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by zmgsabst 1446 days ago
Okay — but the US doesn’t have a “rogue police force that kills citizens”.

That’s not supported by actual statistics, even if it’s a popular narrative among some political groups.

3 comments

German police, all of them together, fired 62 shots, over the whole year, in 2019. In America that's just a regular traffic stop.

Something is very wrong with the American police/society/whatever, you can't deny that.

The difference is that here in Germany, our police officers don't have to fear that the person they're stopping is someone who is running drugs and already has two convictions, meaning any third conviction locks him up for life - so they can decide to simply shoot the cop and hope to get away versus a guaranteed life in prison [1].

Additionally, German police is training their people for ~2.5-3 years [2], whereas the US training is a couple of weeks at worst and a national average of 19 weeks [3].

The US needs to get a lot under control if it wants less police murders: they need to get rid of the absurd amounts of guns floating around, they need a drastic sentencing reform and the complete end of all three-strike policies, they (and fwiw, we too) need to end the "war on drugs", and they need to actually treat police training like any regular job education.

Unfortunately, getting the required majorities to fix all that is completely impossible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law

[2] https://www.mit-sicherheit-anders.de/

[3] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/usa-kritik-an-ausbild...

> The difference is that here in Germany, our police officers don't have to fear that the person they're stopping is someone who is running drugs

Difference is that they do not except (that much) someone will have gun.

Only emphasizes the point, that there's something very wrong in the US.
Do you have a source for that number being a regular traffic stop? I find that highly unbelievable.
> Authorities have not said how many shots were fired [...] the number could be more than 90, with the man suffering at least 60 bullet wounds

https://nypost.com/2022/07/03/ohio-police-release-video-of-o...

Don't shoot at the cops.
Vouched for the sibling reply calling this misinformation because per the police chief himself (as of two days ago) Jayland Walker was unarmed.

> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/us/akron-police-shooting-...

Go back and read the article I responded to. It says he shot at police during the pursuit and there is a picture of the gun found in the car. It was reasonable given the circumstances to assume he was armed when he turned and they opened fire.
Statistics seem to suggest just that though? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enfo...

What other statistic should I be looking at?

If you sort by: "People killed by security forces", out of the top 34 countries, 33 are underdeveloped or developing (and several are at war or have an ongoing civil war). The US is in 7th place.

Interestingly, Canada is the 35th, but it still has about 9 times fewer cases per capita than the US...

You should sort by “per capita”, where Canada has a third of US police per capita shootings.

Which makes sense, given the US’s problems with organized crime and drug trafficking — and a generally more armed society.

The math is off. Divide the deaths by the population, that column is wrong. Canada is actually at less than a third of that number, based on their own columns.
In virtually all of those, the shot attackers were armed themselves. Does stopping someone actively trying to kill a third-party make the police force "rogue"?
Just do a google search and see actual events instead of some statistics.