US Police set to Kill 1100 People in 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database#

For a comparison if this held true between 2003 and 2014 then perhaps over 10,000 people were killed by the police. In comparison in the same time 4,491 US service members were killed in Iraq.


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Your post and this article make it sound as if the police are taken in with the condition of filling a murder quota, something that the doomsayers and mentally ill have been crying wolf on since the formation of peace control units such as provincial police offices.

Uhg. This is dumb. I agree with Spartanmeup. The whole article makes it look like the police force are TRYING to kill people, and that's not the case. Saying stuff like this, furthers the problem.

I mean, if I didn't know any better, I'd say it was satire- because that's the only way this article makes sense.

Plotting numbers on a graph to forecast potential outcomes is legit science.

From the article:
"We live in a time and space that dictates that if we can’t prove it with data, then it didn’t happen. And yet we know that people are continuing to suffer in these ways every single day, so we have to make sure we have the numbers to back up people’s stories and that those numbers push police departments towards urgent action,” said Packnett.

I would argue that we are significantly worse off than this. We have the numbers and people still ignore it.

Alethea Thompson wrote: Uhg. This is dumb. I agree with Spartanmeup. The whole article makes it look like the police force are TRYING to kill people, and that's not the case. Saying stuff like this, furthers the problem.

Dumb?

I like to think of myself as being rather informed of what's going on in the world and the number of articles and stuff I post might be testament to this lol.

So you'll have to forgive my European sensibilities, but why aren't Americans in more of an uproar about this?

Evidence is presented to support the idea that US police killed more civilians in America than an enemy force did in a war that lasted over a decade - and this gets dismissed?

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-americas-police-have-become-too-militarised-cops-or-soldiers

SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year

The number of SWAT deployments soared even as violent crime fell.

it is hard to see why Fargo, North Dakota—a city that averages fewer than two murders a year—needs an armoured personnel-carrier with a rotating turret

Keene, a small town in New Hampshire which had three homicides between 1999 and 2012, spent nearly $286,000 on an armoured personnel-carrier known as a BearCat

Are Americans ok with their police force being turned into a paramilitary force? :dry:

Sure this won't be the case in every police department, just about 80% of police departments...

89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s

Let's not even talk about the US having the largest number prison population, the crime quotas, the dogs which are shot dead (perhaps one family dog is killed every 98 minutes by a policeman), the no knock raids with flashbangs, the use of martial law etc...

I'll stop critiquing now before all my American friends get too angry

Though steps have been taken in the right direction, the use of body cameras and the ruling which allows the public recording of police with video and cameras are examples.

"I like to think of myself as being rather informed of what's going on in the world"

Except you're informed as to what the Media wants you to know. Articles are not proof that you know what is going on-it's proof that you listen to the media: Which is bias.

If you want to be informed on what is going on in the world, become the journalist and do your own research. What you will learn:

Half those "profiling" cases you hear about- can't be proven. Of all the reports filed to the FBI, only 14% of violent & property crimes were reported by face in 2013. Of those numbers 6% of all whites were arrested, 9% of all blacks population, 4% of all Native American/Alaskan population was arrested, 1% of all Asians were arrested and 1% of all Pacific Islanders were arrested. (I know this because I did the charts myself based on FBI information)

Let me tell you what these statics say to anyone: NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. White is anyone that does not fit into the other 4 categories I listed- Arab, Hispanic, Semetic(if you believe it's a race), Hindi, etc, are all White on the paperwork. It does not tell you what demographic they come from (Suburbs, Cities, run-down country towns, etc). It doesn't tell you how many of these numbers were multiple arrests of the same person.

The numbers you are gaining from this article do not tell you anything either. They don't tell you whether or not the officers were misused by the populace, and it resulted in horrible problems. It doesn't tell you if the officers involved have PTSD from previous incidents that have gone undiagnosed for fear of losing their livelihood. It doesn't tell you whether or not the crimes were actually violent that they were responding to.

You can look at numbers all day- they don't paint the picture you think they paint. Numbers are for cold-hard sciences. But when we talk about police profiling, brutality, poor training, cover-ups, etc, that's the realm of soft science, and the only way to address that is by getting into the paperwork directly. Otherwise, you're just spitting out rhetoric, adding to the problem- not resolving it.

I'm not sure that suggesting one becomes a journalist, when it is the media that is a problem, is the solution either though.

The media may distort images and use statistics that suit them, but if one is sensible enough to see beyond the face of what the media is trying to portray then some truth can be seen.

No, statistics don't give you the whole situation, which is always a problem when it comes to numbers. It does raise suggestions though. If police forces need military hardware to curb violent crime then perhaps a harder look needs to be had at the laws that govern crime, or the methods by which police deal with crime. You cannot argue against the fact that the actions of some police have actually incited incidents to occur, and/or broken the law themselves. The police will always be an 'out group' in society, but their actions have a direct impact on the behaviour of groups they interact with, and vice versa.

Nothing is ever cut and dry, but dismissing it all off hand is unhelpful also.

You don't have to write for a paper, it's meant to be an abstract term

Alethea is a military cop. Or was. One of those.

It's no secret that Americans like to shoot people. It is their beloved constitutional right to shoot one another. Their government has the right to shoot them and they have the right to shoot their government, and everyone will happily shoot forever after, unless fatally shot during all those shootings, and that's why america is #1 (at shooting itself in the proverbial foot)









:whistle:

Our police state is completely out of control. The ranks of officers has swelled up with psychopaths. These psychos often take steroids and go on roid rages where they lie to, steal from, rape, and murder innocent people. Every so often you hear about some good cop who heroically risks life and limb to save somebody, but that's RARE.

Anyway, what can we do about it? Well for starters we can stop being police apologists... We can de-fund them by not paying taxes... We can hold them accountable with video, death toll websites, etc... And then there's always smashy smashy