[socalgal2]

1300 is not the rate of innocent bystanders being killed. It's the rate of people killed by police period. Maybe if we didn't have police being killed by criminals in the USA then they wouldn't need to go in armed and scared for their lives.

[ToucanLoucan]

By definition, every person the police interact with is innocent, because at such time as they are talking to a cop, even being detained by one, they have not been convicted of a crime.

[Dylan16807]

That's not the definition of 'innocent', and that argument extremely falls apart when the word 'bystander' isn't omitted.

Come on, you know what people are talking about when they say "innocent bystander".

[ToucanLoucan]

> That's not the definition of 'innocent'

No, it's the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and even if you'd like to craft a scenario next where we're going to talk about Officer Friendly stopping a rape-in-progress, yes, that person is almost certainly guilty, AND the punishment for that crime is usually not death, AND the cornerstone of our justice system says that the officer in question, no matter how pure of heart he might be, cannot exact a death sentence on a clearly guilty person because that is not how justice works.

A cop killing ANYONE, be they a bystander, or a suspect, or an assailant, should be RARE. It should be notable.

[Dylan16807]

> No, it's the concept of "innocent until proven guilty"

It sure is! So let's not confuse it with something else.

> A cop killing ANYONE, be they a bystander, or a suspect, or an assailant, should be RARE. It should be notable.

That's a perfectly reasonable point but let's get there without mixing up two very different statistics.