitchen knife. They'll better be good at keeping him occupied with trivia questions until the properly equipped force shows up.
How do you think it works in practice in the UK at the moment? If someone attacks you with a kitchen knife you can defend yourself and arrest them using a baton or a Tazer - you don't need a gun that's an insane murderous overreaction.
Our rate of both people killed by the police, and people killed by other people, is very low. Learn from what we're doing.
That's a false dichotomy. What if it had been only two officers? That would be the situation if there happened to be a patrol around.
How do you know how the crazy guy would've reacted when facing a gun? Perhaps he would have surrendered.
What about the officer's safety? Having a gun doesn't mean you have to shoot it, it means you have better means to defend yourself and others.
The fact that almost all other police forces in Europe have guns but then tend to not fire them at people tells me that guns are not the problem.
Either way, I'm not willing to put the lives of police officers on the line just to save a couple of machete-wielding crazy people from a "suicide by cop" situation.
> How do you think it works in practice in the UK at the moment? If someone attacks you with a kitchen knife you can defend yourself and arrest them using a baton or a Tazer - you don't need a gun that's an insane murderous overreaction.
No it isn't. If you are getting attacked with a knife, you and or other person, officer or not, are morally and legally entitled to defend yourself and others with lethal force.
For your own safety, don't bring a baton to a knife fight. You can not intervene at a distance and you're risking your life.
As for Tazers, they don't have the same psychological impact as a gun and they have limited range. You're welcome to use them, but I wouldn't put my or any officer's body on the line just to prevent the attacker from harm.
Statistics give clues, and strongly suggest the method is quite effective at saving non-machete-wielding lives.
> It's ridiculous that it takes six or seven officers so long to neutralize the threat, which may not even have been a real threat.
I think what you're implying here is that it's ridiculous to spend a few hours of a few officers work day to save a life.
Better to kill someone, at least it's over quickly and doesn't need as much... salary?
> They'll better be good at keeping him occupied with trivia questions until the properly equipped force shows up.
The point of the video is that, indeed, they are effective at keeping someone occupied until the properly equipped force shows up, and that it is possible to do that without just killing people when they are freaking out.
It is hardly just trivia questions. If you were paying attention to the video, the positioning of the cars and officers was intentional, to contain the situation while de-escalating it.
No, it's ridiculous to keep a threat going for so long. Remember that it is a threat? For how long exactly should these officers be expected to have a machete wielded at their face?
> Better to kill someone, at least it's over quickly and doesn't need as much... salary?
That's not how it would work in a standoff like this. First, you present the gun. That might change the perpetrator's mind. Then, you fire a warning shot. That might change the perpetrator's mind. Then, you shoot at the legs. If that doesn't change the perpetrator's mind, it's going to seriously impede their ability to cause harm.
If the perpetrator chooses to initiate an assault, all bets are off. They're getting shot, but also injury to others is likely going to be prevented.
> The point of the video is that, indeed, they are effective at keeping someone occupied until the properly equipped force shows up, and that it is possible to do that without just killing people when they are freaking out.
How do you know that this was effective? Show me a situation with an attacker actually ready to initiate an assault. The situation couldn't have been brought under control. For example:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/22/police-briti...
https://news.sky.com/story/police-officer-critical-after-bei...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-49273979
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/man-charged-stabbing-p...
We do know, if you'd care to find out, because homicide and suicide rates are significantly lower in the UK and other countries without armed police than the US.
A domestic is a perfect example of a situation where coming in with guns will get people killed.
That's not how you know anything. First of all, the vast majority of countries around the world have armed police, so there's very few samples to work with.
Of course you'll have trouble finding any country with a high homicide rate where the police isn't armed, but you can easily find countries where homicides are extremely rare and police are still armed, for example Japan.
Suicide is mostly cultural. Korea, a country with extremely low crime rates has a very high suicide rate. In the Philippines, police are literally executing suspects in the streets, yet the suicide rate is very low. In Syria, a war torn country, suicide is even lower than that.
https://www.businessinsider.com/michigan-open-carry-laws-leg...
You've left out a word there, haven't you? 'Violence'.
They should fear being arrested with minimum possible force, but they shouldn't fear extrajudicial violence.
There are crimes and crimes. We are talking here about a man being deliberately, painfully and slowly executed for 9 minutes, in front of a crowd, whereas crying for his life...
...for the crime of trying to scam 20 dollars!
Is this the value of your life if you are a jobless black man in US?. $20?
Sorry but this is inexcusable
Its certainly also never the police's role to decide who is guilty. For all those police knew, at the time of arrest, it was Mr. Floyd who was the victim of a false accusation.
But in places with criminals being heavily armed, having unarmed police, just makes the police more vulnerable.
In the US a criminal needs to be ready to defend themselves to the death in any interaction with the police. In the UK, they don't.
Why does a police officer in a nice suburban area who attends things like noisy parties... carry a lethal firearm? That's absolutely crazy to me, and should be to everyone else.
But this is (literally) overkill in my opinion. You could justify a flamethrower by saying 'they'd use it for their protection'. Most community police officers do not need to carry lethal weapons as they do not need that level of protection. They're patrolling communities, not war zones.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ckwnky8QQfgBCZ2p2Lcw...
It's not that surprising IMO for a country where there are so many guns for the police to encounter more hostile situations that require utilizing their gun for theirs and others protection.
Guns are a weapon that quickly escalates any situation to life or death.
It was a long time ago so I probably butchered the description, but I thought it was profound.
Not at all. The idea is that the state has a mandate from its citizens to exercise violence (within due limits) to enforce the decisions of the citizens. It's a monopoly because citizens don't have the right to use violence against each other, and even if they do the state is guaranteed to be able to respond with enough force to make it stop.
> In effect, Americans have contractually given the state the essential powers of violence but still keep the means to take that power back.
This justification to arms ownership always strikes me as delusional. Whatever the amount of weapons in circulation there is absolutely no way American citizens could fight their own police and their own army.
Do people have the right to self defense? Are police legally obligated to keep you safe?
>there is absolutely no way American citizens could fight their own police and their own army
Please tell me the last time America won a war against a militia or insurrection embedded in the civilian population.
Of course, but that's a last resort. You cannot ask someone who is in risk of imminent harm not to defend him/herself, although that should be the minimum use of force needed to fend off the danger (in the US as usual the law is less strict, in Europe you can shoot to defend your life but if it's proven that in that exact moment your life wasn't in danger you'll be charged).
> Please tell me the last time America won a war against a militia or insurrection embedded in the civilian population.
A clear case must be in 1865, when the Union won the civil war- at the cost of between 600k and 1 million dead. But there's of endless instances of the US police or national guard using force to repress protests, uprising and terrorism- as it is normal. It's hard to say whether these movements could have been more widespread if they hadn't been repressed through intelligence and use of force.
But can you point out an example of when a militia or an insurrection won against the US police or national guard?
Afghanistan, 2016.
Why would I think that?
I'm saying that from the violence monopoly everything else is upheld by a first principle approach. If the state is overthrown the violence monopoly is either upheld by a new group, or you have no governing state.
So criminals actually don’t have easy access to guns in these countries, and post terrorism our secret police forces and Europol tracks guns rather well, typically leading to arrests before anyone get to use their guns.
In Switzerland, it's very easy[0] to acquire a weapons, the requirements are:
- you must be at least 18 years old,
- you must not be subject to a deputyship or a supervision order,
- you must not give any cause to assume that you could harm yourself or anyone else with the weapon,
- you must not have a criminal record for violent or dangerous offences or repeated felonies or misdemeanours.
Middle of Nowheretown USA (and Canada for that matter) tends to have astronomically high gun ownership rates and astronomically low "gun crime" or any violent crime other than domestic violence and people who are known to each other engaging in fisticuffs over preexisting disputes. I don't think it's the mandatory class you need to pretend not to sleep though and bureaucratic red tape that's keeping people from shooting each other. It's the lack of a society and economy (victim supply) capable of sustaining a "large enough to show up in the statistics" number of career violent criminals that keeps violent crime and therefore gun crime low in both places.
The crazy high crime, murder and incarceration rates in USA aren't caused by population size. They are caused by inequalities inherent in American system.
If a whole class of your society can't hope for their kids to get a white collar job, and have to fear losing their house if they ever get seriously ill - that's not a stable basis for a peaceful society.
I really hate how I find myself having to go to greater and greater lengths to disclaim my words around here to not have them twisted or stretched to imply something.
US murder and incarceration rates are more or less solely caused by the war on drugs. Once you remove people who are involved in the manufacture, transportation and sale of illicit substances from the crime stats the place looks a lot like the better parts of western Europe.
Yes, wealth equality, social mobility and healthcare have a hell of a lot of room for improvement but they are not the driver of violence in the US. Forcing a multi-billion dollar industry to exist outside the law is what is driving violence.
> US murder and incarceration rates are more or less solely caused by the war on drugs
That's what you would expect if drug trade is the most profitable crime, no matter if drugs are the reason these people went into crime in the first place. If you can't afford your expected lifestyle within the system you go outside the system. Once there you choose the crime with the highest profit per risk factor.
There's plenty of countries that penalize drug ownership that have order of magnitude less crime than USA.
Edit: to clarify, i'm talking about the suspected "original" crime, eg. a robbery, and not the shooting part. The shooting should of course be investigated, but i see no point in holding a full trial for the robbery part, if the suspect is already dead, and if there is no actual benefit for anyone.
Are you sure about this? American Police don’t have to account for each bullet while on duty? They can shoot indiscriminately?
Or are you just saying this because it sounds sorta true and you don’t think anyone will disagree?
““You can get online today and figure out how many tickets were sold to ‘The Martian,’ which I saw this weekend. . . . The CDC can do the same with the flu,” he continued. “It’s ridiculous — it’s embarrassing and ridiculous — that we can’t talk about crime in the same way, especially in the high-stakes incidents when your officers have to use force.””
“In New York, state officials now require a special prosecutor to investigate any death at the hands of police. In Texas, lawmakers recently approved legislation requiring local police to report shootings by their officers.”
“Until now, federal officials have relied on local police to report officer-involved shootings, but reporting is voluntary and typically occurs months after the fact.”
If you consider what happens in other countries, what happens when a citizen shoots someone, what is required of American police when they shoot someone and the accountability police face when they shoot someone unreasonably — it’s pretty clear “indiscriminately” and “with impunity” are valid descriptions of the current situation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fbi-director-calls-l...
What you’re referring to is a centralized federal registry you can do a simple query on. Yes, that doesn’t fully exist right now, because reporting numbers to a central federal authority is new, and currently voluntary.
But do you honestly think this means we don’t keep track of times officers use their guns, on a local level? That officers are simply not responsible in any way for using their gun on duty?
> Until someone is convicted of a crime in America, they are presumed innocent. I don't see why that should change just because a suspect was killed before they could be tried. All police killings should be thoroughly investigated. The statistic that 99% of them do not lead to legal punishment is extremely suspicious.
The first part, suspect innocent until proven guilty (for the original crime, the one police got called for), and i see no point in going further with the trial for the original crime, if there is no point to be made (eg. trial for robbery, having the store owner come to court, proving was there a robbery, proving the suspect was the one robbing the store, etc.).
The shooting (so robber vs. police) part should of course be investigated.
- Suspect allegedly robs a store. Store owner calls police.
- Police finds suspect, yells "stop, police!", suspect starts shooting at the police.
- Police fires back, kills suspect.
- After that, the shooting investigation starts (or atleast should start).
All I'm saying is, that due to suspect being dead, the trial for the robbery is not needed (if noone gains anything from that). Yes, shooting, attempted murder, and everything else is valid and should be investigated, go to trial, etc. But the robbery itself, in my opinion doesn't that much anymore.
If the suspect survived the shooting, then of course, investigating the robbery should be done TOO (checking security footage, search warrant to find stolen stuff, etc), next to attempted murder etc.
I cant figure out why would you assumed either first or second. The actual sentence is clear, killed people.
But also, guilt is not valid reason for police to kill someone. Guilty people should be sentenced by court and death sentence should be treated carefully. The person have to be active threat and no other way possible. "He was guilty, therefor it is ok to kill him" does not cut it.
> 99% of killings by police from 2013-2019 have not resulted in officers being charged with a crime.
If someone wrote...
> "1099 patients died after being treated by cardiologists in Nevada. Thus far, 99% of them have not yet faced any charges."
While "technically correct" it is obviously intended to deceive the reader.
It uses similar data for 2017 and illustrates that 149 out of 1147 people killed by police during that year were unarmed (~12.9% of cases).
It also highlights some differences in the demographics of the people who suffered as a result of police violence; I mention that because it's relevant to these topics appearing on Hacker News currently.
This is why leftists and other zealots have brought us into the post fact world.
Sorry, facts don't care about your feelings.
Since 2018, more police officers have been killed by blacks than the other way around. Blacks are substantially overrepresented in murders of police officers. [0]
This is not to say that there isn't a problem with police violence, ridiculous militarisation after 9/11 or the way police are being trained, because there is. But those one-sided takes aren't helping.
[0] https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1266926255082999810?s=20
Maybe some people realized that after constant harassment and threats, their only recourse was to get armed and protect themselves from the police.
That wasn't exactly my point though: there will always be justification for violence. MLK and Ghandi were great men because they saw that the escalating spiral of death and violence cannot be stopped by retribution.
What happens now will devastate black communities, encourage white flight, and possibly tip the next elections. Its not the first time, we've seen this happen before.
What do you think the premise of the map is? You are saying to disagree with the premise but then you simply argue with the "implications" of the data. What premise are you disagreeing with?
Blacks and other minorities in America today are treated with the same callous disregard as Libyans, Afghanis, Iraqi's and Yemeni are treated by its out of control military industrial pharmaceutical complex - every single day for decades.
Sure, you know who George Floyd is, because he was an American citizen and American media is not banned from reporting on his death. But, do you know who Saleh Matasher Tomal was? Got any clue who Saeed Chmagh was? Namir Noor-Eldeen? These are also victims of Americas out of control obsession with violent authority over what self-appointed political judges, proven war criminals, have deemed to be lesser human beings.
If you want America to change its ways within its borders, you have to start prosecuting the real crimes against humanity that are committed in the name of every single American citizen outside its borders.
This is where the actual trouble starts: war criminals, getting away with it, then turn their troubled death cult psyche towards American society and apply the same heinous policies towards the people they truly hate ...
And yet when I was clicking through the cases most of them seemed to be armed suspects that were shooting at other people and/or at the officers arriving at the scene. In which case I don't see how shooting at the suspect should be condemned in any way.
Maybe I'm missing something here? I'm all in for charging and convicting unlawful use of violence and firearms by the police but this website seems a bit misleading to me because it misrepresents the scope of the problem. It would be much more useful to prove its point if it only showed cases where the suspect was not armed and dangerous.