How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

(Looks into a dictionary.)

Turns out we already have a word for that. Regurgitating.

That it's not the "general case" it's hardly any consolation.

Maybe study the numbers or talk to people from big cities, and especially large urban centers?

Besides the homicides by police in the streets statistics, which are indisputable, confirmed by the police, and the worse by over 70x any western country, here are some other factoids:

Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a licence”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organising cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog. According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants in private homes.

He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s (there are around 18,000 state and local police agencies in America, compared with fewer than 100 in Britain).

Amusing. It's your job as part of the commission to evaluate the performance of your township's civil servants, a circumstance in which those you interact with are highly motivated to act professionally around you.

And yet you claim it's the ordinary citizen who is out of touch with reality.

Here is my own anecdote: Out of four lifetime interactions with functionaries of the law, four have ranged from negative to very negative.

Yeah, it sucks when someone comes armed with facts, doesn't it?

Those are all recent cases that I am personally aware of, as a non-US citizen, living in Europe. I'm sure there have been plenty of others.

So yes, not all police killings in the US are undeserved, but there sure are plenty that are, and that is what those statistics are showing.

Let me repeat: criminals in the US are 3.8 times more prevalent and/or violent than their UK counterparts, but police in the US are are 79 times more violent than their UK counterparts.

(I'm using homicide as a proxy for overall crime, because the definition, record-keeping, and rate of reporting for other crimes varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, whereas homicide is defined relatively consistently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and is almost universally reported.)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Or maybe you meant to argue that crime rate is an indicator for general lawlessness of the population, in which case crime rate and police violence are two sides of the same coin?

So if that's true why isn't information gathered about every single round of ammunition that's fired? Because every time that trigger is pulled is a time when someone (the officer, a member of the public) is at risk of death, and pulling the trigger carries a very real risk of killing the alleged perpetrator. (Or innocent bystanders).

It's baffling to me that statistics like these are not kept.

Maybe this would be too high a burden. But at least they should keep numbers on how many people they kill, and what the precise situation was around that death.

That is a big part of the problem itself.

What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account

.. and a number of recent high-profile cases involve the police claiming these things happened while the video footage showed they didn't.

The UK system is supposed to regard every death by police firearm as an incident that is fully investigated by the independent police complaints commission. (Does America even have one of those?) The system is not perfect (e.g. Mark Duggan, Jean Charles de Menezes) but it works reasonably well.

The Mark Duggan fiasco concerns me in that I think some of the bad relations between US police and the black public are "leaking" into UK culture.

That is true, but not to the US' credit. In the UK, the records are compiled nationally and are beyond question. There have been three fatal police shootings here in 2015; all of them were front-page national news.

The US keeps no such records, and until http://killedbypolice.net/ began compiling credible news reports, nobody was keeping national records. The numbers on killedbypolice.net are therefore an absolute minimum for how many people are killed by police in America. Killings which are not well-documented in the news aren't included. If the number is inaccurate, then the picture in America is even worse.

Undoubtedly many of them are justified. America is awash in guns, and if somebody is shooting at you, then undoubtedly you have the right to shoot back. However only 48% of those who were killed had a firearm on or near them (it doesn't necessarily mean they were using it).[1] Many of the remainder are classified as being "armed", but that includes cases like this mentally ill man who was killed for holding a screwdriver in an unthreatening manner[2], so those numbers should be considered suspect. Finally, there are hundreds of killings every year of people who cannot be considered "armed" by any definition. Many of these are well-documented on video; if you want to spend the next few hours watching snuff films, they're easy enough to find.

The punishment for the overwhelming majority of these killings is a paid vacation for the murderer.

Something is desperately wrong with America.

1: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...

2: https://www.rt.com/usa/252533-dallas-screwdriver-shooting-ju...

But my point was about 'rrmm wrote - that "Getting everyone to admit a problem exists and getting our heads around how frequently it occurs is the first step towards resolving it.". It's true, but you have to be 100% totally damn sure that there is a problem in a first place and that you're not inventing it - because in both cases there will be a problem after media get involved.

> In the end it will be about trust. Previously the cops were given the benefit of the doubt; now that perception is changing. Police will have to do a better job of customer service to change that.

I agree with that.

No, I'd argue it's pretty awful. The average person probably interacts with the police ~10 times during their life. If 1 in 10 000 cop interactions ended up with you getting killed, police brutality would be in the top 10 causes of death in the US (on par with suicide).

Phew, agreed -- my jaw dropped at grandparent's 'minor'.

> we don't collect statistics nationally. So, how do we improve?

I think there's plenty of open-loop approaches that could be considered (training on de-escalation, refresher on citizen's rights, praise/laud the interactions that result in no arrest or arrest without aggression). Waiting for national consensus is unnecessary: cities, counties and towns can recognize the crisis and establish best practices that are effective.

National consensus is likely useful to allocate funds that may be necessary to make these improvements, though.

Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear about this guy?

Now one can say that it's only fringe outlets that go anti-vaxx nowadays. But mainstream sources do exactly the same type of reporting - omitting or not doing the math, blowing things out of proportion by literal orders of magnitude, etc. - when it comes to GMOs, or e-cigs, or immigrants, or terrorists, etc. The feedback loop between readers and publishers can turn just about absolutely anything into a nation-wide scandal.

Suppose a bank was robbed by one person described as 5'10", medium build, wearing a dark blue hoodie, running north on Main St. and two people were seen minutes later running north on Main from the bank matching that description.

It's perfectly reasonable and there's a societal interest for both to be stopped and contacted, even though it's CERTAIN that at least one of them is uninvolved.

It's not (and shouldn't be) just a black youth thing.

The moral of the story: people have known the police are rotten for a very long time, but haven't discussed it until now.