> In 2017, mental illness played a role in a quarter of 987 police killings,
Can we say that police officers kill more people than terrorists do?
Can we say that police officers kill more people than terrorists do?
Though I tentatively agree with the rest of your comment, the original comparison was to stats only in America.
In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
And if you take out the Madoff case (a $1.7 billion case of law enforcement run amuck if there ever was one...), seizures didn't even top out burglaries.
Of course now someone can shrilly denounce me for defending asset forfeiture, but that isn't my point.
It is absurd to leave out the fact that many of these killings were intentionally initiated by suicidal mentally ill people.
I wonder how many police officer killings are due to "suicide by cop".
I don't think this is really relevant, because "suicide by cop" is a great reason why police should not take the lead in responding to suicide threats. You never hear about "suicide by paramedic" or "suicide by social worker."
September 11 2001 terrorist attacks: 2,996 dead.[1]
Here's some data for the previous few years[2], and 2016:
In 2016, 10,497 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.[3]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11...
2. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
3 . https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...
That wouldn't even be a thing if they weren't so trigger happy and unaccountable. How did it ever even get to be a thing?
As for the other two on the street. In the last two years, one had a shotgun pointed at his face from three feet away by an angry drunk man carrying two guns and four hundred rounds of ammo. (Nobody ended up hurt.)
The other spent a month in the hospital after being shot, two other officers with him were also shot and wounded, and a fourth officer there killed.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t officers or even entire departments that are too trigger happy, but that many places in the US fundamentaly require armed officers ready to shoot someone to stay alive.
The typical playbook for Suicide by Cop involves involves attempting a deadly attack on a police officer. In a world with perfect police in which police officers only used deadly force when threatened with deadly force, this would still result the attacker being shot.
So while there are real problems with policing in America, I don’t see the popularity of suicide by cop being the result of trigger happy police shooting innocent people.
Suicide by cop often involves drawing a gun on said cop. You don't need to be trigger happy or unaccountable to shoot someone who's pretending to try to shoot you.
In the rest of the developed world police seem to be pretty good at it without slaying unarmed people left and right.
In various other countries they cannot draw their guns or even carry them.
Just like bodyguards protecting their customers, they are paid to protect citizens - even by risking their lives - that's why they get paid.
The idea that cops are trigger happy is ignorant, if that were even remotely true the number of shootings and deaths by cop would be so high as to not warrant news stories. As in, it would be common place. Fortunately we are far from it being commonplace that shootings and even weapon discharges by cops are news worthy.
Yes we have bad cops just like we have bad actors in many other occupations. The difference is that we don't put people in other occupations in harms way on a day to day basis. that isn't to say being a cop is the most hazardous job you can have, work place deaths are higher for many other fields. We also cannot say that cops cause an unreasonable number of deaths by their actions, if anything we need to account for all the deaths they prevent by their training and mere presence.
I'm very confident that every one of those police officers lives with that horror every single day. While I completely agree that mental health should be treated better and have more options available; you can never know if the person just wants to harm themselves or take the officer down too.