Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
But it ultimately comes down to guns. The window of time between when a person isn't a threat, to that person grabbing a hidden firearm and using it lethally on a cop or someone else nearby, is about 2 seconds. When handguns are everywhere in a community - in homes, on persons, in cars - every potentially violent encounter not only becomes deadly, but it becomes deadly immediately.
In the last 10 years, over 500 police officers in the U.S. have been shot and killed on duty. In that same period in the UK, 2 police officers have been shot and killed. Being a police officer in those two countries involves dramatically different exposure to lethal violence. There's no way police behaviour isn't going to be shaped by that exposure.
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According to FBI statistics, 48 police officers were killed "feloniously" in 2019. (44 of them with a gun.) There were about 690000 law enforcement officers in the US. That puts their homicide rate at about 7 per 100k per year.
Homicide rate among US men is about 8 per 100k per year.
(About 88% of US police officers are men.)
Bottom line: it's no more dangerous to be a policeman than it is to be any other kind of man in the US. In fact being a police officer in the US is not a particularly dangerous job. Statistically it's not even in the top 10.
I get that you're not saying that it's okay, but that it's human, and I agree that fear is understandable. It's basically the same argument I was making earlier:
The US police officers killing people pre-emptively is horrible, but it's also human if you consider that it's a thing that's considered okay in general in the US, not just among the police.
However, you have to start changing this culture somewhere if you ever want to get results, and I really don't see where else you could start. Restricting guns is at this point logistically impossible even if you did try it. (I still think they should get on that, so they could get results maybe 30 years from now.)
The police are the only violence using group that are specifically trained to do so (excluding soldiers obviously, but their violence is usually done abroad). That's why IMO they're the obvious place to start changing things.
They police should be an example in restraint, not an example that it's okay to shoot someone pre-emptively because you imagine danger might happen.