Investigation: Police Shootings | Hacker News Reader

Investigation: Police Shootings

washingtonpost.com

132 pointsddispaltro211 comments

Some notes:

* The Guardian has a very similar feature, "The Counted":

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

The Guardian's feature is better in some ways; for instance, it attempts to account for all police engagement fatalities, not just shootings. Some of the worst police abuses in the US haven't involved guns, and if you read the data carefully you learn some surprising things, like how dangerous tasers are.

The Guardian also gives the state breakdowns weighted by their population, making it easier to spot problem states. But WaPo makes it much easier to see which states have more shootings of unarmed people.

* 79% of the people killed in this database were reported to have "deadly weapons" (not including cars).

* 64% of the people killed in this database were shot and killed while attacking someone with a deadly weapon.

You'd really like to have a more detailed breakdown on "deadly weapon"; specifically, you want to know which of the people shot had firearms, versus knives.

Nobody was fatally shot by a police officer in Rhode Island? That's surprising.

And additional data going back to 2013:

http://killedbypolice.net/

That's a great resource. Multiple links for every death, very impressive.

Can we find out if e.g. Laquan McDonald is included in the "64%"? If not, I'd expect he was before the video came out. This is why I hesitate to consider "mitigating circumstances". Public safety officers should be judged by their effect on public safety, not by how well they cover their own asses.

I wonder if you would feel that way if one of your loved ones was serving as an officer of the peace - would you want them dealing with dangerous situations on a daily basis people with no regard for "covering their own ass"? Would you feel that way if there were an armed intruder in your home and one of those officers had to respond to protect you? Would you want them to intervene to protect you or your family or sit in your driveway deliberating about whether they should "cover their own ass" or yours?

We don't need to excuse unwarranted police violence as a society, but it's equally unfair to outsource dealing with violent and dangerous situations to others and then glibly remove any means they have to deal with those situations without getting killed themselves.

> "covering their own ass"

I think you and jessaustin may be using different interpretations of that term, judging by their reference of the McDonald shooting. People are much more ok with police officers doing what they need to do to keep themselves and others safe at the time (your usage) than they are with officers lying about why they used deadly force after the fact to keep from getting in trouble (their usage).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Laquan_McDonald

It's not in the data set, but the correct category for McDonald is "Deadly weapon" but not "Attack in progress".

McDonald is the reason I'd like the "firearm" breakout, because "deadly weapon", "no firearm", and "no attack in progress" describes a somewhat common class of police fatalities that are probably mostly unjustified.

Yes I agree. The standard for "deadly weapon" has deteriorated to the point at which anything that any conceivably imaginative movie plot might suggest could cause a death in very particular circumstances, is thought to qualify. Yes it's possible that a two-inch penknife might be able to sever the vein of an immobilized person, given several minutes of sawing. That doesn't mean that such a tool is considered a "deadly weapon" by reasonable people, in any situation which includes police firing guns.

When you look at the Guardian data (manually, unfortunately, as that's the only way to do it), you're going to find that most of the "deadly weapon" cases involve firearms, not two-inch penknives.

Laquan McDonald's shooting happened in 2014, before we started investigating and tracking this data.

93 victims were unarmed, 33 were armed with a toy, and 27 unknown.

That is a lot more than Americans killed by terrorists in US.

For me, this highlights how overblown the terrorist problem is.

About 30,000 Americans die in car crashes every year. That's about ~400,000 Americans killed by other Americans in their cars since the 2001 terrorist attacks. It's pretty clear that the emotional appeal is what people seem to care about ("someone wants to kill us") and it has absolutely nothing to do at all with Americans dying.

Terrorism has never been a problem. The same number of people died in car accidents during September 2001 as they did in terrorist attacks. Where is our war on cars? Oh, nobody cares about that, cars are freedom, cars are what we went to war to protect.

> it has absolutely nothing to do at all with Americans dying

I think it does, it's just that people are simply not aware of the numbers.

What you call emotion, I call justice, and I think that matters.

Consider, without any emotion, the issue of murder versus suicide. What are the negative impacts of those acts? From the point of view of that person's friends and family and society at large, leaving aside emotion or notions of justice, the impact of the acts is the same: loss of that person, loss of their financial and emotional support. In fact, the impact on family and friends is often worse in cases of suicide because insurance policies often have an exemption for suicide.

Yet, almost nobody thinks murder should be legal while quite a few people think suicide should be legal. If we just mechanically consider "a death is a death" and count up the monetary impact of each case, we have no way to explain or justify why people feel this way.

So you agree that the general lack of prosecutions for vehicle caused fatalities is a failure of justice?

The only difference between murder and suicide is if the person who dies chose to die.

We don't prosecute people for "fatalities". We prosecute them for homicide and manslaughter, which are offenses in which the prosecution must prove intent to commit harm.

Meanwhile we do in fact prosecute car fatalities when they are caused by recklessness, and, of course, when they're caused intentionally.

You engage me in a semantics debate in a condescending tone and then are wrong. Manslaughter does not require 'intent to commit harm'.

Yes, there are prosecutions of reckless/negligent drivers. However, the fact remains:

1) Most traffic fatalities are the result of human error.

2) Most traffic fatalities do not result in prosecution.

I can't find numbers to back up #2 but this semi-anecdotal evidence is telling:

http://www.wnyc.org/story/283394-killed-while-cycling-why-so...

This quote in particular makes my point:

> “We as a society have chosen to drive these big cars," said Joe McCormack, Assistant District Attorney for the Bronx. It’s his job to prosecute traffic crimes. "And we also as a society have chosen not to criminalize every single small mistake that just has a dramatic consequence because you're driving a car,” he said.

I think it's actually you who have decided on the semantic debate, since the reason we don't charge lots of people with felonies for killing people with cars is pretty apparent from the comment I just wrote.

I also don't think you read my comment carefully.

As a reset: here's what the state must prove in a manslaughter case:

    First, the defendant unlawfully killed someone;

    Second, while in a sudden quarrel or heat of passion, caused by
    adequate provocation:

    a) the defendant intentionally killed someone; or

    b) the defendant killed name of victim recklessly with extreme
    disregard for human life; and

    Heat of passion may be provoked by fear, rage, anger or
    terror. Provocation, in order to be adequate, must be such as might
    arouse a reasonable and ordinary person to kill someone.

Maybe you'd rather look at a vehicular manslaughter statute? Here you go, California's:

    To prove that the defendant is guilty of this crime, the People must
    prove that:
    1. The defendant (drove under the influence of (an alcoholic
    beverage/ [or] a drug) [or under the combined influence of an
    alcoholic beverage and a drug]/drove while having a blood
    alcohol level of 0.08 or higher/drove under the influence of (an
    alcoholic beverage/ [or] a drug) [or under the combined influence
    of an alcoholic beverage and a drug] when under the age of 21/
    drove while having a blood alcohol level of 0.05 or higher when
    under the age of 21);
    2. While driving that vehicle under the influence of (an alcoholic
    beverage/ [or] a drug) [or under the combined influence of an
    alcoholic beverage and a drug], the defendant also committed
    (a/an) (misdemeanor[,]/ [or] infraction[,]/ [or] otherwise lawful
    act that might cause death);
    3. The defendant committed the (misdemeanor[,]/ [or] infraction[,]/
    [or] otherwise lawful act that might cause death) with gross
    negligence;
    AND
    4. The defendant’s grossly negligent conduct caused the death of
    another person.

This describes only a tiny percentage of vehicular fatalities.

Again: we don't prosecute people for errors. We prosecute them for doing things intentionally, or, as I said, for causing grave harm recklessly.

I didn't intend to engage in a semantics debate and I did read your comment carefully. You might carefully re-read your comment to see how I got that impression.

> we don't prosecute people for errors. We prosecute them for doing things intentionally, or, as I said, for causing grave harm recklessly.

We usually don't prosecute for intentional errors. That is precisely the problem: we are far to lax with incompetent/reckless drivers. Do you think that if the costs associated with causing injury/death due to your own 'errors' were higher, we wouldn't see more careful drivers?

You asked why the lack of criminal prosecutions for automobile fatalities wasn't a "failure of justice". I answered, and answered again, and now answer yet again: because our system of justice generally avoids prosecuting people for things that aren't crimes.

Your argument appears to be:

1) We don't prosecute people for things that aren't crimes.

2) Thus our system and standards for prosecuting people for things that are crimes is just.

I don't see the step from 1) to 2). I would guess you are making the following assumptions that I would disagree with:

a) We do a adequate job of enforcing the current laws. (Prosecutions tend to be fairly rare due to low priority and lack of investigative resources)

b) The current laws on the books are just. (The standards for recklessness are weighted toward DUIs and tend to exclude other types of intentional misconduct.)

No. You've shifted the goalposts. You began the thread by trying to argue that a lack of prosecutions for vehicular fatalities was evidence of injustice. But it isn't: it's evidence for the fact that most traffic fatalities don't involve conduct we recognize as criminal.

Now you'd like to litigate whether we should pass laws that criminalize more kinds of driver error. I'm not interested in that discussion, and I don't have to be, because it's not germane to the argument you made up thread, except in a Calvinball kind of way.

I'm not moving the goalposts, nor am I trying to litigate anyting. I'm simply trying to understand your argument and where we differ.

You think the current laws regarding driver culpability for errors are sufficient. Ok, fine. We've established a difference of opinion and don't need to argue it.

> You began the thread by trying to argue that a lack of prosecutions for vehicular fatalities was evidence of injustice. But it isn't: it's evidence for the fact that most traffic fatalities don't involve conduct we recognize as criminal.

From this I am going to assume that you also disagree that investigation and prosecution of traffic fatalities lack sufficient priority and resources.

If I am correct about this, then I now think the source of a disagreement is clear.

I thought the whole purpose of manslaughter was that it does not require the intent to commit harm? Apparently, it's actually based on culpability. Involantary manslaughter matches my original ideal of there being no intent. But there's also voluntary manslaughter in which case intention is present but there's some other mitigating factor that reduces culpability.

> Where is our war on cars?

We do have a war on car fatalities. It's been remarkably successful:

http://www.donerdesigns.org/_/rsrc/1376697199749/other-cause...

That graphic is rather misleading. Our success in reducing traffic fatalities is rather mixed and not nearly so dramatic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._traffic_deaths_as_fr...

The first graph shows that we have made driving far less dangerous over time. The second graph shows that driving has become far more popular over time, popular enough to outweigh this effect until the early 70s.

The recent improvement in car accident rates is pretty impressive.

Yet it is misleading to support the claim of a "war on traffic fatalities" with a graph that measures something else.

The first graph show we have made driving far less dangerous per mile.

The second graph shows the likelihood that any given person will die due to traffic.

I would make the reverse argument. Someone driving 100 miles today is far less likely to die doing it than, say, 30 years ago. The odds look about 3:1, eyeballing the chart. That, to me, seems like driving is far less dangerous than it was. The fact that people drive more miles today than before is an entire separate concern. One could even argue that making driving safer has also made it more popular, though I wouldn't bet on it being a large contributing factor.

You seem to be missing the point. The graph was posted to show evidence for a 'war on car fatalities' not a 'war on the dangers of driving'.

This is akin to announcing a 'war on cancer fatalities' but only caring about improving cancer treatments, not removing carcinogens on the environment.

It's as if we were successfully making cancer less deadly, but at the same time more people were living long enough to get cancer that there were more cancer deaths. We'd still be making the kind of progress we care about in working against cancer fatalities, even though there are more of them. And a suggestion that reduce longevity so that fewer people would die of cancer would be missing the point.

Would a suggestion to stop contaminating the ground water and air with carcinogens also miss the point?

Obviously, it is a bad idea to maximize the wrong metric. In the case of cancer, just measuring survival rates is a bad metric, but so is measuring cancer deaths per capita. A better metric is to measure the per-capita deaths due to cancer within specific age groups.

Here's a gedankenexperiment for you: I instantaneously and permanently disable every car and car manufactory, thereby reducing all traffic fatalities to zero. Did I make driving safer?

I'm not missing your point, and cbr's reply makes it obvious that he isn't either. The prevalence of driving is a separate variable from how dangerous it is. Driving is far less dangerous and far more prevalent.

Obviously you have completely missed the point.

> Here's a gedankenexperiment for you: I instantaneously and permanently disable every car and car manufactory, thereby reducing all traffic fatalities to zero. Did I make driving safer?

You certainly would have done an effective job of executing a 'war on car fatalities' which is what the harryh was claiming was demonstrated by the chart he posted.

While I agree that driving is safer than it used to be, the chart harryh posted doesn't actually show that. it just shows that driving is safer per mile.

Analogous to the point that cbr made: Without changing any of the risks of driving, I could make driving safer per mile by hiring a million drivers to drive 10MPH on a closed track year round.

While the above point is rather tongue-in-cheek, I do suspect that a significant part of the drop indicated in harryh's chart is due to changing driving patterns, particularly the increase in freeway driving.

I don't think eliminating all driving would be a good way to reduce traffic deaths (because it all of the other consequences that would have). However, if we had spent more effort in trying to reduce unnecessary and high-risk driving we would see a larger reduction in traffic deaths. This includes solutions like walkable cities, adequate public transit, and higher penalties for drivers engaged in risky behavior that cause fatalities. Focusing purely on deaths per mile excludes those types of interventions. Thus you can't use that measure to claim a 'war on car fatalities'.

So your entire argument is centered around the semantics of "war on car fatalities"? In that case, there's not really anything for me to add, other than that I think you are taking a very uncharitable [0] view of the original post.

[0] http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

I noted that a set of statistics was being misused as evidence for the specific claim being made and added a source that supported that claim, abeit less strongly. That was 'uncharitable'?

You then 'charitably' missed my point twice, and argued against a strawman. You followed that up by 'charitably' accused me of only arguing semantics rather than responding to any of my actual points.

I'm pretty sure I understand your argument fine. Allow me to attempt a summary:

The original graphic shows that driving is less dangerous now than ever before. However, it does not take into account the prevalence of driving, which is also higher. Therefore, the original graphic is "misleading", because "traffic fatalities" is the combination of the danger of driving and its prevalence.

Given this current understanding of your point, my only argument now is that I believe that is an uncharitable view of the original post. I argue this because the view is entirely based on that singular interpretation of "war on traffic fatalities". A charitable approach is entirely based on attempting to view an argument with suspension of your own beliefs and interpretations in order to understand the other party's. Through such, common understanding can be worked towards.

I'm also sorry that you feel that I have been uncharitable to you. I honestly do believe your argument is entirely centered around the semantics of "war on traffic fatalities". The information you provided in your graphic is very good, and the point you are making is not wrong. I didn't have any issues at all until your response to cbr's original post, which is where I feel you began arguing semantics over content. I feel this way because cbr was also not wrong, and if anything was an equally good summary as what I stated above. And yet you still seemed to take an issue with it.

Your suggestion that I should have reinterpreted what harryh said, does not makes sense given the context of the post he was responding to:

> Terrorism has never been a problem. The same number of people died in car accidents during September 2001 as they did in terrorist attacks. Where is our war on cars?

My main point, and reason for making the distinction between metrics is explained here:

"However, if we had spent more effort in trying to reduce unnecessary and high-risk driving we would see a larger reduction in traffic deaths. This includes solutions like walkable cities, adequate public transit, and higher penalties for drivers engaged in risky behavior that cause fatalities. Focusing purely on deaths per mile excludes those types of interventions. Thus you can't use that measure to claim a 'war on car fatalities'."

This a very dishonest argument. Fatalities per km travelled is the standard metric of safety for a good reason.

Are you against hospitals too? Deaths in hospitals have skyrocketed since they were invented.

You are being a pedantic jerk. Read this:

http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Here are some more reasonable discussions of the issue:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the...

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/02/a-m...

> You are being a pedantic jerk

"DH0. Name-calling. This is the lowest form of disagreement"

> Are you against hospitals too? Deaths in hospitals have skyrocketed since they were invented.

"DH1. Ad Hominem."

Good job, you've hit the bottom of the disagreement heirarchy. In my mind my responses are all on the level of DH4 and DH5. If I have failed to do that, please provide specific examples because I strive to disagree well and wish to improve.

> Here are some more reasonable discussions of the issue:

Neither of those are discussions of the issue at hand, which is the number of deaths due to cars. Nowhere, except in replies that attack a strawman argument, was the safety of driving a point of debate. I have even stated elsewhere that I agree that driving has gotten safer (though I do dispute that fatalities per distance is an ideal metric for measuring that since it is also affected by usage patterns in addition to safety).

I have made solid, non-pedantic points about the effect of using different metrics and what types of interventions will show up in those metrics.

If you are talking about traffic safety (say vs air travel or between countries), fatalities per distance is one of several applicable metrics (fatalities per trip being another).

If you are talking about traffic deaths, as a overall source of risk (say vs terrorism) then fatalities per capita is a more correct metric.

This is not a pedantic point, this is a very important point that is key to the discussion that you seem to be avoiding.

If we force people to drive more by underfunding public transit then number of miles driven is going to go up due to public policy not personal choices.

The 60% drop since 1972 looks pretty good to me.

It looks less good when you compare our numbers vs. those of other countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

We have higher traffic related death rates per capita than any other 'first world' country, including coutries with similar geograhpy such as Canada and Australia.

We have higher traffic related death rates per distance than any other 'first world' country (other than New Zealand, but still including Canada and Australia)

Interesting! I wonder why that is? I don't have a good hypothesis.

I don't know. If I were to guess, I would blame some combination of the large number of urban areas in the US that are pedestrian-unfriendly and the US's relatively lax punishment of DUIs. In Canada for example, a DUI is a felony. As a non canadian citizen, you will be bared from entering Canada for 5-10 years after receiving a DUI anywhere.

> The same number of people died in car accidents during September 2001 as they did in terrorist attacks.

I was interested if this is true, and on the face of it it is. 2996 people died in 9/11, in 2001 (the entire year) 37,795 people died in car accidents (source: NHTSA), or an average of 3149/deaths per month.

Injuries are also higher from accidents than 9/11 for the month of Sept. 2001.

This is an argument that gets wheeled out a lot, and I'm afraid I don't see the logic in it at all. More Americans died in car crashes in December, 1941 than were killed at Pearl Harbor, too; are you going to assert that, therefore, Japan bombing Pearl Harbor was not a problem?

In arguments over the relative safeness of the world it is often pointed out that relatively few people have died recently in terrorist attacks, but as N. N. Taleb points out, the distribution of deaths by terrorist attacks is a fat tailed one: the current average does not preclude much higher future numbers.

I though the same thing until 9/11.

The 3,000 people killed were 20% of the 16,000 murders that year. It was by far the biggest mass murder in US history. Next biggest was 44 in the 1927 Bath School disaster.

And of course terrorism is a much bigger problem in some countries.

Not a lot more: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/02/us/oregon-shooting-terrorism-g.... About 30 terrorism-related deaths per year, not counting 9/11. If 9/11 is a once-every-50 year sort of event, that's another 60 per year on average.

I've seen police shoot and kill a man "armed with a toy" and it's very, very hard for me to fault them for it. It sounds bad when you say it, but armed with a toy and armed should be treated as the same thing. When a man being chased by police stops his car, gets out, takes cover behind the door and starts pointing something that looks remarkably like a gun at police, he should be shot.

There is probably a better way to word this.

There are regularly displays by men armed with AR-15s around cities in the US. Yet the police seem to be disinterested in shooting them. I wonder why?

Simple: because they aren't pointing the AR-15s at anyone or breaking any laws. Hope that answers your question -- anything else you need help with?

Look at this guy: http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/11/25/laquan-mcdonald-chic....

He was walking away from the police when they shot him -- 16 times! Fortunately this was caught on camera, but a lot of shootings are not.

And people like these guys weren't pointing guns at other people or breaking the law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff#April_12_confro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Springs_Planned_Paren...

I'm certainly not suggesting that we encourage violent responses from law enforcement. (I'm relieved injury and harm were minimized in both of the above instances.) But, it's disingenuous to think that all demographics get an equally fair shake/generous response from law enforcement when they are holding (or believed to be holding) a gun.

"But, it's disingenuous to think that all demographics get an equally fair shake/generous response from law enforcement when they are holding (or believed to be holding) a gun."

Maybe they do and maybe they don't, but that particular argument doesn't work at all. There's a huge difference between a protest (even with armed protesters) in broad daylight surrounded by cops and news media, and a split-second confrontation between a police officer and a suspect in the middle of the night. You cannot boil down both situations to "a person may have a gun."

(To be clear, that's not to make any moral judgements about the people involved in those two different situations, or what cops should or should not do. Just saying they are different, and it's dangerously simplistic to line them up next to each other and believe you've proved anything.)

My main point is that it's not as simple as:

not("breaking law" or "pointing guns at other people") == not("get shot")

which is what you were snarkily making it out to be.

There are whole fields of study devoted to the issues at hand, neither you nor I will convince each other or make an airtight case in a single post regarding the full spectrum of input into all armed encounters with police that result in the output of either dying, or being arrested without incident, or anything in between.

So when someone tries to enter a property where firearms are banned, persists until the police are called, and then gets in the officers' faces while weilding a firearm, that doesn't seem like a problem to you, but gunning down children with toys is essential?

Interesting.

If I were inclined to be rude, I might make a smartass remark in kind about how you seem to believe that the police should indiscriminately open fire on demonstrators the second they fail to cooperate in any way...

...but I won't, because I know the situations are more complicated than that and if we were speaking in person instead of over the Internet you'd probably agree with me on that, even if we didn't agree on the fundamentals of the issue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/us/long-taught-to-use-forc...

>>When a man being chased by police stops his car, gets out, takes cover behind the door and starts pointing something that looks remarkably like a gun at police, he should be shot.

How often does this happen?

A much more common occurrence is when someone sees a suspicious-looking dude walking down the street, calls the cops and says "I think he is armed!" and the cops arrive and shoot him without first verifying if he's actually armed with a real weapon.

In your scenario the victim would be classed as "unarmed", not "armed with a toy". The point i was trying to make is that people identified as "armed with a toy" in stats should be grouped along side armed people, not with unarmed ones like the person i replied to was doing. Because odds are, if you're interacting with police and carrying a replica weapon, the whole point of that weapon is to fool people into thinking you're armed.

First: citation needed.

Second: In almost the entire US, being armed is not against the law.

Third: If it's as much of a "common occurrence" as you claim, please paste here one example from the list of shootings on the article's main page where an officer shoots a civilian without any provocation.

Admittedly, I don't think it's on the article's main page but if you were paying attention, you'd know about this one.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/16/justice/walmart-shooting-john-...

> In almost the entire US, being armed is not against the law.

So what? Cops don't know the law and aren't expected to know the law. The fact that a cop didn't know the law is a legal defense if you accuse him of messing up.

Cops aren't expected to know the law? Does that hold for civilians as well?

As a comparison, here in The Netherlands, all citizens are expected to know the law. Not knowing it is never an argument as far as I know.

Not knowing that what you are doing is illegal is not a defense for you, true. But when a cop arrests you for doing something they believe is illegal but in fact is legal, you are not allowed to resists arrest. You must allow yourself to get arrested (and searched) and then explain later, at the precinct. You'll lose a few hours, people will be worried about you, you might lose your job, and the police don't owe you anything, because cops do not have to know the law. Only prosecutors are supposed to know the law, and then only if a judge is willing to shame the prosecutor (not a given).

Yes, cops in the US are expected to have an above-average working knowledge of the law. If you have a question about the legality of something, you're more likely to get the correct answer asking a random cop than a random civilian.

Where are you are taking this from? There is a recent Supreme Court opinion (the name of which I forget) relating to the 4th amendment that I recall touches on this, but the exclusionary rule of evidence isn't what we are talking about here.

>>Second: In almost the entire US, being armed is not against the law.

Way to miss the point. Of course being armed isn't against the law. But most states don't allow open-carry, and if someone is reporting you to the cops and saying you're armed, that means you just broke the law by failing to conceal your weapon. Furthermore, if the person reporting you says you're acting suspiciously or in a threatening manner, that's enough justification for most cops to shoot you.

Open carry is only disallowed in 5 states. That said, I agree that the police are more likely to shoot first and ask questions later no matter the situation.

On the contrary, in the US most states do allow open-carry. Only 9/50 states prohibit or restrict licensing to effectively prohibit open carry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_carry_in_the_United_State...

Hard to believe but Texas just now joined that list. Keep waiting on the massive shoot-outs I've been told to expect. Still haven't seen someone open carry.

To your third:

How exactly do you define "provocation"? I'm curious because you seem to have a very lenient definition when talking about police using deadly force. This is remarkable to me when there have been a number of highly reported incidents involving police shooting a civilian without provocation that warrants deadly force (by my definition and video evidence). Here are a few to consider:

1. Tamir Rice

2. John Crawford III

3. Levar Jones

4. Laquan McDonald

Seriously, I could go on. It happens far too frequently that Americans are killed by police firearms when they are not posing an immediate and credible mortal threat. Sadly, there are too many high-profile cases in which cops fire before even bothering to assess the situation. Videos of these incidents abound.

Now, I assume we all agree that police are charged with serving and protecting their communities, right? I believe that also includes suspects and criminals. The bar for determining provocation that warrants deadly force should be very high.

If we are being rational and reasonable, I think there are behaviors that we can agree are not provocations of mortal danger. A few such behaviors:

1. Running away from police

2. Verbal altercations

3. Suspicious behaviors of any kind that are not posing credible mortal threat to other persons or officers

4. Reaching for waistbands (of what are too often excessively sagging pants that frequently need to be pulled up)

I think it is reasonable to have a civil, national conversation about better training for police, and a national charge and expectation to keep every potential suspect alive until a situation is properly assessed and resolved.

If ranchers in a standoff, or bikers in a gun battle, can make it out alive, I think many more can, too.

Funny story from my childhood in Southern California, around 1990:

I was playing in the yard with my toy gun. I hated the orange cap at the end of the barrel and had pulled it out with pliers. It was a metal rifle. A cop came down the neighborhood street, and I took cover behind a tree and pretended to shoot, as if he was my new imaginary enemy. He slowed down and stopped in front of the yard. I was within earshot, so he called out to me in a friendly way. Asked if I was shooting at bad guys. I nodded. He asked if I'd like to see his gun and might be interested in a trade. I thought that was cool, and ran over to his car with my metal toy rifle. He opened his car door to me and stepped out, asking if he could see my gun. I handed it right over, and he invited me to sit in the drivers seat of his squad car. Looking back, I'm sure he was checking if I had a real firearm. He then showed me the shotgun he had secured between the front seats. He talked to me about being careful with guns. Then he suggested there were some bad guys sneaking around my house, and I should go get them with my gun. And I ran off to chase them down.

I shudder to think what would happen to my 12-year-old in the same situation today.

I'll agree that all 4 of your non-provocative behaviors should not escalate a situation to the level of deadly force being required. I specifically asked for examples from the list, because the list seems designed to support a very specific thesis, one that you expressed in this comment:

    > It happens far too frequently that Americans are killed 
    > by police firearms when they are not posing an immediate 
    > and credible mortal threat.

"far too frequently" is a fuzzy number, one that's hard to agree on. How many unjustifiable deaths per year is that? I believe the data in this article is intended to be used as a stand-in for that figure, and I posit that the actual number is dramatically lower than the fuzzy number everyone has in their heads.

If you want to really shut up the naysayers, try showing this data:

    Interactions between civilians and LEOs:  __________
    Of those, how many involved physical force? __________
    Of those, how many resulted in fatalities? __________
    Of those, how many were unjustifiable? __________
    Of those, how many went unpunished? __________

If that last number is more than a handful a year in the US, I'd be shocked, outraged, and offended. And certainly we should be shocked, outraged and offended for each individual incident of that last kind no matter how many others there are.

That being said, if you want to claim that we need "a civil, national conversation" about this, I think the onus should be on you to prove that the last number above has risen to a national crisis level. Maybe it has, but I don't think this article (or even your 4 examples) makes a very good case for it.

It honestly takes very little effort to find "more than a handful" of cases. I've provided four already. That's 2 short of "more than a handful". It's even easier to increase the number if we expand the parameters to citizen deaths at the hands of LEO with or without that death being from a bullet. There's a serious problem with American policing, and its behavior toward the citizenry. I have no interest in, nor am I trying to, "shut up the naysayers". I find naysayers tend to say nay as a rule, and default to any number of shifting goal posts and mental gymnastics to remain convinced there is no problem worth considering seriously. You've just done this yourself—you asked for a single example of an unprovoked death; now you've crafted a tailored list of questions meant to narrow the field of validity based on different parameters (you've now shifted to asking for deaths that are "unjustifiable", whatever that means).

When a 12-yr-old boy with a toy gun is shot by police after being on the scene for a few seconds, and the cop doesn't wind up in prison, there is a problem. And that problem extends from bad policing to the justice system as a whole.

There is quite a difference between not faulting the police for shooting someone and saying that person should be shot. I do not think pointing a non-lethal weapon, much less a toy, should be automatic grounds for being shot. I do believe it may be the appropriate response in some situations though. That said, I suspect you don't really believe what you've said, and it's a case of poorly communicating your intent.

Unfortunately, on polarizing issues like this where clear communication is paramount to prevent people from wasting time arguing similar points, it seems people are more prone to comment without fully considering their wording (possibly due to high emotional investment).

Why? Likely from a distance the cop won't be shot if it is a real gun. The police should not be so trigger happy. What is more preferable to a society? A cop getting shot? Or a child with a toy gun?

This seems like a case where they simplified the wording too much to be worthwhile. "Armed with a realistic-looking toy and pointing it at someone" is very different from "Playing with super-soakers and water-hoses on their lawn".

> When a man being chased by police stops his car, gets out, takes cover behind the door and starts pointing something that looks remarkably like a gun at police, he should be shot.

I disagree, especially in your outlined scenario, for a couple of reasons:

1) First and foremost: the police are professionals whose job should be to protect the public, even if that means they put themselves in harm's way. The person with the toy gun (or wallet, cell phone, etc) is still a member of the public.

2) After a car chase, the police have the ability to position themselves defensively until the situation becomes clearer (e.g. shots are actually fired at them). They also could be wearing unusual protective gear like body armor, which would further reduce their personal danger.

Now, if the person was actively threatening an innocent third party with a realistic toy gun in some way, then I think it would be much more justifiable for the police to shoot. Ditto if a person brandishes something clearly gun-like at an officer at close range.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect cops to allow criminals to take the first shot in case the gun might be a toy. Even if you're "positioned defensively" you can still be killed by someone who's lucky or skilled.

There seems to be a cohort of people who believe that policemen's lives are essentially forfeit, and thus any level of mortal risk to them is reasonable.

I don't think that policemen's lives are "forfeit," but that it's their duty to not have self-defense as their very top priority, which entails taking risks in some situations that we wouldn't expect of other people.

Clearly the cop doesn't have self-defense as his top priority, or he wouldn't be in that situation at all. He'd make sure he was somewhere else when the possibility of violence manifested itself. Like, say, I would.

Police officers shouldn't be shooting people on the off chance that a suspicious bulge might be a gun, but it seems pretty unreasonable to expect police officers to put their self-defense as the very lowest priority and wait until bullets actually come out of a gun-like-object being pointed at them before shooting.

But what I'm saying isn't putting their self-defense at "the very lowest priority," it's just putting it after correctly determining the suspect is an imminent mortal threat before deciding to kill them.

The police are after all are the ones with the experience and training: they shouldn't ever be killing kids with toy guns or people with wallets, which they in fact are. The thinking that enables that needs to change.

>...they shouldn't ever be killing kids with toy guns or people with wallets, which they in fact are. The thinking that enables that needs to change.

I disagree. That's not an achievable standard without putting officers' lives at undue risk. Cops can not tell the difference between toy guns and real guns without a close inspection.

I take it you're not a cop, and don't have any cops in your family. The rule is very simple: unless you want to get shot, don't fuck with police. Pointing a toy weapon at an officer counts as fucking with police in my book.

It's not surprising when people describe the police as a fascistic brutal regime.

I'm not sure how you can extrapolate that from one person's insensitive comment about the police.

Because it's not just one person's insensitive comment, is it? It's a pattern of repeated behaviour. "I am the law, don't fuck with me".

Clearly every police who believes "I'm the law don't fuck with me" fits the bill you describe, but I don't think we're close to establishing that every police believes that.

Yes, that's how things are done in this country. You can fuck with them afterwards, in the court of law. When they're enforcing the law, fucking with police is the stupidest thing you can do. They have families to come back home to as well. I don't see what's so "insensitive" about that.

> When they're enforcing the law, fucking with police is the stupidest thing you can do

...in the US. In other countries you can fuck with the police and not get killed.

And, for the sake of clarity here, "fucking with the police" is for example asking if you're being detained or if you're free to go, or asking what grounds they have for a stop and search. It's baffling to me why asking police to obey the law is described, by police, as fucking with them.

No, I'm not talking about stop and frisk or "am I free to go". I'm talking about pointing a toy weapon at an officer when he/she can't tell if the weapon is real or not. Or reaching into the police cruiser, punching the officer in the face and attempting to grab his gun. Stuff like that.

Sure, but in this little sub-thread I'm talking about the thug officers who think that polite refusal to answer their questions is justification for police harassment.

It's far too common in the US.

And while it's stupid to point a gun (toy or not) at police (I agree that death is a likely result, because you should never point a gun at someone unless you intend to kill them) that doesn't excuse all the people who had cell phones in their hands, or the people shot within six seconds of a police officer arriving on the scene, or the people with no weapon and their back turned.

Yet in many of these cases we see officers closing ranks and claiming the victim somehow deserved it, and was somehow responsible for their death because they were arguing with police.

The US is unique in first world nations in murdering its citizens. It's an abuse of human rights when it happens after lengthy court cases; I can't imagine why it's okay before an arrest is made.

(Unless someone's life is in real and immediate danger).

So, we should just hope that innocent bystanders are not hit by that first shot at police as the they hide behind their defensive positions and superior equipment?

> So, we should just hope that innocent bystanders are not hit by that first shot at police as the they hide behind their defensive positions and superior equipment?

The scenario outlined did not involve an actual gun that could harm anyone.

If a car chase ends the suspect hiding behind a door with a "gun" in their hand, there are actually many possible scenarios, for instance:

1. The "gun" is not actually a gun, and was misidentified.

2. The gun is fake or a toy.

3. The gun is a real gun and the suspect will not shoot at anyone.

4. The gun is a real gun and the suspect will shoot at the police or others.

Some people say the suspect should be shot in all four scenarios (after all, he might shoot!). I disagree.

> The scenario outlined did not involve an actual gun that could harm anyone.

It did not involve an actual gun in that particular instance. I would like you to explain exactly how the police may identify whether the object that appears to be a weapon is an actual weapon other than waiting for the suspect to fire first.

Again, we should just hope that innocent bystanders are not hit by that first shot at police as they hide behind their defensive positions and superior equipment? Police officers and innocent bystanders don't always fare too well when the police are obligated to follow stupid rules of engagement.

> Some people say the suspect should be shot in all four scenarios (after all, he might shoot!). I disagree.

See, that's where I agree with you. Because none of the scenarios in your list is a reason for police officers to fire as you list them. But tack on the end of each item that the suspect acted in a threatening manner with an object that appeared to be a weapon then the police officer may choose to fire their weapon. To be fair, if the suspect tried to run down other people or cops during the chase to show that he was a threat then just getting out of the car with an object that appeared to be a weapon will get him shot. It's all about context.

I agree the context is important, and it may sometimes provide reasonable justification for the police to shoot first, like if there's a crowd behind the officer. Generally, I think the officers should minimize the probability that 1) innocent bystanders get shot, 2) unarmed suspects get shot, and 3) the officer gets shot; in that order. Some people seem to put 3) in front of 2), and I think that's wrong.

However, a in lot of recent videotaped incidents, it's been shown that many police officers are shooting and often killing people merely because the officer falsely "thought" they had a real gun. That behavior is unacceptable and needs to stop, even if that means police have to take more personal risks themselves.

I agree, to a point, because most of the unjustified police shootings I'm aware of, that we have video for, did not show any direct threat to the officer or any bystanders. In almost all those cases the victim did not even have an object that could be mistaken as a weapon. I personally don't see those as police shootings but as murder, manslaughter at best.

But I still have problems with your wording. In your examples above you feel 2 is more important than 3 and you disagree with people that reverse it. I agree with you. The difference is I see the possibility that the police may think the unarmed suspect is armed and is a direct threat to the officer or bystanders. By your wording you seem to suggest that scenario is not possible, and just in case the officer should wait until fired upon to determine whether the suspect is armed or not. That's a bad rule of engagement.

Given that people in the U.S. have the right to be armed, with anything from nail clippers to 18-wheelers, I demand a bit more justification for a violent intervention than simply carrying or controlling a weapon.

So you are correct when you say armed with a toy and armed with a functional weapon should be treated in the same way. But I don't think possessing an object that may or may not be a weapon is sufficient justification in itself for the use of lethal force. I think police need to exercise every available opportunity to de-escalate conflicts, with the goal being to deliver the suspects alive and unharmed to the courts for arraignment. That may actually mean that the cops have to let the suspect fire a shot before he gets a lead shower. That would leave no doubt that yes, it is a real weapon, and yes, the suspect is willing to use it inappropriately.

I don't want 750k Judge Dredds on the street, acting as judge, jury, and executioner.

When a man takes cover and points a gun, he should be ordered to "show me empty hands" [0], then given a reasonable opportunity to assess his situation and comply. If he even fires the gun, and injures a cop, he should still be given an opportunity to surrender and make it to the courtroom alive.

[0] As "drop the weapon" is confusing to a person not actually carrying one.

Here's the data set as a spreadsheet, which I think is more helpful (I will feel dumb if they made it available as a spreadsheet themselves):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/100kWwv7vLl0ZAbtMn7lY...

Oklahoma is pretty bad.

California is in the top 15 for both fatal shootings weighted by population and for fatal shootings of people not attacking with a deadly weapon.

Illinois, where I live, is all the way down at #44 for fatal shootings, which is surprising to me.

The data is available in CSV format on GitHub: https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings

It would be interesting to see how well the numbers correlate to percentage of population in the state that lives in urban and rural areas, or even what percentage of the population is in heavily/dense urbanized areas.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ow1ktm5nwy6um5f/Screenshot%202016-...

Excuse the formatting. That's the top 10 by fatalities weighted by population.

Short answer: it's all over the map.

Ah, thanks! It looks like Percent Threat is minority deaths over total deaths for that state?

The other thing I wondered was how it looked when normalized to the racial makeup of the state (I'm not asking you to do this, just wondering).

No, percent threat is the (active attack + deadly weapon) / total fatalities.

The racial data is easy enough to get, but when you state rank in police shootings/population to it, it's pretty much all over the map. Wyoming, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, the leading three states, have below-average African American populations. Two slots later, DC has the highest in the country.

If you think that a knife threat should never call for a firearm response then I recommend this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xpcrDzy344

I don't think that and don't appreciate the framing you're trying to impose on me. Could you perhaps word comments like this more carefully?

What I think is that people armed with firearms give the police much less reaction time, while people armed with knives can, if they're not on a vector that puts them in contact with other officers or civilians, be pacified more gradually.

>I don't think that and don't appreciate the framing you're trying to impose on me. Could you perhaps word comments like this more carefully?

This is a fantastic, measured answer - I'm always pleased to see reasonable responses to unreasonable comments.

Sorry for the choice of words, but my point was that a person armed with just a knife can still be very dangerous. The use of a gun in such a situation cannot be simply called a deadly overreaction, without going into details. Therefore I do not see my comment as unreasonable.

Nobody called it a "deadly overreaction", so I'm a little confused about this comment.

If we're trading youtube clips here's a police force who disarm a man armed with a machete. Armed police are available, (the UK has armed police, especially in London) but those police are not needed because our police force is not fucking incompetent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5CPx4RKWw

Here's another video of a man wielding a knife and approaching police. In the US he's much more likely to be killed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9TFvh6Xps4

In the first clip I wouldn't call that "competence" so much as "overwhelming force", something US police use frequently. It's worth noting that at the beginning of the video, an officer is trying to ram the perp with a trashcan found at the scene...

It's also worth noting that in the US an officer is much more likely to be killed. Hence why regular people are more likely to be killed by police. It's a fearful, kneejerk reaction thing.

Source please for "in the US an officer is much more likely to be killed"?

I took a quick look and found this. [1][2] Looks like number of cop deaths are at a 50 year low but can't find a country by country comparison.

[1] http://www.groupnewsblog.net/2014/09/i-saw-posting-on-facebo...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131230/15411225716/numbe...

It's surely anecdotal, however I have a hard time believing most of Europe, in particular the UK, has more mentally ill and/or drug addicts who are more prone to this kind of behavior than the general populace. You also have a variety of high profile examples of cop-killing in the US that play into this kneejerk reactionary arms race on the part of police.

> more mentally ill

Nice stigma. People with mental illness are not violent; mental illness does not predict violent behaviour. That's about as offensive and ignorant as saying "has more black people and/or drug addicts".

Once again. Provide examples of high profile cop killings contributing to so-called arms race. It's not an arms race when police always has a gun while the suspect may or may not have one in any given encounter.

You have moved from one statement to another without much to show for it.

Reusing your own comment in a different thread, "what terrible reasoning"

This is what happens in the US.

http://heavy.com/news/2015/12/san-francisco-sfpd-police-shoo...

With no clips to trade, I'm merely spectating at a tennis match, but I remain unconvinced that the UK response is in any way better.

In all 3 clips (your two, plus the parent's) what I see is that a person holding a knife is an immediate and real danger to anyone within 15 feet of them.

Also, if I'm seeing correctly, both assailants had already been pepper-sprayed, is that right?

I don't know the numbers but it seems to me the relevant question is, in X number of incidents in the UK vs. the US, how many perpetrators die? How many cops die?

If the UK police are able to subdue these people without killing the perpetrator or getting killed themselves, on a per capita basis, I'd say the UK response is better.

Leaving aside the apples/oranges comparison of the greater latitude given to the individual's rights in the US vs. the UK (2nd and 4th amendments in particular), I'd more or less agree with this criteria being a good way to distinguish the overall value of the two approaches to dealing with armed civilian confrontations.

That being said, if the numbers you're looking for exist in an unbiased, non-doctored study, I'd be surprised. If they did, and they supported the thesis, you'd see them quoted in every article advocating gun control.

Yes, in the UK version the person poses a risk of very real harm to officers. People could die. Despite this, police manage to subdue him, and arrest him. They can do this because an officer didn't shoot him within six seconds of arriving at the scene.

Granted, neither has happened to me, but if someone wanted to kill me, I think I'd rather be shot than hacked with a machete.

Thanks for the constructive feedback, Thomas. These comments will be valuable when we build the 2016 database, if we decide to do so.

Please do. We need more people to see this.

> while attacking someone with a deadly weapon.

According to who?

In several cases, it was shown that the police claimed "attacking someone with a deadly weapon." that was later shown to be a false claim.

First off, I am not a doctor and I didn't sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night. But as someone that was an EMT and who worked around law enforcement for numerous years in other capacities, I have seen this all too often.

"like how dangerous tasers are."

Taser stats can be a bit deceiving. In the vast majority of cases where a taser is deployed the individual is in a drug-induced state with increased heart activity. Combine that with the escalating situation and the individual's heart rate is often higher than if they were just in the drug-induced state. These individuals are often highly combative at the time the taser is deployed. Given normal circumstances a taser deployment on these individuals most likely would not result in any harm. However, combine that deployment with the increased heart activity and adrenaline going through the individuals system and it becomes a recipe for disaster.

To generalize and say that tasers are dangerous does not take into account the entire picture of events or situation at hand. It's not the taser itself that is dangerous it is the situation the individual has placed themselves in that causes the danger.

> To generalize and say that tasers are dangerous does not take into account the entire picture of events or situation at hand. It's not the taser itself that is dangerous it is the situation the individual has placed themselves in that causes the danger.

That's misleading. If a taser is dangerous in the "vast majority of cases" in which it is used, then its use is dangerous. Doesn't matter if it's safe in situations where it isn't used.

I only said that the "vast majority of cases" where the result is deadly has outside factors (i.e. drugs). I did NOT say that the "vast majority of cases" where tasers are deployed. Enormous difference. Tasers are used hundreds of thousands of times annually with no issue. Unfortunately the ones where there is a death, or significant injury, typically involve the use of drugs or other have other outside factors not related to the use of the taser.

EDIT: I did say in the vast majority of cases where tasers are deployed. That was an error on my part I did mean that to add that in a vast majority of cases where tasers are deployed and there is a death or significant injury.

"Taser stats are a bit deceiving (the death toll is surprisingly large), it's lethal only to drug addicts"?

If Taser is dangerous to people high on drugs, it is a dangerous weapon, and we should care about that. Do you mean it's individual's fault that police uses a weapon that is lethally dangerous to "individuals in a drug-induced state" to apprehend individuals in a drug-induced state?

> Do you mean it's individual's fault

He actually did state exactly that:

> it is the situation the individual has placed themselves in that causes the danger.

Very sad to see even a medical professional take the tack that "serve and protect" is not the police's task anymore.

That theory makes no sense. By that logic I should be innocent if I go out drinking, get behind the wheel and drive, and kill someone in the process.

I am not here to argue morals, ethics, or whether the use of force in situations is warranted or not. All I can say is that it is easy to arm chair quarterback a situation until you are placed in that situation and asked to make a split second decision that in end you know someone will always be second guessed.

My point was simply that taser statistics are deceiving to some extent. Sadly the statistics only show incidents where someone was killed by the use of a taser. If you compare that to the number of times tasers are actually deployed around the globe, you will find that tasers are in fact not as deadly as you think. In the vast majority of cases where a death does occur you will often find that there is an outside factor such as drugs that resulted in said death, not the taser.

The comment about police "serve and protect". Unfortunately to "serve and protect" does not simply refer to the individual the police are questioning and/or arresting. To serve and protect, first and foremost, refers to the officer's own safety. Second it refers to the safety of the community as a whole. Finally it refers to the individual at hand. At every call for service an officer must make determine exactly how to "serve and protect" to the best of his or her ability all three of these groups. This decision often has to be made in less than a second with the officer knowing the wrong decision can end up being grave to one of the three groups. The best decision is no harm to any of the groups. The second best option is that the officer and community are safe. Regrettably, to reach that second option usually results in the injury or death of a party. But if that injury or death served and protected the larger community than in most scenarios it is considered justified.

FWIW (a alot, IMHO), here is the Github account for the data:

https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings

Seems like no big deal but with the commit history, we basically have a record and frequency count of how, in a major project by a major news organization, things get updated. Counting these incidents has always been difficult. Victims names are rarely known at the time of death, nevermind the circumstances. It can take awhile for that information to come out and when it does, often a reporter (at a local newspaper) will have moved on to some other story.

The Wapo team is dependent on local reports. The github repo let's us see how efficient they are at it. Very cool transparent move on their part.

FWIW, this is exactly why we chose to post to Github. We wanted to be as transparent as possible during a fluid process.

Worth reading through these. A lot of people with mental illness shot just for holding guns or knives or "driving toward police."

Recently, an au pair we know (from Germany), had a gun pulled on her because she reached into her purse to get her ID when she was pulled over. The fact that Maryland's finest are totally mental and she could get killed for doing that never occurred to her.

I don't know. Someone with severe mental illness and a knife (or a car) sounds way more dangerous than a calm person with a gun. It's hard to know whether the shooting was warranted without more details. Maybe better video records of these incidents will be helpful.

A lot of those people have no intention to harm anyone but themselves. They're suicidal. It's weird that emergency medical treatment for suicidal people is "call the police", but that's what their relatives do. The police turn up, see the weapon, hear "mental illness" and wrongly assume mentally ill people are violent, and shoot them.

Who are you going to call in an emergency? 911, or, um, what's the number of the suicide psychiatric emergency response team?

You don't get to decide whether 911 dispatches police.

> You don't get to decide whether 911 dispatches police.

Maybe America should fix that, because in most other countries you get to ask for the service you want, either when you dial the 911 equivalent number, or by dialing the specific service emergency number.

Some countries have an emergency psychiatric numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_telephone_nu...

Once got pulled over while driving through a narrow alley. I had seen the police officer turning the corner behind me at an extremely dangerous speed (wheels spinning) so I assumed he was responding to an active shooting or something. I accelerated to cover the last 20 yards or so and then immediately pulled over once I was out of his way. He came up, gun drawn, thinking I had tried to escape. The reason for pulling me over in such a dangerous manner? One of the 2 lights illuminating my license plate was out.

Wait, are license plates required to be lit? I thought that was just a curtesy to other drivers, not a legal requirement.

Many states require them to be lit for identification purposes. And there's a lot of malicious fundraising that occurs around these laws.

By the letter of the law where I was, apparently it is the law. I was ticketed for it. I had it fixed and went to traffic court (hoping to at least have my complaint about the way the officer handled the situation heard, even though I would admit the light was in fact broken), but they thought the ticket was so ridiculous it was dismissed before I even saw the judge. So... technically illegal, but dumb enough to literally get laughed at by the court clerks?

edit: I am aware one can complain to the police department, but this was typical of their officers and I didn't expect sympathy from other officers. Not sure what I expected to achieve in court.

On the flip side, if there really is a threat, police officers have standard training which makes it clear that they have less than three seconds to react, before they are killed.

Bringing their weapon to a ready state, actually increases the time that they have to react, and lets them make more rational decisions.

> Bringing their weapon to a ready state, actually increases the time that they have to react, and lets them make more rational decisions.

Or one could argue that it reduces the amount of time they spend rationalising the situation, which could result in a "knee jerk" emotional overreaction to any perceived threat.

I'd argue we've seen so many completely unwarranted shootings in the last few years due to: cellphones, reaching for ID, hands in pockets, etc, that maybe police should be taught to slow down and consider the threat, not speed up, and start blasting on a whim.

The number of police officers dying on the job hasn't decreased with these new higher risk tactics. They're just killing more members of the public. It has stayed roughly around 50/year shot + 2/year from stabbings for the last ten years.

Most police officers die due to vehicle crashes/collisions and illness. None of which is resolved by shooting more members of the public.

Whether the officer makes more rational decisions with a gun in a ready state is pretty debatable. People holding guns are reduced to instantaneous decisions with large consequences. A very basic, universal rule of responsible gun use is don't point it at things you aren't comfortable destroying. The important decision is whether to draw at all.

How is a suspect's decision making affected when they have a gun trained on them? How does provoking irrational behavior affect the outcome?

I certainly hope there's more governing an officer's standard readying of a weapon than the X seconds they have to quickdraw at the OK Corral.

Maybe they shouldn't rush to insert themselves into a situation where they only have 3 seconds to react.

Every single traffic stop a police officer makes has them in this situation.

> lets them make more rational decisions.

it re-frames decision process from 'what should I do?" to "should I kill him?"

Its all cops, we had guns pulled on us when our car matched a stolen car. Pulling a gun out should be last resort. Unless you intend to kill the someone, guns shouldn't be pulled out. Accidents happen as we seen in SF when guns are pulled out.

Risk mitigation seems to favor police officers even though they picked their occupation with the known risks. An innocent person didn't chose to have a gun pointed at them in order for the officer mitigate risk to themselves.

I think a better public understanding of police risk-averse training for common scenarios such as traffic stops would be a huge step in gaining common understanding in preparation for a meaningful dialogue.

To a driver asked for their license, reaching unanounced for a wallet in a concealed place (pocket, purse, glovebox) is an innocent and virtually instinctual movement. To a LEO, the same movement, by necessity, must be considered as having the potential to end their life.

Hi everyone! I'm a developer who worked on this project, and I appreciate the comments and suggestions. If you enjoyed this piece, you might want to check out our related story about the six most important things we learned from a year of investigating and reporting this data: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

Is there a way to get the union of "Fleeing suspect" and "deadly weapon" (or, better: "fleeing suspect" and "firearm") from the data?

The best we could advise you to do is select both "Deadly weapon" (under the "Weapon" category) and "Other" (under "Threat Level"). Deadly weapon includes all firearms, and the Other (threat level) category includes, but is not limited to, individuals who were fleeing.

There will be some information in the blurbs that may indicate if the person was fleeing specifically. We hope that in future versions we will be able to provide a more specific breakdown.

But you have the data somewhere, right, because you gave it a number (roughly a quarter of all fatalities). Could I derive that number from your data set on Github?

(I'm not questioning the number; I'd just like to see if I can generate more context for it).

A more roundabout way might be to go here https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... , look at the second point about fleeing individuals, and look around for those who were brandishing a firearm. Some you will also find showed signs of mental illness. Apologies for not having an exact count of that particular union.

Absolute numbers in the last year are interesting, but much more interesting would be trends over a longer period. There's a widespread perception that there is an epidemic of police killings right now, but I haven't seen anyone use data to analyze how novel the current rate is with the past.

It's tough, because we only started investigating and reporting this data in 2015. We've just announced we will be continuing the investigation in 2016, and by 2017 the government has said it hopes to have a better system in place for reporting and tracking these shootings. We definitely hope to some day have several years' worth of thorough police shootings data to see long-term trends.

Is there any data about the police themselves ? Male vs. female officer, with or without partner, length of service, age, etc. ?

Number of people killed last year by police in England and Wales: 3. That's the highest since 2008. [1]

Why doesn't law enforcement seem to care? The government doesn't even track police shootings (one reason the Washington Post created its database) and, generally, law enforcement's reaction expresses no concern for the victims or for reducing this appalling behavior and widespread failure.

[1] http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/fatal-police-shootings

While the police in the US are clearly more violent than those in the UK, it's also the case that there is more crime in the US, more variance in the population, and way, way, way more gun availability. So we may not have very much to learn from your simple comparison.

> So we may not have very much to learn from your simple comparison.

You mean that I didn't write a dissertation on it in an HN comment? We don't have much to learn from your simplistic dismissal of a serious issue, based on simplistic speculation about the causes. Have a nice day.

What terrible reasoning.

It'd be interesting to compare what the UK folks were armed with, including those not shot. My guess is that US cops are far more likely to face people carrying firearms of their own.

I figure if we're talking about gun laws, though, the article is probably political in nature, so I flagged it.

Wow! And England and Wales are entire countries!

Except...

They are much, much, much smaller countries, and so...

One would actually expect a much, much, much smaller number for them.

Even combined.

Whether by land area or population, they are considerably smaller.

Given the population of the UK is about a fifth of the US, your post is so ridiculous it's hard to consider it anything but a troll.

Yes, but: the population of England and Wales together is about 55 Million; the us 319 Million. So that's a ratio of 1:5.8.

There were 3 shootings vs 984, so that's a ratio of 1:328. So it's still a very valid point.

They're smaller, but not that much smaller. With a combined population of 56M to the USA's 319M, we could scale their shooting numbers by 5.7x to get something adjusted for population. So if they were as big as the USA they would have ~17 shootings to our 984.

Not that much smaller:

                   Population    Killed
                   (mid-2012)    by Police
  United States    314,102,623     984
  England & Wales   56,567,800       3
  Ratio                     6x    328x

Don't think land area makes sense. However adjusting for crime rates and demographics would make a big difference.

I find this discrepancy very interesting, only ~4% of the people shot and killed by police were female. Police departments are male dominate and maybe this factors into the difference[0]

Male - 952

Female - 41

Why such a discrepancy? I don't think males are 23x more dangerous than females.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_law_enforcement

1. Men do commit a lot more crime than women. We don't know exactly why that is, but probably some combination of biology and society.

2. There is a lot of bias towards seeing men as more dangerous. Some is legitimate - men are physically larger, on average - while some is just pure bias. The bias might be partially justified due to men actually committing more crime, but it's hard to say how much. Regardless, if you encounter the police in a potentially violent situation, it's clearly much better to be a woman than a man.

See Table 5: http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf. Men are offenders in 92% of gun homicides, 93% of homicides committed in conjunction with another felony, 95% of drug-related homicides, and 98% of gang-related homicides.

See Table 7: http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf. Blacks are offenders in 57% of gun homicides, 60% of homicides committed in conjunction with another felony, 67% of drug-related homicides, and 42% of gang-related homicides.

I don't understand your comment in relation to the male / female issue. Care to expound?

For the past year the black/white issue has dominated the discussion of police violence, not male/female.

That 97% of those killed by police are male but on 52% of the population is male seems too be in a large part justified by the fact that men commit 90% of the murders and a similar fraction of other violent crimes.

Given the dominant media narrative that cops are unfairly targeting blacks it was bit surprising to find that only 26% of those killed by cops are blacks when blacks commit 52% of murders and similar amount of other violent crimes. This is new information to me.

Unfortunately any rational discussion of the racial dimension of police violence or crine generally is difficult even on HN so I expect to be down voted or even called a racist for the 1st time in my life.

My personal view is that U.S. policing is in need of reform as it is ineffective, too costly and overly violent. This would be difficult but benefit everyone.

Among the many reasons you're being downvoted is the fact that you said black people are "only" 26% of police shooting fatalities in the US without acknowledging the fact that they make up only 13% of the population.

I read the "only" as referring to the ratio of crime percentage to shot by cop. 96% of those killed are men, and men commit the same order of magnitude of the violent crime (even though they are 50% of the population). Following that trend, you would expect blacks to be 50%ish of the shot-by-cop numbers, not 26%.

Between 1980 and 2008 "Males committed the vast majority of homicides in the United States at that time, representing 90.5% of the total number of offenders" [1]. Men are much more dangerous. A general rule for a lost child is to seek out a friendly looking woman, since she would be much more likely to help and not harm the child [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime [2] http://gavindebecker.com/resources/child_safety/its_every_pa...

Did you really have to add a second link which has no value except to imply all men are assholes or sexual predators.

As a man, I respectfully disagree. The link has much value if you're concerned with keeping kids safe, and it's relevant as a direct consequence of the fact that most crimes are committed by men. Your statement about men has it backward. Not all men are criminals, but most violent crimes are committed by men.

According to that link we should be terrified that any man is a sexual predator just waiting to take your kid away. Fuck that.

That's basically nonsense advice without mentioning the baseline rates. If 90% of all sex offenses are committed by men, but the baseline rate of sexual predators is 10 per 100,000, your chance of running into a male sexual predator by chance is 0.009%, and your chance of running into a female sexual predator is 0.001%. Both would be essentially negligible risks, even if one is 9 times higher than the other.

Male lives matter.

Yes they are. Especially 16-35 year old ones. Nature of the beast called raging testosterone.

I remember reading an article by a former military guy who was deployed in the middle east. Back home he had to deal with the police and basically said: "they reminded me of myself when I was deployed and operating in enemy controlled areas".

The guy goes on to explain on, according to him, the problem is that there is a narrative that cops should be allowed to do anything to protect their life, as opposed to protect the public.

This is always the excuse when a cop kills a civilian by mistake - "he feared for his life". Guess what? You're a freaking cop! Not a plumber, or an accountant. Cops should not be allowed to kill someone on suspicion that maybe there is a possibility that they will start shooting at them.

>Cops should not be allowed to kill someone on suspicion that maybe there is a possibility that they will start shooting at them.

Civilians in the US often have this right, so why shouldn't the police?

For one, civilians don't have the role of "protecting and serving" :)

Cops are trained, and are supposed to learn how to handle a situation without pulling out their gun [].

I don't necessarily disagree with you though. It would be good for people to be able to walk at night with a bag of candies without getting gunned down. I don't think that 2 problems should cancel each other.

[] And I know I'm wrong when I say that. I remember another paper showing how American cops spend a disproportionate amount of time practicing with their gun as opposed to cops in other countries where they mostly learn how to handle situations without their arms.

Police should certainly be held to a higher standard - and when they shoot someone, they should be treated the same as anyone else, if not put under greater scrutiny, because of the greater responsibility their position entails.

But the fact remains that, for better or worse, every American by default has the right to shoot people with guns under certain circumstances. I am not a lawyer but I don't see a legal justification for limiting the ability of the police to defend themselves, without treating police officers like felons.

I don't necessarily disagree, but the problem is you could say the opposite. If you claim that police officers should have the same rights as a civilian, couldn't you argue that civilians should have the same rights as police officers?

I believe that the role of "police officer" comes with the idea that before defending yourself you should be prepared to defend other first.

As far as I know, civilians and police officers in the US do have the same rights, as far as firearms are concerned.

Taking this rationale to its logical conclusion, a police officer would be required to wait for violence to actually occur before responding. Imagine the scenario in which a civilian points a gun at a police officer's head. What course of action would you recommend? Wait for the civilian to fire? If the officer were to fire, would you say "I feared for my life" is reasonable?

Second, you've got a straw man argument here. Police can't shoot (de jure) when there's a suspicion that maybe there's a possibility. In Texas (I imagine others are similar), deadly force is authorized [1]:

(A) to protect the actor against the other's use or attempted use of unlawful deadly force; or

(B) to prevent the other's imminent commission of aggravated kidnapping, murder, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated robbery.

and,

(1) the actor reasonably believes the conduct is immediately necessary to avoid imminent harm;

(2) the desirability and urgency of avoiding the harm clearly outweigh, according to ordinary standards of reasonableness, the harm sought to be prevented by the law proscribing the conduct.

There's a clear line here, and "reasonable" is decided by a jury of one's peers, not the responding officer.

Reference:

1. http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/SOTWDocs/PE/htm/PE.9.h...

  The FBI and CDC log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete. [1]

This is a little bit ironic in that the government agencies cannot do their job properly and it has to take a news company and their great investigative journalism to get it done right?

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-the-washington-p...

Hi! I'm a developer who worked on this project. If you'd like to download and check out our data, we are making it available in a repository on GitHub: https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings

they did an incredible job here, very well done UI easy to filter and educate yourself.

The saddest story I found:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/autistic-6-year-old-shot-killed-...

If anyone is wondering, the police were charged with second degree murder in this case: http://www.wdsu.com/news/local-news/new-orleans/grand-jury-i...

They have plead not guilty and will be tried soon: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2016/01/trials_set_for_d...

Just for a fuller picture, here's the listing of police killed, by year, by state, etc.:

https://www.odmp.org/search?name=&agency=&state=&from=2015&t...

Sample search is for 2015, when 129 officers died from all causes including automobile accidents; 39 were killed by gunfire, 5 by vehicle pursuit, 7 by vehicular assault, etc.

Who determines whether mental illness is present and how?

Usually family members, though police sometimes state it as well.

I found this website the other day http://killedbypolice.net/ turns out several people per day are killed by police which I was surprised by.

What the hell is going on in California? Actually, better question is why is Illinois so much less violent?

Blacks were 26% of the deaths, but only make up 13% of the population.

The state by state numbers are surprising. CA has about 1/10th of the total shootings. IL has only 20, which is less than a lot of other states (NM for example). Florida and Texas seem to be the other big standouts

More than 10% of US people live in California. So 1/10 of the total doesn't really stand out.

Why on earth would it be surprising that California, with 12% of the population of the United States, would account for 10% of the total shootings? Florida, based on it's population, would have about 61 shootings (it has 60), and Texas would be expected to have about 84 (it has 96, or about 20% more than expected).

The only surprising ones you've mentioned are Illinois (which is about half the expected rate) and New Mexico, which is about 3 times the expected.

You have to look at per capita numbers. North Carolina and Arkansas actually stand out as having lower numbers than some of the 'usual suspects' states they are next to. Wonder why that is.

Note to self: When uniformed officers approach to serve my arrest warrants, drop cellphone and put hands up. These dudes are dangerous!!

It actually is good advice to keep your hands visible at all times. It's a step in the right direction of keeping the officer at ease.

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