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I also tend to think that incidents like these should absolutely be used to take time to evaluate things properly.

While various studies and estimates can be found, there are no proper stats for deaths by police collected, at least not publicly, in the US. Considering how many stats in general is kept by the police force in pretty much any country, and considering how important the matter is, I get the feeling that this is not an accident. It seems like somewhere a decision has been made that this is not a topic open for discussion.

Of course, if the US police is not especially trigger happy, what better way to prove it than actual per capita stats?

Btw, earlier in this thread I made a rough calculation that deaths by police could easily be something like 50 time as common in the US as they are in Finland, while at the same time deaths of police officers are something like 20 times as common. Which to me says that you can absolutely not pin the problem all on the police, being a cop in the US is genuinely a lot more dangerous. Which of course indicates that even though this cop might indeed have been trigger happy, you might also argue that he was simply reacting in a way which he was taught to react. (Whether that lesson is directly a part of their training or behavior learned on the job is another very good question.)

Of course that doesn't absolve him legally or morally (and that's assuming he did something wrong, which he might not have done), but I don't think you should scapegoat him unnecessarily either.

Still, the per capita homicide rate in general is "only" something like 3 times that of Finland (which has pretty average numbers as far as Europe goes). So my rough counts suggest at least to me that there's a very good reason to suspect that there might a really serious problem with the US police.

Of course, proper studies would need to be made, which I think is kind of the point of this whole thing.

This is some really serious stuff, much more serious than stuff like international terrorism which is a rather marginal threat on the grand scale of things, and at the very least I think everyone should agree that the accusation that the US police might be unnecessarily trigger happy is so severe that you can't just shrug it off with "well it's a tough job, what you gonna do".

EDIT: Or, you know, you might just choose to not go there, like ever. Which is actually what I've noticed an increasing number of Europeans I'm in contact with have been saying. Small minorities obviously still, but I think it's somewhat telling that the supposed "beacon of freedom and democracy" is viewed by many on the outside as a dangerous pseudo police-state.

Kind of like going to Brazil. Lovely country, but if you end up in trouble, remember that it's the chance you took when you went there, and never go to the police. (And then again I also know people who consider visiting Afghanistan a normal thing to do, so you know. Different people have different tolerances for risk.)