How do police handle violence in countries where officers don’t carry guns?

The short answer is that they stop not having guns when they face someone similarly armed.

But this is not the most interesting question to ask. In the US, a disarmed police force would probably just carry privately, while on the job.

A much more interesting question is why so many armed police forces in the world get by with a level of violence not so much different from their non-carrying peers. The U.S. traditionally condemns many nonviolent police activities (like searching, or requesting ID, which theoretically does not even exist there) as oppressive, anti-freedom, unamerican. Other countries do not have this cultural expectation, that the police should never interfere with the life of non-criminals. Thise countries therefore have a wide, nuanced range of police/citizen interaction that only involves guns as the very last level of escalation. If culture (and/or law, but I think that culture is much more important here) only acknowledges police authority stemming from a pointed gun, officers will find excuses to point guns.

But the biggest reason for US police gun violence must be the high general level of gun violence. It seems very natural that when criminals are trigger-happy, the police force adapts by lowering their thresholds accordingly. Inevitably, this will also fatally affect law abiding citizens. I haven't checked the numbers, but maybe, in relation to total gun deaths (instead of in relation to total population), American police are not even as terrible as they seem?

Here in Norway, a police officer is most likely to be shot by...

...a fellow police officer.

Police were unarmed until quite recently (however, they did have firearms available should need arise, also compulsory training and certification at fixed intervals)

When our DoJ decided to arm police due to some perceived terror threat, the number of accidental discharges (unsurprisingly) skyrocketed.

The terror never materialised, but several officers today limp after quite literally shooting themselves in the foot.

Quote: "In one of these countries, Iceland, it’s legal for citizens to carry guns—and roughly a third choose to do so."

Absolute bullshit. I lived in Iceland for 4 years and still have a place there, and hundreds of Icelandic friends. Not once have I ever heard about anybody carrying a gun - unless out hunting.

Rather seems to be missing the point. In Australia, police carry guns. Unfortunately, there are police shootings but they are very rare and when it does occur there is a full and thorough investigation done. I don't think I've ever heard of a case in the last 15 years of anyone in the Australian police firing a gun at someone unless they were literally in imminent danger of serious violence from the one they were shooting at.

As an Australian citizen, whilst the police here aren't perfect, I also believe they aren't as trigger happy because, quite frankly, we don't carry guns on our person in Australia. This means that when police make a routine stop because of a broken tail-light they aren't as likely to feel like their life is in danger, and this almost certainly means they hesitate to fire their weapon unless they are really in danger. They are also aware that if they do discharge their weapon then there is a full investigation done. The investigations are quite thorough and actually normally very fair, but no police officer wants to be investigated really and all police officers know what a serious thing it is to fire their sidearm.

I don't expect any citizens of the U.S. to agree with me. But it occurs to me that as more people carry increasingly powerful weapons, the police have had to upgrade their own weaponry, body armour and tactics in response. From my vantage point here in Australia, it puzzles me why this isn't obvious: the more people who carry guns, the less likely law enforcement will try to negotiate and use minimal force.

From my perspective, America's gun culture is bizarre.

There's the old-testament revenge style of conflict resolution, and the new-testament style of conflict resolution. The new ones works better, that's why almost everyone uses it.

Even in the UK and in Norway police officers are allowed to carry gun's but they rarely do, and rarely have to. There are special forces who are called when wide-reaching bullet forces are needed, and even then deadly force is rarely needed to take out an attacker.

Third civilized countries have the principle of consequence of lawlessness. If a police officer oversteps his powers he has to face the consequences, otherwise he will continue to abuse his powers. A very simple but powerful principle, which is esp. needed for those who have state-granted special powers.

Forth, civilized countries invest a lot into marketing of police powers. TV broadcasts crime investigations and police dramas all the time, round the clock, where police is presented to serve the people, so they are presented in a positive light. This might be useful to cover up police abuse, but is in fact more useful as a positive role model to the enforcers. Officers stepping out of line are clearly overstepping their line. Whilst in the US the lone cop hero taking down the suspect with a well-aimed shot is the patriotic hero, saving the community from crime and violence. Marketing is different there, the state powers don't invest in these kind of TV dramas.

An important cultural difference is the concept of "policing by consent"

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policing-by-conse...

"To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect."

I think lots of people here have made excellent points about the UK etc., so I would like to add something else, which is the representation of gun usage in the media. Let's compare a show like Flashpoint with, say, NCIS Los Angeles.

A Canadian series, Flashpoint shows you in its very first episode a SWAT situation (that's what the show is about) in which one team member acts as a sniper and kills a man who is holding somebody hostage. The first thing you see is that, as the sniper emerges from the building he was positioned on, his gun is taken away and he is led away by internal investigation to be interviewed. In the same episode, a proper investigation is launched, all team members are questioned and a judge ultimately has to decide whether the killing was warranted or not. The usual approach in all of the episodes is a gradual escalation from negotiation to non-lethal to lethal methods, highlighting specifically that the least amount of violence possible is always to be preferred.

In NCIS Los Angeles, between the four main investigators, they probably shoot on average one or two people per episode, and nothing ever seems to come of it. Not just do the characters not seem to mind or care, but nobody else seems to be concerned either. If an investigation ever happens, it happens as a plot device or conspiracy, not as a routine investigation of law enforcement conduct or the lawfulness of a police killing.

Of course, all of these events are fictional, but they nevertheless show a very different approach to gun usage as well as general escalation/deescalation strategies employed. Furthermore, they have an impact on how people conceive of law enforcement, setting expectations but also showing examples. Is every show like NCIS Los Angeles? Certainly not, and not every Canadian show is like Flashpoint, either. However, I do think that these shows emblemise very different understandings of law enforcement and what is appropriate conduct as well as what constitutes reasonable violence.

The article treats these police forces as something special when really the unusual case/outlier here is the US.

The US has a bit of a culture problem on this front - everyone is armed to the teeth & violence has been made acceptable via Hollywood etc. Plus there is the old "if you have a hammer everything starts looking like a nail" issue. People will resort to what they have available. And you can't really do much about it because the gun freedom crowd will howl if you take away their guns.

I guess people will just have to keep dying.

My father was a cop in Norway. He told me that they once tickled a belligerent drunk to get him to surrender.

It was fairly controversial when the Australian Government recently decided to have submachine gun-armed Federal Police provide security at our national Parliament House. It was rationalised by claims of terrorist threats, of course.

To an Australian, it's very weird to see submachine guns at all, let alone around our national buildings.

(Another thing to consider about different attitudes: There's a bunch of interesting politicisation about the terms "Police Force" vs. "Police Service" in some jurisdictions around the world, to the point that, in general, conservatives prefer "force", progressives prefer "service".)

> Of course, in all but Iceland, citizens in these countries generally don’t have access to guns.

As a Kiwi I'm surprised to hear that. Perhaps the author is speaking of some parallel New Zealand, but in the one I inhabit it's not especially hard to own a shotgun or rifle: get a license, buy your firearm.

Pistols, high-capacity semi-automatic rifles, automatic weapons are very hard or impossible to own, but guns themselves are not uncommon.

"Don't show up with a knife to a gunfight" is what most people would say, but in many occasions the opposite holds true too. When the officers are implicitly armed it by default escalates the situation. That said the US always had a problem with "gun violence" and even some level of "utter lawlessness", the wild west, the prohibition era, and now the more modern gang violence. You think of 1930's you think of tommy guns, you think of bonnie and clyde you think of the hails of bullets shot at them by the FBI, somehow the US has been always that extreme. I don't know if that's actually was the case or that turn of the century popular culture is too American centric especially due to hollywood, but at least to me that always seemed the case.

The main problem I see is the "free flow" of legal and ilegal guns for citizens. In Japan, a disarmed society, the amount of deaths by gunfire are almost nil. They also have a really tight gun control, which arguably it's easy since it's a "small-ish" island.

Of course there are many more reasons, and I think that America's youth thinking of "gangster's are cool" is way off. Hech, in Japan even a knife stabbing reaches all newspapers and makes a big fuss.

But doing that in USA would make the economy slightly worse and "cut their freedom": tighter border control on imports, regulating the shit that is on TV, better education, etc.

Assuming tasers are effective, do US police forces carry them? If they do, why is it not the first choice? If they don't carry, what's the problem with tasers?

If tasers are not effective, I'm still wondering why non-lethal weapons do not seem to be the first choice. Would all known non-lethal restraining tools be inefficient (too slow) if we assume the civilian will make use of a firearm? I mean, let's say tasers are not good enough, maybe pepper spray or something else can be used.

Genuinely curious and probably missing important details.

The 2nd amendment applies to police officers as well as non-police officers, so even if their job did not demand they carry, they would be allowed to carry.

Asking this question shows one significant way that people do not understand our 2nd amendment freedom. I use 'how people' rather than 'the author' because this is the 2nd time in 24 hours that I've seen this topic raised.

Most gun related crimes in Holland are drugs related. Regulate drugs, problem solved.

So now that there's over 300 million guns in the hands of American citizens, what are they supposed to do? We are where we are, this article doesn't help shit.

Anybody remember the Battle of North Hollywood?

I agree that 19 weeks of training for police officer in US is very low, and that leaves officers poorly qualified for their job.

On the other hand, the attached video of how British policeman handle a man with machette is nothing but pathetic, the kind of stuff that we regulary make fun of.

As the very minimum, if the policeman does not carry a gun he should carry a taser instead. This would resolve machette man situation in seconds, and only took one policeman to do so, instead of dozen.

> Another week, another police shooting in the United States. So far this year, 569 people have be killed by US police, according to The Guardian’s count. Police brutality is a horrific normality and, in more ways than one, black men being shot by police has become the modern-day equivalent of lynching.

This is greatly exaggerated. It makes it sound like black men are being gunned down by police left and right, usually without justification, and it makes it sound like the majority of people shot by police are black.

Black men are being shot at a higher rate than other groups (except for Native Americans), but they are only about 1/4 of the police shootings. Here are numbers as of a few days ago:

Number shot in 2016:

  • 10 Asian/Pacific Islanders
  • 13 Native Americans
  • 40 Other/Unknown
  • 88 Hispanic/Latino
  • 136 Black
  • 279 White

Here are the rates per one million group population:

  • 0.56 Asian/Pacific Islander
  • 1.41 White
  • 1.59 Hispanic/Latino
  • 3.23 Black
  • 3.4 Native American

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

To try to get a better idea of what is actually going on, I used a random number generator to pick 10 entries from the list of 2016 police killings at http://www.killedbypolice.net/ and looked at each and classified it as either "Justified" or "Not Justified".

KilledByPolice.net tries to keep a running list of all police killings in the US, and for each they give race/ethnicity, gender, age, state, and links to the news report on the killing and to the KilledByPolice Facebook post on the killing (which usually duplicates that news link, but also includes followup news stories).

Here were the 10 that I looked at, my summary of the facts as gleaned from the news reports, and my verdict as to whether it was justified or not justified.

Keep in mind that this was only a sample of ten. I'd be curious to see other people's sampling results (or even better, the results of someone with the time and interest to go through them all and classify them as justified or not).

The numbering in this list matches the numbering at KilledByPolice.net.

#94, black male. He was fleeing from an arrest attempt, slipped and fell, and a gun that had been concealed fell out. The officer told him not to reach for the gun. The suspect reached for the gun, and was shot. (It later turned out the gun was just a BB gun, but the officer did not know that). My verdict: Justified.

#110, white female. She was the wife of a reserve office. He was cleaning his gun in their home and it accidentally fired, shooting her. My verdict: Not Justified (although also not criminal).

#263, white male. Former officer, fell on hard times and turned to robbery. Killed 2 people during a robbery, and then was killed by police who arrived in response to that. My verdict: Justified.

#272, white male. Suspect was driving/parking suspiciously. Officer talked to him, then headed back to patrol car. Suspect started shooting at the officer, officer shot back. My verdict: Justified.

#328, latino male. Burglar, with knife holding a hostage when police arrived and shot him. My verdict: Justified.

#398, black male. Armed robber, shot at officers several times and hit one. They shot back. My verdict: Justified.

#446, white male. Man walking down the center of the street, bare chested, complaining of chest pains. Police and paramedics arrived to help and/or take him to the hospital. Man became combative and police handcuffed him. He then went into medical distress. CPR was given, but he dies on the scene. I'm unsure how to score this one...it is not clear it should even count as a police killing. However, if I'm going to rate every item as either "justified" or "not justified", then I'll give it: Not Justified.

#475, latino male. Shot a customer in an auto detail shop, then shot at responding officers who shot him. My verdict: Justified.

#505, white male. Police responding to a 911 call about gunshots and a woman yelling for help got the wrong address. The man who answered at that address had a gun, and ignored police orders to drop it. It's unclear whether or not the police identified themselves sufficiently, and there had been a home invasion next door not too long before, so I'm going to tentatively call this one Not Justified.

#535, white male. Reports of a drunk driver causing damage. Police find the car, but the driver is gone. While the officer was working on paperwork, the driver returned and pulled a gun out of his car. The officer struggled with him for control of the gun, and another officer arrived and jumped in to help. After over a minute of struggling, and dozens of commands to drop the weapon, one of the officers finally shot the suspect. (It later turned out the gun was just a BB pistol, but it looked like a regular gun). My verdict: Justified.

So...that's 7 justified, 3 not justified.

Of the three that I classified as not justified, only one remotely fits into the trigger-happy police narrative.

This is quite different from the impression I would have if I had relied solely on what the press is telling me about US police shootings.