Nuvendil said:
No, they don't normally handle situations this way. The majority of police interventions and actions are above board, the far far majority. And the vast majority of cops don't discharge their fire arm in the line of duty at all during their careers. Shoot, in 2015 the total number of times guns were fired in NY by officers was 65. And the NYPD is enormous, 35,000 strong. And the number of police involved shootings has in general been on the decline for years, along with the violent crime rate. Also, keep in mind every state is different in size, regs, demographics. So some states are lower than others. Sometimes it's a tragic collision of circumstances, like one man who was shot when officers mistook him for a murderer who was known to be loose and armed in the area. The man fit the description and when the police confronted him he ignored police orders to keep his hands where they could see them and instead reached into his pocket. Officers fired,it turned out he was going for a phone. They followed procedure, sometimes crap happens (incidentally, if an officer has his weapon drawn do what he says and definitely don't reach behind your back, under your shirt, or into your pocket). Other times it's bad judgement or tragic confusion. Police involved in bad shootings usually do lose their badges and then are exposed to civil actions. The worst are taken to criminal court but most DAs know that it is very hard to get a jurry to convict as it requires a unanimous verdict of guilty etc etc. In short, yes these incidents are absolutely the FAR minority. However, two things to keep in mind. One, US media is HUGE and very, very loud and incidents in the States get broadcast around the world on some level whereas frankly, European crime goes pretty unnoticed over here. Second, the US is a very big country with a very large population so numerically, there are more of these incidents than in most countries. That's just a statistical inevitability. Doesn't help that gunregulation is such a hot button topic and thus every single solitary shooting gets dragged out on the national and international stage to be used as ammo for one side or the other. Also, cops doing their jobs well rarely warrants news. So the bad stuff gets blasted over the news and the good stuff flies under the radar. Which is par for the course for most things reall. |
Yet Europe, Japan, Canada, etc. even proportionate to their population have no where near the police killings that the US has.
Nor is the imprisonment of its own citizens a multi-billion dollar industry that it is in the US.
The US is fucked up when it comes to this issue. This is not normal.
England & Wales combined had 55 police killings in the last 24 years ... the US had 59 in the first 24 days of 2015 ... that is fucked up. Germany had 3 people killed by police in 2014 and 2015 combined.
