US police kill more in days than other countries do in years
 

Link with easier to read graphs
By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years | US news | The Guardian









It’s rather difficult to compare data from different time periods, according to different methodologies, across different parts of the world, and still come to definitive conclusions.

But now that we have built The Counted, a definitive record of people killed by police in the US this year, at least there is some accountability in America – even if data from the rest of the world is still catching up.

It is undeniable that police in the US often contend with much more violent situations and more heavily armed individuals than police in other developed democratic societies. Still, looking at our data for the US against admittedly less reliable information on police killings elsewhere paints a dramatic portrait, and one that resonates with protests that have gone global since a killing last year in Ferguson, Missouri: the US is not just some outlier in terms of police violence when compared with countries of similar economic and political standing.

America is the outlier – and this is what a crisis looks like.

england wales police killings the counted
Find out more at theguardian.com/thecounted. Photograph: The Guardian US interactive team
Fact: In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.

Behind the numbers: According to The Counted, the Guardian’s special project to track every police killing this year, there were 59 fatal police shootings in the US for the days between 1 January and 24 January.

According to data collected by the UK advocacy group Inquest, there have been 55 fatal police shootings – total – in England and Wales from 1990 to 2014.

The US population is roughly six times that of England and Wales. According to the World Bank, the US has a per capita intentional homicide rate five times that of the UK.

iceland police killings
Find out more at theguardian.com/thecounted. Photograph: The Guardian US interactive team
Fact: There has been just one fatal shooting by Icelandic police in the country’s 71-year history. The city of Stockton, California – with 25,000 fewer residents than all of Iceland combined – had three fatal encounters in the first five months of 2015.

Behind the numbers: A 2013 police shooting in Iceland drew international attention because it was the first of its kind; there had literally never been a fatal police shooting recorded there before two years ago.

In Stockton, Patrick Wetter, Matautu Nuu and Carl Lao were all fatally shot by police in the 64-day span between 6 January and 4 March. According to US census data from 2013, Stockton has a population of 298,118; World Bank data puts Iceland’s population at 323,764 for the same year.

Iceland’s official intentional homicide rate is so low that it does not register in World Bank data on intentional homicides per 100,000 people. For the US, the rate is five per 100,000.

germany police killings the counted
Find out more at theguardian.com/thecounted. Photograph: The Guardian US interactive team
Fact: Police in the US have shot and killed more people – in every week this year – than are reportedly shot and killed by German police in an entire year.

The Counted: people killed by police in the United States in 2015 – interactive
The Guardian is counting the people killed by US law enforcement agencies this year. Read their stories and contribute to our ongoing, crowdsourced project
Read more
Behind the numbers: The Counted database shows that the first week of 2015 had the fewest fatal police shootings of any this year, with 13.

The German Police University concluded in 2012 that German police had killed six people by gunshot in 2011 and seven in 2012.

According to the German data and the Guardian’s count, more unarmed black men (19) have been fatally shot by US police in 2015 than citizens of any race, armed or unarmed, fatally shot in Germany during all of 2010 and 2011 (15).

The US population is roughly four times that of Germany, and according to the World Bank, the US has a per capita intentional homicide rate five times that of Germany.

australia police shootings the counted
Find out more at theguardian.com/thecounted. Photograph: The Guardian US interactive team
Fact: Police in the US fatally shot more people in one month this year than police in Australia officially reported during a span of 19 years.

Behind the numbers: The Counted database shows that police in the US fatally shot 97 people in March 2015, the highest one-month total recorded by the Guardian.

A 2013 study from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) found 94 fatal police shootings for the period between 1992 and 2011.

In Australia, as opposed to the US, all police shootings are subject to national monitoring by law. The US population is nearly 14 times that of Australia, and the US has a per capita intentional homicide rate five times that of Australia.

canada police shootings
Find out more at theguardian.com/thecounted. Photograph: The Guardian US interactive team
Fact: Police in Canada average 25 fatal shooting a year. In California, a state just 10% more populous than Canada, police in 2015 have fatally shot nearly three times as many people in just five months.

Behind the numbers: So far in 2015, police in California have fatally shot 72 people, according to the Guardian’s database – the most thorough accounting for officer-involved fatalities ever built in the US.

In Canada, reliable nationwide numbers on police shootings don’t yet exist.

But a journalist for the Independent in Canada did combine data from the provinces that report police killings – and extrapolated that Canadian police kill an average of 25 people by gunshot every year.

The US has an intentional homicide rate two and a half times that of Canada, according to the World Bank.

finland police shootings the counted
Find out more at theguardian.com/thecounted. Photograph: The Guardian US interactive team
Fact: Police fired 17 bullets at Antonio Zambrano-Montes, who was “armed” with a rock. That’s nearly three times what police in Finland are reported to have fired during all of 2013.

Behind the numbers: Zambrano-Montes was killed in February by officers responding to reports that he was throwing rocks at cars. The incident was caught on video, with 17 shots fired; according to police, “five or six” struck Zambrano-Montes.

In Finland, according to chief inspector Jukka Salmine, police fired just six bullets in all of 2013.

This just in: Stockton is a ghetto shithole and Iceland isn't.

Looking at that article, one thing which strikes me is that most of the countries to which the US is compared have a relatively homogeneous population in terms of:

• Ethnicity
• Race
• Culture
• Religion

And yes, Stockton is a ghetto shithole.

If you were to compare the number of police shootings in Oakland, CA (ghetto shithole) to that of Carlsbad, CA (affluent suburb), I'm sure you'd see a similar trend even after re-scaling for the difference in population.


The police don't create the underlying causes of violence, plain and simple. They respond to violence, as well as intimidation and threats of violence, often with lethal force of their own. But you take a Carlsbad cop and put them in Oakland, and take an Oakland cop and put them in Carlsbad, and I can pretty much guarantee that the rate of officer-involved shootings will stay with the city and not move with the officer.

You want to decrease the rate of officer-involved shootings in the US? Decrease the number of civilians prone to violent, antisocial behavior.

Lies, damn lies, statistics. Perfect example right here.

Our police officers are our friends and neighbors, called upon to do a difficult and dangerous job. I guarantee you not one of them gets up to go to work in the morning and says "Gee, I hope I get to kill someone today!" They deserve our support. They've got mine.

Clifton, you and your ilk disgust me.

Does Joe's post earn a /thread ?

lies.

Your right, they just hope to beat the shit out of someone that rubs them wrong. If it leads to death, so be it. RIP Kelly Thomas. They were good cops.

Interesting article:
If You Run, You're Done: Why Cops Go Berserk When People Run From Them | Alternet

This morning, i woke up and hoped i'd get to make fun of some stupid shit posted on MiataTurbo.

Thank you for making my hopes realized.

Do you know what happened to Kelly Thomas?

If not I urge you to listen to the audio of his murder. then look at the pictures.

I watched the whole thing. I was being sarcastic in saying they were good cops. A violent murder was committed and as usual not one cop stepped up and said enough or stop.

In the hundreds of videos I have only seen, there has only been one video of a good cop steeping up and stopping a cop on civilian assault/attack. She was later fired for doing the right thing.

I was speaking to @concealer.

No organization comprised of humans is perfect. Police officers are subject to the law. These particular officers were tried for murder and manslaughter and acquitted. Do you think maybe, just maybe, there was more evidence presented at trial than what you "smarter than the rest of us experts" have seen on Wikipedia? Hmmmmm . . . ?

And, no, I'm not saying juries always get it right either. But it's a whole lot better than mob rule.

On the whole, our police officers are good people doing the best job they can. I'm tired of being quiet about it and am speaking up. What's been portrayed in the media over the last couple of years is ridiculous and one-sided. This thread is asinine.

^ In your opinion what systemic problems if any are present? Or, what room is there for improvement?

This nonsense about police having "difficult and dangerous" jobs and therefore getting a free pass every time they beat or kill a citizen has to stop. It's not as dangerous as you think, and most of the on-the-job deaths are from traffic accidents.

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=230243

I have personal experience working as a correctional officer and training with police officers. I have personally seen the massive corruption and completely shit attitudes of cops. I detest cops in every single way.

I left that job because I felt completely unprotected and unsafe from the actions of the higher-ups. In fact, 3 months after I left, the security warden was fired for doing favors for prisoners and the director of STIU (Security Threat Interdiction Unit) was fired for bringing in drugs for the prisoners. I never trusted either of those assholes and I was proven correct.

I worked in the most dangerous unit, because I actually did my job and didn't let shit slide. The few problems I did bring to the security warden ended up with nothing happening and the behavior continuing. I later found out why.

Cops are trained to harrass and since I know how they are trained, I exploit that everytime I am stopped for speeding and I get out 99% of the time, even though underneath the surface I want to tell them what I really think about them. Cops are brought up on the belief that their jobs are so dangerous and that their gun is their best friend and that their lives are always in danger. It is that myth that they themselves believe in and then cop supporters parrot that argument for no real reason.

I hate cops.

The article shows 1 thing very clearly.. we got nothing but trigger happy monkeys in the police force. Shame the article doesnt track non fatal shootings.. we'd be in the hundred thousands.

Other countries are different than the US. Even the parts of the US are very different from one another. Bloodshed in the US isn't evenly distributed across the nation. It's concentrated in a few urban areas that have astronomically high levels of violent crime. East St Louis has a higher murder rate (23 per 100k) than Rwanda. If you ignore these islands of horror, the US has murder and crime statistics that compare favorably to most of Europe.

Keep in mind that many countries report murder statistics in ways that we would find blatantly dishonest. The UK, for example, only counts a crime at the time of conviction. So in the US, when police find a dismembered hooker in a garbage bin, the number of murders immediately goes up by one. In the UK, that murder only counts as a murder only once they find out who did it and convict him of murder. It used to be possible to get around this and find the real number by looking at coroners inquests and counting the homicides, but the UK changed this as well so that such deaths aren't put in a category where they can be easily counted. The actual murder rate in the UK is many times higher than the official statistics. Similar games go on in most countries. In Japan, they classify most murder-suicides as suicides, which is why their suicide rate is higher than our combined murder+suicide rate. And so on.

Our high rates of police killings reflect special circumstances and honest reporting. In most countries, killings performed by state actors aren't noted at all unless they reach ridiculous levels (ie, the mass disappearances of argentina). In the US, everything gets thoroughly scrutinized and reported.

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