[Animats]

This is a price the US pays for the right to keep and bear arms. US cops have to assume that everyone is armed. That leads to a paranoid style of policing. As gun laws have become less restrictive, cops have armed and armored up.

[Lendal]

That doesn't explain the first ~230 years of US history though, where police weren't this way and we had the same Constitution.

[mc32]

It’s possible it’s a bit of an “arms” race, the police are more aggro but so are the public. At least in public perception back before the 70s its was perceived that by and large there was “respect for authority” but that’s eroded over the decades for various reasons among them court cases asserting more rights for individuals where cops can’t just up and arrest willy nilly. But also movements like “sovereign citizen” leaks in places enough to affect behavior elsewhere.

Also weapons are relatively cheaper today than decades ago.

[mothballed]

There's an insane number of police shootings where it turns out the person was looking at an insanely large sentence and they "weren't going back to jail." From that perspective it's not even clear they're acting irrationally -- if the penalty for third-striking for stealing a TV and murder is the same then some criminals are going to make it worth their while.

[RajT88]

"suicide by cop" is a narrative also used to cover up a bad police shooting.

[cwmoore]

Jail is a medieval institution with state actor technology.

[supertroop]

Assault rifles were banned for most of that time. Now I can go buy 10,000 rounds of green tip XM85 ammo and an AR platform at a gun show in an hour. I’m not saying that justifies militarization (that’s mostly war profiteers selling to police departments and right wing alignment with law enforcement) but OP isn’t completely wrong.

[rascul]

Assault rifles were banned for 10 years.

[supertroop]

They were not legal to buy until the 1980s.

[rascul]

That's not true, on a federal level. Colt was selling a civilian model of the ar15 to the public in the 60s

[mrguyorama]

If everyone is really armed, that's the single biggest reason why standard doctrine should be de-escalation first.

But US Cops always escalate instead. They want the fight, they aren't looking for safety.

[cucumber3732842]

>If everyone is really armed, that's the single biggest reason why standard doctrine should be de-escalation first.

See also: Game wardens during hunting season vs game wardens during fishing season.

[mothballed]

At the range nearly all casual police interactions like traffic stop happen happen at (<20ft), a knife has to be treated just as deadly as a gun. So even if you remove the guns you'll still have to treat everyone as a deadly threat under such a model.

[rolph]

20 feet is approximately the distance a person can rush forward, and have a decent chance of engaging in a weapon retention challenge.

its also the effective range for most people snap drawing a pistol in a use of force situation.

[lambdaone]

And yet mysteriously the British police seem to be able to deal with such situations with nothing more than a Taser - and often manage to avoid even using that. And yet, in spite of all the falsehoods being spread about knife crime levels, their mortality rate is much less than that in the US.

[simoncion]

> As gun laws have become less restrictive...

Do you have a reliable citation for this claim? [0] I disbelieve that this has been happening in any substantial way in the US. I expect that at very best, they've stayed roughly as restrictive as they have been for quite a long time.

> US cops have to assume that everyone is armed.

Weird. In San Francisco, California (a city of roughly 800->900k), the regular CompStat reports [1] have this to say about the number of incidents of firearm violence (whether fatal or non-fatal) in the city:

* 2022 -> 185 incidents

* 2023 -> 162 incidents

* 2024 -> 132 incidents

* 2025 -> 101 incidents

For fun, you can slap this pretty fucking shitty Power BI dashboard [2] around to compare those numbers to the number of times cops have either threatened to shoot or have shot someone each year.

Weirdly, I'm having great difficulty finding the city's officer injury reports. In the absence of those reports, I'll assume that policing still doesn't crack the top ten most hazardous jobs in the US, and that it's still roughly as hazardous as being a groundskeeper or professional athlete.

[0] If your supporting evidence is "spooooky ghost guns", I'll laugh my way out the door.

[1] <https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...>

[2] <https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/published-repor...>

[harimau777]

It's pretty clear to me that gun laws have become less restrictive. Stand your ground laws and open carry have become more commeon and more normalized. Tactical rifles (i.e. semi-automatic variants of military rifles like the AR) are less restricted since the "assault weapons" bans expired or were overturned. Perhaps even more importantly, ARs have become a much more prominant part of gun culture. Openly carrying guns at protests has become more normalized (although it did exist before; e.g. many Black Panther demonstrations).

[simoncion]

> Openly carrying guns at protests has become more normalized...

Yes. For hundreds of years, open carry has been legal just about everywhere. More people choosing to do things that have been legal for ages doesn't mean that the relevant regs have been loosened.

I do note that over the past couple of decades it has become illegal to openly carry in many places, [0] so that's a substantial increase in the restrictiveness of firearms regulation.

> Tactical rifles (i.e. semi-automatic variants of military rifles like the AR)....

By this you mean to say "semi-automatic variants of rifles designed in the last sixty five-ish years". [1]

> ...are less restricted since the "assault weapons" bans expired or were overturned.

You should look into the status of state regs on firearms possession and notice how many of them have been enacted within the past decade. You should also look into the regs on ammunition production, sale, and possession. While the regulation of ammo possession, sale, and production is not literally the regulation of firearms, a firearm without its ammo is no fun to operate, unless you're really into swinging around a very expensive, poorly-balanced club.

[0] ...among them, schools, hospitals, wherever a private business owner places a legally-conformant notice...

[1] Seriously, go look at when the AR-15 was designed and first manufactured.

[phatskat]

There’s not much to back this up, at least that you’ve included as reference.

The bigger issue that comes to mind and that you can actually look in to is the practice of teaching police departments about “Killology”. This is (or was) a kind of seminar that taught departments this mindset of “everyone that an officer interacts with is a potential threat”. Add this to the “super criminal” bs that was popular in the 80s/90s, the constant right-wing fearmongering about dangerous criminals in blue cities, and the militarization of police, and it feels more like they’ve been primed for violence from the power structure more-so than any actual threat from the public.

[rolph]

thats what happened to presumption of innocence absent indications of guilt.

[philipallstar]

Even if the right changed, the main actual causes of police caution would remain:

- a land border with a large continent that has a lot of guns and violence and criminality

- millions and millions of existing guns, the criminal holdings of which would not decrease following a change in the law

- subcultures that glorify violence and teach it as a path in life, particularly how to be a man and what sort of man to be attracted to

[boothby]

> a land border with a large continent that has a lot of guns and violence and criminality

That's a curious perception indeed, given that guns predominantly flow from the US to Mexico and not the other way around, and guns in Mexico are of mostly US origin.

[Hikikomori]

Unclear which side you are talking about.

[randoomed]

I suspect this fear of guns largly explains the additional risks police face.

assuming everyone has a gun and is willing to use it, raises the stakes of every encounter. so instead of a police encounter starting at a very low risk level (casual conversation), it starts a very close to deadly force risk.

This causes both sides to be a lot more tense, with a lot less room for mistakes. It also makes any encounter feel very risky.

I don't think people having a gun prevents police from starting an encounter at a casual level. But the assumption everyone is out to harm them, and has the means to do so, does.

[Zigurd]

Plausible sounding theory, but in reality what kills cops is traffic accidents. Even there it's not people running them over. Cops are seldom charged with DUI where other dangerous behavior on the roads.