Since police violence in the US was a major topic of discussion on this forum too, I think it's worth mentioning that a new study makes the (frankly extremely unsurprising) finding that the real situation is probably twice as bad as reported.
Police killings in America have been undercounted by more than half over the past four decades, according to a new study that raises pointed questions about racial bias among medical examiners and highlights the lack of reliable national record keeping on what has become a major public health and civil rights issue.
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I'm continuously amazed at how regularly Americans like to criticize other countries and their internal politics and systems while at home their country has much to fix.
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I'm continuously amazed at how regularly Americans like to criticize other countries and their internal politics and systems while at home their country has much to fix.
Pretty common ploy by leaders and media to bring up foreigners as a distraction from local issues.
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It says "over the past four decades" - has this improved to a point where at least current counts are more or less accurate?
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Global Peace Index score for the USA places them 117th out of 161 countries, sandwiched between Saudi Arabia and Armenia.
They have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Proportion of children living in poverty is 21.2%, third highest among OECD countries.
... None of which has anything to do with the thread topic.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
... None of which has anything to do with the thread topic.
?? It almost directly goes to the topic of this thread. A well educated, well fed society is not a criminalized society. A criminalized society is going to have more conflicts with law enforcement. If we're going to have this conversation getting into root causes is probably a good idea.
(that stuff plus all of the guns).
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I'm continuously amazed at how regularly Americans like to criticize other countries and their internal politics and systems while at home their country has much to fix.
... None of which has anything to do with the thread topic.
You don't think a police force that routinely kills its citizens has nothing to do with the relative peace of its own country?
Or that the same police that routinely arrests its own population at the highest rate in the world has any relation to it killing its own population?
I guess I should have explained it a bit more...
The USA is a mess and the police are continuing to jail its poorest citizens, their children then go on to be even poorer, and then the police just kill the others.
Last edited by flames_fan_down_under; 10-13-2021 at 11:26 PM.
I'm continuously amazed at how regularly Americans like to criticize other countries and their internal politics and systems while at home their country has much to fix.
?? It almost directly goes to the topic of this thread. A well educated, well fed society is not a criminalized society. A criminalized society is going to have more conflicts with law enforcement. If we're going to have this conversation getting into root causes is probably a good idea.
Can you point to data that backs that up? As much as we like to mock it, the American education system is actually not that bad. It’s not up to Western European standards, but it’s middling by OECD standards, and better than a lot of countries that have much lower crime rates. If education is such a big factor, why doesn’t Turkey have crime like the U.S? I’m not clear about the relevance of being well fed either. America’s working class and poor are much more likely to be obese than undernourished.
The causes of crime are incredibly complex. Anyone pointing to simple explanations - especially when they fit an ideological narrative - is likely driven more by political motivation than facts.
I don't see the study suggesting that, or any reason why the situation would be improved.
Just data collection in general is way, way better now than it used to be 20 years ago due to more things being input and stored electronically and in standardized format. I have the exact opposite intuition to you, I would guess that the vast majority of these "undercounts" happened early in the study period, but I'm just guessing.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Can you point to data that backs that up? As much as we like to mock it, the American education system is actually not that bad. It’s not up to Western European standards, but it’s middling by OECD standards, and better than a lot of countries that have much lower crime rates.
Wouldn't the U.S. numbers be boosted by the private institutions that are only accessible to the wealthy? I think if we looked strictly at public education, the U.S. would probably be much lower, and if you examined the areas of the U.S. with high crime rates, you would probably also find underfunded public schools.
The question would be whether the high crime rates are a result of said underfunding, or if the high crime rates drove money out of these areas.
Just data collection in general is way, way better now than it used to be 20 years ago due to more things being input and stored electronically and in standardized format. I have the exact opposite intuition to you, I would guess that the vast majority of these "undercounts" happened early in the study period, but I'm just guessing.
That would be if this had anything to do with bad bookkeeping instead of racism and cover ups.
It's still routine in the US that medical examinations of deaths in custody are done by examiners who literally work at the same police station.
US police kills twice as many people as reported
