crayzz wrote:Ok, what WOULD be a reasonable proportional rate then?
Did... did you forget what you wrote?
"
Police-shootings tend to make the news a lot, and losing someone is a personal tragedy, but in a country where on an average day 2,500 people will die of one cause or another, death-by-cop doesn't even register as a blip on the radar. For a murder-oriented-profession, the majority of cops spend an awful lot of time not shooting people."
Except that is abjectly false. The police commit homicide at a rate of 20 times more than the US homicide rate, which itself is really high compared to other developed nations (3 times greater than Canada's, for instance).
Now if you'd like to defend said homicides another way, then by all means.
It's not false. The definition of "majority" is a number greater than half. When a city like new York, with ~35,000 cops, kills only 9 people a year, the odds are the MOST cops will go their entire career (20-40 years I assume) and never kill anyone. In fact, even if we assume that most cops have long 40-year careers, I need to multiply that by the number of firearms incidents in the highest years (992 and 880) to get close to the total number of cops. If we use more recent numbers, around 100 per year, then the majority (meaning more than half) of new cops will probably go their entire careers without ever firing their gun at a person.
So by the literal definition of the words, what I said is perfectly true.
Yes, cops shoot people at a far higher rate than civilians. However even if every copy waited until a person was in the act of shooting or otherwise attacking them or other people I would expect them to shoot at a higher rate than the average civilian. If you exclude the deaths due to things like car accidents and heart attacks, cops are beaten, shot, and stabbed to death a rate roughly the same as civilian homicides- approx. 50 per million people per year:
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fat ... auses.htmlSo even if you held cops to the restriction that they could only use lethal force against people who had used lethal force directly against them (ignoring lethal force being used against civilians in the presence of a cop) then they would be using it about as often as the same-size civilian population would.
As
vvn pointed out- the police deal with the segment of the population that is far more likely to be armed and/or dangerous on a far more frequent basis than the rest of the civilian population by definition of their job. Most of us will never interact with a cop beyond getting a speeding ticket. Many of us will also never have to interact with another person who threatens our life or the life of other people near us. Cops and violent/dangerous people come into conflict all the time.
So while cops only represent 1/3rd of 1% of the total population, they are interacting with virtually 100% of the 20 million or so felons in the country (your number). In other words, there may only be a million cops, but they are dealing with 300 million people's worth of crime.
If you want to envision a truly ludicrous scenario in which cops are judge, jury, and executioner, and the killed everyone who they knew killed someone else, then they would kill people at a rate of 8 times what they currently do. (approx. 15,000 homicides per year, minus the 1000 by cops and the 6000 that go unsolved). If each cop only killed one person, then the majority of the roughly 1,000,000 cops in the U.S. would STILL go their entire career without killing anyone.
Now, you pointed out that cops in America shoot people a higher rate than other countries. However you also pointed out America has a higher rate of violent crime than other countries. I would be interested in seeing if the proportion between the rate at which cops shoot people and violent crime occurs remains constant; i.e. if Canadian cops shoot people at a rate of 20 times as many as the general civilian population.
The population of Canada is about 35 million, they have about 70,000 cops, and the homicide rate is 1.6 per 100,000, or about 560 total per year. I am having trouble tracking down rates of shootings by Canadian police though. Maybe you can help me out here- I'm writing this post at 4:30 a.m. because apparently I'm suffering from insomnia, so my Google-fu is not at it's best right now.
Does all this mean the rate of cop-on-civilian violence in the United States to high? I DON'T KNOW because I don't know what the appropriate rate is supposed to be. I feel (admitting 100% that this is my opinion) that saying cops are only allowed to employ lethal force when another cop has been killed seems like a ridiculously stringent standard though.
Do we need better data on cop-related violence? Yes, definitely.
Do we need more accountability for cops in America? Sure, I can get behind that.
Do we need a separate system for investigating and when necessary prosecuting cop violence? The historical evidence would seem to indicate yes.
Do our prisons need a reform to refocus them on rehabilitation instead of punishment? I'd prefer it that way.
Does our justice system need an overhaul to be more fair? Probably, we just need to work out a reasonable way to do so.
But I have issues with the claim that cops kill to many people, until you can tell me how many they SHOULD be killing and how you arrived at that conclusion.