Flood of US police shootings spurs action

[damnedifIknow]

Washington: The shaky phone video of a white police officer shooting an unarmed black man eight times in the back in South Carolina on Saturday is shocking, but not that surprising.

After a spate of high-profile killings, Americans are now confronting the ugly reality that its police kill its citizens far more often than those of other western nations."

Last week the left-leaning political blog Daily Kos noted that in March alone police in America shot 111 people, while UK police have killed 52 since 1900.

What is frustrating those trying to study the killings, is that no-one really knows how many people American police kill each year.

Though the FBI keeps a database of justifiable police homicides, it is based on reports volunteered by a tiny fraction of American police forces. There is no compulsion on the nation's estimated 18,000 police forces to report their justifiable killings."

Nor does the FBI database include any unjustified killings.

Still, the database reveals that in 2011 American police justifiably shot dead at least 404 people. Over the same period Australian police killed six people, German police killed six and English and Welsh killed two."

*I was rather surprised to find there are no statistics", a former FBI agent and criminal justice professor, Jim Fisher, told the Washington Post last year. "The answer to me is pretty obvious: the government just doesn't want us to know how many people are shot by the police every year".

In the face of this great void of information many groups have now begun projects to gather the data."

*In the end though, he believes American police officers kill more people than their colleagues in Britain and Australia because they can do so with almost complete impunity.

"They do it because they can", he says. "If more officers were indicted I think there would be fewer killings".

http://www.smh.com.au/world/flood-of-us-police-shootings-spurs-action-20150409-1mh45a.html

[el_bryanto]

1. The lack of statistics on this issue is terrible

I understand why cops don't want to give out those statistics; but this problem will be hard to fix without accountable. And that's accountability not just for the officers who do the actual shooting but for the departments they belong to. There is a culture in too many of our police stations which allows if not encourages these kinds of extreme reactions.

Bryant

[damnedifIknow]

2. Agree but something has to be done

In the end though, he believes American police officers kill more people than their colleagues in Britain and Australia because they can do so with almost complete impunity.

"They do it because they can", he says. "


Who in their right mind would want to kill people in the first place? We have a problem and a big one.

[el_bryanto]

4. Well - that leads us to another question

If any officer literally wants to kill people or kill black people - that officer should be fired and put into a counselling program before that desire is acted on (or arrested and prosecuted if they act on it).

But for most it's more an issue of 1) they feel threatened by a black person, 2) black lives aren't as important as white cop lives (or white lives in general) - so they use deadly force to protect themselves from what they see as a threat, without ever analyzing why they see black men as inherently threatening or why they see their lives as having less value. Knowing where these attitudes are most prevalent can help correct them.

I could be wrong about that, but that's my take on it.

Bryant

[Action_Patrol]

3. You simply can't compare the US with the UK...

Guns are a goddamn religion in the US. There isn't a comparable gun culture in the UK and Australia.

[Trillo]

5. In one month alone, 111 police executions? Wow.

Per this other thread, Amnesty claimed U.S. executed 46 people in 2010
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026477252

So, if you add in the police killings, the U.S. killing rate looks a lot worse.

[NaturalHigh]

6. Actually it said 111 shootings, not killings.

[Trillo]

7. True. According to Wikipedia, the total killings in 2010 are unknown

but there are 220 listed (counted by pasting into a spreadsheet). Most of the descriptions say "shot" and do not specify "killed", yet the article overall is titled as "list of killings..." The article also says, "The list below is incomplete, as the annual average number of justifiable homicides committed by law enforcement alone is estimated to be near 400.[1]"

Whether a person gets sentenced to execution by a court, or killed on the street by a cop, they are just as dead, and in both cases they are killed by government authority.

[cwydro]

8. Kick. nt