how many bar fights in the UK would be shootings in America? We have a more effective weapon than our fists.
Police killed at least 1,054 people through November 27, 2022. I don't think this is a bad thing....
- Thread starter OfTheCross
- Start date
how many bar fights in the UK would be shootings in America? We have a more effective weapon than our fists.
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
*ding ding*Holy shyt we are a violent country.
Cue the "It's absolutely impossible for American police to do what police in every other developed nation have no problem doing" clip.
It is literally impossible to parse the data in any manner that doesn't make American police look far more violent than police in every other developed nation.
Even if you ONLY count incidents where no guns are involved, even if you only count incidents where the police KNOW there is no gun involved and the perceived threat of a gun played no part in the shooting, US police shootings completely wash any other country.
In most other nations, police only kill when people are being shot at or appear to be on the verge of being shot at or (rarely) a very very immediate threat with another deadly weapon, and only after all other options have been exhausted. In the USA police often escalate the fukk out of situations and then kill for every fukking excuse on the book.
Bullshyt, if you separate the data into 50 nations then they would occupy slots 1-50 in terms of highest police killing rate in the developed world. The American states where you're LEAST likely to get killed by a cop (Massachusetts and Connecticut) are still about 33% worse than the most deadly non-American developed nation on Earth. And the most dangerous states for cop killings (New Mexico and Oklahoma) are nearly 10x more deadly than the next deadliest country.
Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression
We found that more than half of all deaths due to police violence that we estimated in the USA from 1980 to 2018 were unreported in the NVSS. Compounding this, we found substantial differences in the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence over time and by racial and ethnic groups...
www.thelancet.com
And those "just 33% more likely" states are extreme outliers. In fact, in 45 of the 50 states you are more than TWICE as likely to be killed by a cop than you are in ANY developed nation not named America.
Not to mention that those are all comparisons to Canada, which itself is an outlier due to American influence. The most dangerous cop-killing counties in western Europe are Belgium and France, which both have rates less than half of Canada's. So the average American is about 9x more likely to be killed by a cop than the average French person is. In Oklahoma they're 22x more likely to be killed by a cop than in France, even in "safe" Massachusetts they're about 3.5x more likely. And that's compared to the MOST violent western European nations. If America was just barely the most deadly country that would still be reason for concern, if it was 20% or 30% higher that would be a huge red flag, the fact that we're multiple times more deadly is fukking wild.
If you need a fair comp, America's cop-killing rates are about the same as Columbia, Sudan, Rwanda, Mexico, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Those are literally the countries whose cop-killing rates most closely match the USA. They're 2.5x higher than India despite the fact that India's cops notoriously commit extrajudicial assassinations at will (look up the term "fake encounter").
Encounter killing - Wikipedia
So American cops kill people at more than twice the rate of a country whose cops are literally trying to knock off as many "bad guys" as they can.
What points are trying to be made here?
When we talk about civilian murders we point to the Mass proliferation of firearms as the culprit.
Does American gun culture not also fall victim to this complaint. Or were we not being honest when we complained about our highly militarized police force?
When we talk about civilian murders we point to the Mass proliferation of firearms as the culprit.
Does American gun culture not also fall victim to this complaint. Or were we not being honest when we complained about our highly militarized police force?
I have literally no clue what point @OfTheCross is trying to make.
But in case it isn't clear (I'm unsure how to parse your series of vague questions), the mass proliferation of firearms can be a problem and police training/mentalities can be an additional problem above and beyond that.
I don't even think they're separate. The American cultural glorification of violence is fundamentally responsible for the mass proliferation of civilian arms and the ridiculous over-arming of the American police and the operational mentality of American police who, in many situations, appear to act as if the only logical response to any threat of violence or even mere disobedience is to ramp up and escalate your own threat of violence.
Spend your entire childhood with every cartoon, action movie, history teacher, and politician trying to claim that violence is the surest and most acceptable means of resolving serious disputes, and this is what you get.
It is literally impossible to parse the data in any manner that doesn't make American police look far more violent than police in every other developed nation.
Even if you ONLY count incidents where no guns are involved, even if you only count incidents where the police KNOW there is no gun involved and the perceived threat of a gun played no part in the shooting, US police shootings completely wash any other country.
In most other nations, police only kill when people are being shot at or appear to be on the verge of being shot at or (rarely) a very very immediate threat with another deadly weapon, and only after all other options have been exhausted. In the USA police often escalate the fukk out of situations and then kill for every fukking excuse on the book.
Bullshyt, if you separate the data into 50 nations then they would occupy slots 1-50 in terms of highest police killing rate in the developed world. The American states where you're LEAST likely to get killed by a cop (Massachusetts and Connecticut) are still about 33% worse than the most deadly non-American developed nation on Earth. And the most dangerous states for cop killings (New Mexico and Oklahoma) are nearly 10x more deadly than the next deadliest country.
Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression
We found that more than half of all deaths due to police violence that we estimated in the USA from 1980 to 2018 were unreported in the NVSS. Compounding this, we found substantial differences in the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence over time and by racial and ethnic groups...www.thelancet.com
And those "just 33% more likely" states are extreme outliers. In fact, in 45 of the 50 states you are more than TWICE as likely to be killed by a cop than you are in ANY developed nation not named America.
Not to mention that those are all comparisons to Canada, which itself is an outlier due to American influence. The most dangerous cop-killing counties in western Europe are Belgium and France, which both have rates less than half of Canada's. So the average American is about 9x more likely to be killed by a cop than the average French person is. In Oklahoma they're 22x more likely to be killed by a cop than in France, even in "safe" Massachusetts they're about 3.5x more likely. And that's compared to the MOST violent western European nations. If America was just barely the most deadly country that would still be reason for concern, if it was 20% or 30% higher that would be a huge red flag, the fact that we're multiple times more deadly is fukking wild.
If you need a fair comp, America's cop-killing rates are about the same as Columbia, Sudan, Rwanda, Mexico, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Those are literally the countries whose cop-killing rates most closely match the USA. They're 2.5x higher than India despite the fact that India's cops notoriously commit extrajudicial assassinations at will (look up the term "fake encounter").
Encounter killing - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
So American cops kill people at more than twice the rate of a country whose cops are literally trying to knock off as many "bad guys" as they can.
You're not accounting for the fact that our cops carry guns compared to those Western countries you compare us to.
If your desire is to demilitarize the police, I support you.
But, given our current level of police militarization and training, the number of deaths is low as hell.
Sure, we have 2.5x as many as Western nation X. But we have 100x more guns on the streets and our police are armed.
It's an apples to oranges comparison.
AquaCityBoy
Veteran
We taking WOAT ballots yet? 
It seems you're glossing over the fact that this is a problem worth addressing.
It seems you're glossing over the fact that this is a problem worth addressing.
I'm not glossing over it, I mentioned it. Despite that we're doing quite well....you want to amend the constitution or get new judges in there to change gun laws in America...I'm with you...but that's a separate topic.
This thread is grounded in reality.
I don't know. It seems you're skipping some important data.
Those countries aren't run by gun lobbies and the police are actually accountable
NZA
LOL
That claim doesn't make any sense. Low as hell compared to what? You've just arbitrarily designated those deaths "low" without explaining your reference point at all.
The militarization and training IS a huge part of the problem, so why are you just dismissing that as "given"?
No, we don't have 2.5x as many as Western nation X - there is literally not a single Western nation in the entire world that has only 2.5x fewer police killings than us. We have over 3x as many as the next most-killing country, and over 10x as many as most Western nations.
And no, we don't have 100x as many guns as those countries. UK is pretty much the least armed European nation and we're at 24x as many guns per capita as them, for several countries it's closer to 3x to 4x. But comparing those numbers straight up is meaningless, because you continue to ignore that a massive # of victims of police shootings in America were neither armed with guns nor thought to be armed with guns.
Around half of police killing victims didn't have a gun on them at all, not to mention the ones who happened to have a gun (like so many Americans do) but did not pose a risk to anyone. You're completely ignoring that.
The reality you seem to be missing is the one where half of police death victims didn't even have a gun on them. Not to mention that a massive portion of the ones that did weren't justified either. There are still millions of guns on the streets in UK and Germany, there are still plenty of criminals with guns and if not guns, knives, so how is it that their combined police killings can usually be counted on your fingers rather than by the thousands like us?