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by kristopolous 3870 days ago
death by police is tracked here (1051): http://killedbypolice.net/ ... cancer kills about 580,000 and automobiles get about 32,500 for comparison.
2 comments

Comparing it to Cancer is not really fair. Compare it to other violent murders for a fair comparison. Do the police kill more or less than regular criminals who aren't wearing uniforms?
It was strictly in reply to "it would probably still not be in the top 50 leading causes of death".

It may be in there depending on how you count. Police deaths account for 0.34 per 100,000, greater than war (0.30) and less than tetanus (0.38).

Wow, wonder what cops think about this page and if ever tried to shut it down.

Someone is doing extensive work organizing all this on a daily basis. Too bad we don't know how many were bad guys and how many innocent, but that would be hard to followup and monitor.

It's a spectrum. Some, like this 6 year old (http://theadvocate.com/news/13907799-176/few-details-emergin...) leave the officer in greater culpability than this active shootout with police (http://www.pe.com/articles/riverside-784400-officers-stop.ht...) where the driver sped away and died in a car crash against a barrier.

If you scroll through and read the stories, most of them seem to be either terrible car crashes or violent criminals.

Presuming that officers work 2080 hours a year and there are 765,000 with arresting power, you are 1755 times more likely to interface with a not-a-cop than a cop on the job. Therefore, you are 160 times more likely to be killed X minutes with a police officer than X minutes with some stranger. 15 seconds with 1 cop is as dangerous as 15 seconds with 160 random people.

My friends in south LA from different backgrounds have a mantra to never call the cops under any condition. The idea is that however bad a situation can get, introduction of the police will incontrovertibly make it a de facto worse situation. Whether true or not, this seems to be a gut intuition to many (search google for "never call the police" to see people express this view).

The crux of the question is two-fold:

1. Does bringing police into any situation generally lead to worse consequences than avoiding them?

2. If we believe that violence is always an inferior solution that lacks efficacy, then why should we invite state-sanctioned violence into our lives voluntarily? Stated another way, why is the government provided service to someone with psychological distress two people with firearms locking them in a cage? Shouldn't we provide a more appropriate government service for this?

That first link is absolutely horrific.