Reddit would be a better place for comments like this. HN is for reasonable discussion
It's a reasonable point made in an unhelpful inflammatory way.
In 30th June 2015 WP had this article (reporting that about a quarter of the people shot and killed by US police that year had a mental illness. The police had often been called out by relatives who wanted help, but who didn't want their loved one shot and killed).
Here's a grauniad report that talks about the differing news coverage of US shootings of dogs (lots of coverage) and mentally ill people (local news). I'm not sure that bit is accurate: plenty of dogs are killed by US police with little media mention. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/03/idaho-police-...
That report talks about the total number of people shot and killed by US police, and about the amount of them who had mental illness, and links to this 2013 PDF that says about 1,000 people are shot and killed by US police each year, and that about half of them have a mental illness. (Scarily the US doesn't collect statistics about this! That's, I think, telling.) http://tacreports.org/storage/documents/2013-justifiable-hom...
> Although no national data is collected, multiple informal studies and accounts support the conclusion that “at least half of the people shot and killed by police each year in this country have mental health problems.”
People aggressively go after cops in other countries and don't get shot.
It's poor training and low skills that cause US police to kill so many people.
No it's not poor training, it's just fundamentally different training. The US train their police force that it's OK to draw their weapons and potentially use deadly force in far more situations than the police in for example Europe.
The fact that the US train their police force that it's OK to draw their weapons and potentially use deadly force in far more situations than police manage in lots of other countries, would suggest that it is poor training, as many other police forces seem to be much better at de-escalation, and the training given to them seems to be a major component of that.
This is a total over generalization. Mainly because the numbers of people shot by police do not include the context of the shooting.
Questions like:
- Did the person charge at a police officer?
- Did the person brandish a weapon like a knife or gun and threaten the officer?
- Did the person physically attack the officer?
- Did the person refuse to put down a weapon after being asked several times?
Are not included in a statistical breakdown of police shootings. As such, the number people trot out there simply have no context to show in many cases the officer is justified in using deadly force - where it comes down to it's either the cop dying or the person they're trying to arrest dying. This is probably the one thing that irks the shit of me more than anything. The data about police shootings is unreliable at best, completely inaccurate at worst:
Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement.
“The FBI’s justifiable homicides and the estimates from (arrest-related deaths) both have significant limitations in terms of coverage and reliability that are primarily due to agency participation and measurement issues,” said Michael Planty, one of the Justice Department’s chief statisticians, in an email.
Even less data exists for officer-involved shootings that do not result in fatalities.
“We do not have information at the national level for police shootings that result in non-fatal injury or no injury to a civilian,” Planty said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/0...
A guy weilding a machete and charging police in, say, London is much less likely to be shot and killed by police. (And you can see this on youtube).
What exactly is "many"?
Of course deadly force is sometimes justified. But you do realize that civilian deaths at the hands of police are through the roof in the US compared to any other country, right? Is the US population psychotic?
>This is probably the one thing that irks the shit of me more than anything.
What irks the shit out of me are apologists who justify police violence because "sometimes" deadly force is required. Is there anyone in this country that doesn't understand that, as a Police Officer, you're going to end up in scary situations? You're signing up for it. It doesn't give you permission to shoot something every time you feel the least bit threatened.
Hopefully body cameras solve this ridiculous problem.
Frustrating that you chose to use word psychotic there.
Psychosis isn't linked to violence. Previous episode of violence are; a drug or alcohol addiction are; and if you combine any (or all) of these you get a stronger predictor. But a person with psychosis is far more likely to be the victim not perpetrator of violent crime, are more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else.
Maybe psychopathic fits, but that's still pretty stigmatising.
The US is by far the most violent Western nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
>Hopefully body cameras solve this ridiculous problem.
Body cameras will likely vindicate police more than opponents would like, although it may be hard to compare before and after because knowing you are being recorded will have an affect.
No but seriously, it's one (not very nice) thing saying "don't bring Reddit's bad comment quality to HN". It's an entirely other thing to encourage someone to post shitty comments on another site. That behaviour won't fly at Reddit either. Take it to 4chan.