Police should be masters at de-escalation. Instead, because they are not trained and motivated, they often create the situations which result in shootings. Not universally, but often. The people who shoot at the police _do_ have a reasonable belief that they'll be killed if they don't try to defend themselves. That is people who have committed crimes end up being more violent because they fear police brutality. Police in turn are quicker to turn to force in fear of their own safety.
This vicious should be and needs to be terminated by police learning how best to minimize the violent tendencies of petty criminals and the mentally ill. Don't get me wrong, the weapons they use are valuable and important tools, but they are so often used because the authority wants to use them.
I've known more than one person who before signing up, said openly that they were joining the armed services because they "wanted to shoot people". It's easy to find police on public media who clearly have the attitude that the people they work with on a daily basis are the enemy.
It's easy to look at the cops as the bad guys. "Fuck the police!" but that's falling for the same line of reasoning that the bad cops do.
You have to recognize that it's a systematic problem. The real world is complex – Americans really have to rid themselves of the Christian "good vs. evil" narrative we try to apply to every situation.
And it turns out that hostage situations in police shootings are indeed pretty damned rare.
I don't think that's how "criminal justice" is supposed to work.
These are things no engineer would hear of but you see statements like yours on HN all the time.
Let me put it this way: is it your position that in every single one of those thousand-odd cases, the person who was shot deserved it? If not, how many of them did?
That is, in edge cases like a bit of swerving, 10 over the limit, newly expired tags, etc; police will look at the car and what they can tell about who is driving it and where they are to determine if they pull over or not.
A cop told me this directly. I don't remember his exact conditions – but they included things like a young guy driving a real nice car or a car that seem like maybe it was his mother's or a really beat up car. You're a lot less likely to get pulled over if you're driving a mid-priced sedan.
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In America police kill about 1000 people per year. There's no hard number because there are no official statistics kept – that's telling in itself.
Thousands and thousands of police interactions each day, and each day about three of those ends up with somebody dead. The police in this country are undertrained and underpaid. The stupidity of the populace drives them to be statistics driven, and the environment attracts hot heads who want power to the career. Once on the job the complete lack of negative feedback from internal investigations and the courts gives them god complexes and their culture becomes a cesspool of corruption and us vs. them mentality.