Can we say that police officers kill more people than terrorists do?
Though I tentatively agree with the rest of your comment, the original comparison was to stats only in America.
In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
And if you take out the Madoff case (a $1.7 billion case of law enforcement run amuck if there ever was one...), seizures didn't even top out burglaries.
Of course now someone can shrilly denounce me for defending asset forfeiture, but that isn't my point.
It is absurd to leave out the fact that many of these killings were intentionally initiated by suicidal mentally ill people.
I wonder how many police officer killings are due to "suicide by cop".
I don't think this is really relevant, because "suicide by cop" is a great reason why police should not take the lead in responding to suicide threats. You never hear about "suicide by paramedic" or "suicide by social worker."
September 11 2001 terrorist attacks: 2,996 dead.[1]
Here's some data for the previous few years[2], and 2016:
In 2016, 10,497 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.[3]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11...
2. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
3 . https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...
That wouldn't even be a thing if they weren't so trigger happy and unaccountable. How did it ever even get to be a thing?
As for the other two on the street. In the last two years, one had a shotgun pointed at his face from three feet away by an angry drunk man carrying two guns and four hundred rounds of ammo. (Nobody ended up hurt.)
The other spent a month in the hospital after being shot, two other officers with him were also shot and wounded, and a fourth officer there killed.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t officers or even entire departments that are too trigger happy, but that many places in the US fundamentaly require armed officers ready to shoot someone to stay alive.
The typical playbook for Suicide by Cop involves involves attempting a deadly attack on a police officer. In a world with perfect police in which police officers only used deadly force when threatened with deadly force, this would still result the attacker being shot.
So while there are real problems with policing in America, I don’t see the popularity of suicide by cop being the result of trigger happy police shooting innocent people.
Suicide by cop often involves drawing a gun on said cop. You don't need to be trigger happy or unaccountable to shoot someone who's pretending to try to shoot you.
The idea that cops are trigger happy is ignorant, if that were even remotely true the number of shootings and deaths by cop would be so high as to not warrant news stories. As in, it would be common place. Fortunately we are far from it being commonplace that shootings and even weapon discharges by cops are news worthy.
Yes we have bad cops just like we have bad actors in many other occupations. The difference is that we don't put people in other occupations in harms way on a day to day basis. that isn't to say being a cop is the most hazardous job you can have, work place deaths are higher for many other fields. We also cannot say that cops cause an unreasonable number of deaths by their actions, if anything we need to account for all the deaths they prevent by their training and mere presence.
I'm very confident that every one of those police officers lives with that horror every single day. While I completely agree that mental health should be treated better and have more options available; you can never know if the person just wants to harm themselves or take the officer down too.
This is a very uninformed statement. For 911 and/or police calls, there is an extensively well-established (to put it mildly) precedent that the safety of an area must be secured by police before medical personnel are even allowed on scene. There are very good reasons for this-- you don't want to have your primary emergency medical responders taken out by a delusional shooter when other emergencies will be coming up soon that require them, all too often for matters of life & death.
> " 'The moral of this story is don’t call the cops,' Cassandra said. “If you know someone who is having a mental health crisis, call a friend, a trusted neighbor, or someone close by who can safely intervene. Keep the number to a volunteer emergency medical service in your city or neighborhood that can be called directly"
This I agree with. For people familiar with the situation and person/people involved (if they exist), a much more appropriate response can be conducted. There are numerous accounts of these situations leading to the arrest of the individual in crisis, which of course can make things much, much worse for them. I know someone it happened to.
Here in the UK, the police would not routinely attend an ambulance call-out for someone experiencing suicidal thoughts unless there was specific intelligence to suggest that the patient might present a credible threat to an ambulance crew. Most British police officers are not permitted to carry firearms; armed officers would only be deployed to a mental health crisis if there was specific intelligence to suggest that the patient was armed and posed an immediate threat to life. All armed officers have specialist training, including crisis management and conflict de-escalation.
In 2017, six people were fatally shot by police in England and Wales. Since 1990, the average number of fatal police shootings was 2.46 per year.
Another way is possible.
Especially in country areas where they are limited Ambulance/Paramedic resources, police are more often than not the ones conducting checks and will be first responders.
If paramedics are concerned about safety on a particular job (weapons mentioned on call, previous history of violence), they will wait for police to make the area safe before attending to a patient.
If paramedics are unable to gain entry to a property, police are required to be the ones to force entry.
Also if paramedics require to take someone involuntarily to hospital for mental health evaluation they require police presence to "arrest" someone under the Mental Health Act to allow them to be taken against their will due to health concerns.
Due to large amounts of mental health work with police, on most shifts police will have a specialised unit (car) on duty in each area which has a combination of a police officer and specialist mental health worker / psychologist. They focus on any jobs relating to mentally ill and can conduct assessments without having to wait for an ambulance to be available.
There are a lot more police on shift than ambulances, and ambulances are often tied up for hours at hospitals doing transfers of patients, so police can and should be the ones dealing with welfare of the general public. They have a very close relationship with health workers.
Police will NEVER undertake a welfare check with guns drawn, even if forcing entry to a property. When arresting someone under the Mental Health Act police will not draw their guns. Guns are a last resort only.
This is incorrect. UK police routinely attend for people who are mentally ill because they've been called there by family or neighbours.
Section 135 and 136 of the mental health act (and the equivalent in Scotland) are police powers to detain someone and take them to a place of safety.
But this just strengthens your point: despite this routine use of police for people in mental distress we still manage to avoid killing many people, and when it happens we spend considerable effort to change procedures and policy to stop it happening again. (See the reduction in prone restraint for one example).
It could also be true that it's safer for the police, bystanders, and even those mental health experts themselves, for the first contact to be armed police.
But that scenario is just another one to add to the US gun control debate. Generally speaking, this stuff hardly ever occurs in other countries. It's a special US thing.
Edit to add: it's not just that the police are much less likely to shoot someone, but that people know the police won't shoot them and therefore they're less likely to react in stupid and/or dangerous ways.
Sending US police into a situation where guns probably aren't needed increases the risk a lot.
If your policies and precedent end with innocent people dying, then they need to be changed.
Someone close to me had armed police bust into their house and haul them off in handcuffs because they confessed to violent thoughts in an email to a fellow support group member whose facilitator freaked out over it. I think they were put on a psych hold and handcuffed to a hospital bed. It absolutely devastated them and permanently damaged much of their progress.
This kind of thinking is uniquely American. On my drive to work I heard a third tier college promoting their "anti-terrorism" major. We are marinating in an ambient paranoia, where every police response is an armed response, and every "first responder" response has a police element to it. That's not good. The expense entailed by American paranoia is part of why our ranking in things that matter to quality of life for people of modest means are mediocre.
Every comment seems to miss what seems obvious to me.
Since the chance of armed encounters is high the Police have to respond this way to every scenario or risk getting shot.
I don't think so. Maryland isn't the most restrictive state when it comes to firearm policy[1], but it's a long distance from "no gun control." I'm also not certain that the chance of armed encounters is terribly high in Bethesda, though I'm uncertain if those crime statistics are recorded or what terms I should use to search for them. To give a comparison, the homicide rate per capita (which I suspect would correlate to some extent with police interaction with armed individuals) in Montgomery County (where Bethesda is) was 1.4/100,000 in 2016 [2]. For Australia at large, the rate is 1.0/100,000 [3], so pretty comparable. These police officers don't seem to operate in an area that is notably more dangerous/violent than Australia.
I do, however, think the issue is cultural. Many police officers in the US seem to perceive that they are in danger 24/7, and this effects how they interact with people on a daily basis. There is a preference for an overwhelming show of force even when it's absolutely uncalled for. This probably contributes to a feedback loop that causes the general population and the police to trust each other less and be more confrontational. And I don't seem to be alone in identifying this as a problem; if you search for problems with police culture in the US, you will find a large body of criticism for the default behavior of police officers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Maryland
[2] https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/POL/Resources/Files/MCPD%... (Page 4)
This discussion always makes me think of Robert Peel's principles of "policing by consent", amazingly forward-looking given that they were drawn up in the early 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
The UK doesn't follow these principles perfectly (for example, there are still tensions between the police and racial minorities) but they're mostly in the right ballpark. It seems from news reports that most US police forces don't even try -- the police see themselves more as being in conflict with the community.
It's small consolation to all the people killed by police who didn't have a weapon because the police seem to operate in a state of mortal terror.
Try this on for size: https://www.npr.org/2016/12/08/504718239/military-trained-po...
"Forget your years of combat experience, shoot first ask questions later, that's our policy."
U.S. Police have more of a free hand to shoot civilians than U.S. Military have to shoot people in war. The U.S. is not a Mad Max war zone... although that's the narrative police seem to want to cultivate because it makes it easier to justify their aggressive tactics and the civilian body count.
Our system has completely failed the the suicidal, mentally ill, etc. You have almost no legitimate options for help. I recently heard of a story of someone who was put in jail when they threatened their own life. It's not the police's fault though, they have no options to them.
Right. The problem, for a disturbingly large section of the community, is that they are afraid to call the cops for _anything_.
I would argue that you should not be calling the police unless you are literally in fear for your life. Bringing the police, guns drawn, into your home or where ever you may be is only going to increase the chances of a gun being fired.
In my opinion, this article highlights the reality that the police do, in fact, approach everything from a robbery to a reported suicide to a loudly barking dog in exactly the same way: guns drawn.
Yeah, so "police training". I'm perhaps a little less prepared to attribute purely positive outcomes from that.
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-06/victoria-police-off...
"A Victorian police officer has told a jury he punched a teenager in the face as hard as he could, in line with his training, after the boy hit him on the forearm."
and:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/22/ipcc-concern-o...
"Police officers have been accused of using Tasers to inflict pain to gain compliance, a report by the police watchdog says. Concerns are also raised about the use of Tasers on suspects already in custody, in the findings by the Independent Police Complaints Commission."
"IPCC commissioner James Dipple-Johnstone said: "When used in this way it is purely a means of pain compliance. Yet in several of the cases we reviewed, where it was used for the purpose of gaining compliance, it had the opposite effect, stimulating further resistance.""
When your country is missing any sort of universal state "help" for your health, then what other option is there?
I also find it fascinating that responses seen in other comments sound completely reasonable (and are reasonable, given the chosen perspective) when they justify that what happened is exactly what had to happen (cops may be called to dangerous places, and it's a fact that that happens to them all the time). Yet, when looking at it from a different, much farther away perspective from a country where I would expect such police behavior only in very few extreme cases (and only carried out by special police forces, of which there are not many), it does not seem reasonable at all. Again, I understand the cops, I might act just like them if I had to live their life. So something other than police tactics may be a causal reason, because if cops actually are in danger routinely than their measures make sense.
All else being equal, whether or not other people have guns, you'll be safer if you have a gun. But that apparently rational argument leads to everybody having guns, which is much less safe for everybody.
But there's an extra twist -- you are actually not safer with a gun all else being equal, because you or your loved ones could be killed by that gun through accident, suicide, etc.
Americans need to learn that the police are not their friends and teach their children that. Police will not save you when there is a real threat. Police will stand back, hidden, away from danger just like they did in so many school shootings. They do not give a fuck about you, your kids, or your safety. They do not give a fuck about your life or anyone's life other than theirs (something they constantly talk about on every single cop show ever, in case you doubt this claim). I truly cannot think of a single positive thing police do in our society or any reason to call them, ever. Not one.
This isn't indicative of a police state, it's indicative of a state where guns are too readily available to people with mental health issues.
