A Distinctly American Problem, Police Killings, Needs Systematic Investigation | Hacker News Reader

A Distinctly American Problem, Police Killings, Needs Systematic Investigation

theatlantic.com

I believe a big reason for this problem is in how we discuss these events. We need to stop questioning whether a killing is justified or murder, we need to instead think in terms of competence.

No one thinks the airline mechanic who didn't tighten down a bolt was trying to cause a plane crash. No one thinks the surgeon who left a tool inside a patient was trying to kill them. No one believes the engineer who didn't account for wind wanted a bridge to collapse. We all know these were mistakes - but mistakes still have consequences. The mechanic who can't keep track of the bolts they've tightened isn't going to remain a mechanic for long, the surgeon who can't keep track of their tools won't be a surgeon for long, the engineer who doesn't double check their math won't be designing things for long. In any profession where people can die if you do things incorrectly, incompetence must be weeded out quickly and making a wrong decision, even without the slightest malice, must come at great personal cost to the professional and the institutions to which they belong. If one of these professionals ever acted like they intended to cause harm, we would unanimously label them monsters.

It is absurd that we do not treat the policing profession the same way. It is absurd that anyone should consider "it was a mistake" to be a valid defense. Whether you're knocking on the wrong door, or grabbing the wrong weapon, or misjudging whether someone can survive you kneeling on them, there is life-threatening incompetence. And just like with any other profession, if you find someone being incompetent you need to find out how they were in a position to be. Why wasn't there a procedure to double check the address? Why did no one question buying tasers with a pistol grip that could not be distinguished easily from a gun? Why did no one step in and tell the officer their use of force method was not compliant with department policy? Heads should be rolling at multiple levels just from asking how this happened before we ever get to why. We should never even need to consider the appalling possibility that some of these tragedies may not have been entirely unintentional.

This topic routinely turns into a culture war between those for and against the police, and thus nothing gets done. Progress requires transforming it into a discussion of police efficacy, which no sane person can oppose.

Progress requires transforming it into a discussion of police efficacy.

The problem is, once you look at it as a problem of efficacy, it becomes pretty obvious that police killings are already quite rare compared to other failures of policing. There are around 15,000 murders a year in the US, and around 50 cases where a police officer kills an unarmed person. If you are purely concerned with the statistical impact of the police, it makes a lot more sense to focus on how the police can prevent more crimes, rather than focusing on how the police can kill fewer people.

There is an argument that hiring more police will reduce crime. But hiring more police is expensive. Perhaps we could save money by training police officers less, and use the money saved to hire more police officers. One cost of that could be an increased rate of police mistakenly killing people. But if it reduces crime, perhaps that is worth it. Or perhaps not, perhaps the answer simply is better police training.

As you say, this topic almost always turns into a culture war. I don't think many people on either side are willing to take a neutral view, like one life equals one life whether it's someone shot by the police, or someone shot by a random civilian, or someone dying of the flu. I believe once people do take a neutral view they will realize that police killings should be deprioritized as an issue because they are not very frequent.

Killing fewer people than literal murderers is not an accomplishment worth celebrating. Similarly the odds of dying from a poorly performed surgery are much lower than the odds of dying from an untreated condition, but that doesn't mean we should ignore medical malpractice. Plane crashes may be rare but that does not make plane crashes acceptable, and likewise for police killings.

Speaking in vague generalities about numbers of police and budgets and training is exactly the problem. Planes don't crash because maintaining planes is expensive, they crash because someone made a mistake, and corrective action should ensure that mistake can not be repeated. If you notice that bolts aren't tight enough, you don't have the mechanics promise to tighten them better, you make them use a torque wrench. Likewise if a veteran officer can grab a pistol and not immediately realize it's not a taser, you can talk all day about training and de-escalation and heat of the moment but the fact is some idiot thought buying tasers with pistol grips that felt the same as the department's guns was a good idea. That decision was not a judgement call made in the heat of the moment, there was no ethical calculus trading some lives for more, it was simply incompetence that killed a man. In any other industry there would be no one trying to make excuses to support the making of such a decision.

"Killing fewer people than literal murderers is not an accomplishment worth celebrating."

You're straw-manning and you know it. This is exactly what the above commenter was referring to.

No, trying to compare the murder rate to the police killing rate and thus misconstruing the original proposal as focusing on police killings instead of preventing murder (when I had made no such claim) is the the straw man.

GP comment made the claim that since fewer people are killed by police than murderers that therefore actions that decrease murder rates increase efficacy even if they also increase police killings. My comment refutes that.

I don't see anywhere in the comment where the individual suggested less deaths were worth celebrating as you so eloquently put it. In fact, I don't think comment says anything that would make a person believe police shootings are a good thing. Alas, you're attacking his arguments like he supports killing innocent people....

I take it english isn't your first language.

Celebrated in this context doesn't mean throwing a party or rejoicing, it is being used here as a synonym for praised or lauded. And specifically, saying something like this should not be celebrated is meant to convey that this ought to be considered normal as opposed to exceptionally good. Most people would consider fewer deaths to be good, but in this cases there hasn't been any reduction - these are just two different sources of deaths.

No one at any point was saying police shootings are a good thing. The other poster is saying that dealing with police shootings should be a lower priority than dealing with murder, and that there is conflict between these goals. I on the other hand am saying that there is not conflict between the goals and that their priority is irrelevant. I believe his method to be ineffective, not ill-intentioned.

My English is just fine you just don't seem to understand what you're writing I guess.

I know exactly what you meant by celebrated. You think I thought you were talking about throwing a literal party and I'm the one that doesn't understand English? Huh? The commenter most certainly wasn't saying police shootings should be praised. Try again. You're just trying to twist words to support your silly straw-man and it's not working.

> No one thinks the airline mechanic who didn't tighten down a bolt was trying to cause a plane crash.

I dunno, if I found out a significant numbers of airline mechanics, their supervisors, and the people who investigate crashes were all members of groups hostile to certain airports, and crashes due to maintenance failures kept happening to flights to and from those airports without significant accountability, I might start thinking that, yeah, there are some problems with aircraft maintenance that go beyond neutral competence issues, and involve, if not necessarily intentionality, at a minimum bias-driven focusses neglect.

Of course, there’s probably a reason that crash investigation universally involves people with no close common chain of command and operational dependence with pilots, airline mechanics, etc.

I think you misinterpret my comment. I'm saying if you eliminate everyone who does the job incorrectly, you also get rid of the people who intentionally do it incorrectly.

> I think you misinterpret my comment. I'm saying if you eliminate everyone who does the job incorrectly, you also get rid of the people who intentionally do it incorrectly.

I think you misinterpret my comment, which, is suggesting exactly why that doesn’t happen in policing in the status quo, and therefore what needs to change to achieve it.

No I got what you were saying, it just doesn't make sense as a response to my comment unless you believe that all of society secretly wants police killings. I'm not talking about cops holding themselves accountable, I'm talking about people holding cops accountable.

You could start with police training:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-man-who-teaches-ou...

The uniformity of police violence is almost completely unexamined in the large news outlets. Why do our tax dollars go towards "killology" bullshit?

That was my point that apparently nobody got. Cops in the USA are often trained to deploy more violence than is necessary.

People are very unaware of the egregiousness of this "training".

Don't know why this is downvoted. We have gradually increased training and qualifications of the police force in Victoria (Australia) and from what I understand it's been quite effective at reducing police violence.

Probably because in the US, often when one of these killings happens, it comes out that the officer who killed had in fact passed the trainings put in place the last time an officer killed someone. If you’re not following these things super closely you could be forgiven for not knowing this, but for those of us who do, the suggestion of “just train them better” generally feels pretty hollow at this point. It might work elsewhere, but it hasn’t worked here.

I agree it shouldn’t have been downvoted, but the point OP is making is different from your point.

In the US, the most famous police trainer is a guy that basically tells police that they are justified in shooting almost anyone in any circumstance and even developed his own pseudoscience around it. That’s what the podcast is about.

Except police killings are not a "distinctly" American problem. Just because it doesn't happen as often in other wealthier western countries doesn't mean it only happens in the US.

Moreover, statistically it's still very rare despite the increase in sensationalized media coverage.

> Just because it doesn't happen as often in other wealthier western countries doesn't mean it only happens in the US.

Ok, but you're looking at the rank #1 member of a power law distribution.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/

> Moreover, statistically it's still very rare despite the increase in sensationalized media coverage.

Police killings are just the tip of the spear. The US also locks up an enormous swath of its population... comparable to El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Rawanda... even 2x the rate of the country we're told is so dangerously authoritarian: Iran.

Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately. The only way in recent history the US managed to lower its violent crime rate was by locking up more people via the 1994 crime bill, which is now panned as "racist". America has an underincarceration problem, and is seeing double to triple digit increases in murder over the past year following bail reform and prosecutorial discretion putting more future recidivists into the streets instead of jail.

If you believe the us has a more violent population than anywhere else in the world, have you ever bothered to interrogate as to why that is?

Or could it be the us has an issue with whay and for How long we allow police and our court systems to punish people? Could it be the us is simply over policed?

No shortage of research on this. I ask you take the time to look into this

Perhaps we’re subject to demoralization and whipped into fear and agitation by our own news media, goaded into street violence, justice warriors fighting law enforcement, our culture more or less in tatters. I doubt all that’s caused by over policing seems like cultural social problems to me. But if you believe that overpolicing is the root problem, the easiest way to reduce policing is not to call them. All it would take is a concerted effort in the high crime areas to boycott the police; fewer crimes reported leads to fewer cops.

Otherwise, politicians are always going to feel obligated to add police to areas where folks are getting robbed, raped, murdered, etc... Seems underreporting of crime, citizens boycotting 911, is the only way forward if the problem is overpolicing. Am I mistaken?

> Am I mistaken?

Yes, we can defund them.

Here in Pennsylvania, numerous rural (read: white) communities have disbanded their local police departments. Lack of tax dollars and, as I like to think, it's stupid to pay for overtime, SUVs and army gear so that police can harass people for traffic violations and drug possession.

The problem now is that these communities don't pay any extra for state police emergency coverage... so they get to have their cake and eat it, too. (That is, they get to whine about how "defund police" is a communist plot while everyone else pays for their emergency coverage... money which is supposed to be spent on road repairs.)

Places without high crime (armed robbery, murder,etc) can decrease policing because those areas don’t have high crime. Those are not the areas where police violence is an issue. So your solution effectively does nothing.

I would argue that police in inner cities are a bit like the drunken reveler looking for their keys under the street light because they can't see anything elsewhere.

Could certainly use a few more detectives poking around Wall Street...

think a bit more on why lots of police could possibly generate high crime rates

If more police _caused_ more crime to occur you would see it quite clearly in in small wealthy suburban communities where over policing is very real (think about places where the police mostly focus on truant high school kids and rich people with domestic disturbances). Rather, police violence is a problem in dangerous high crime areas like the Oakland Bart station, not in undeniably over policed areas like Beverly Hills. As long as a lot of violent crime is reported in these places, politicians will be obligated to have police there to protect the public. Bart without police won’t fly with anyone. You can defund the cops in Beverly Hills, for sure, but that seems counter productive if your concern is police violence. Private security will just move in a soak up those dollars with even less accountability to the public.

There's a very good, entertaining movie that is great rebuttal to this take. It's called Beverly Hills Cop. give it a watch and then reread what you wrote here lol

You're saying that the US, which is also number one on incarcerated population per capita, doesn't put enough people in jail?

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

If recidivism is the issue, then the way the US treats prisons, prisoners, and especially ex-convicts is the source. The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues.

Yes.

>The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues.

The problem is, we're not doing that anymore, and crime is returning to its worst levels in history, as bad as the 70s and 80s. A man on parole for killing his mother just beat an Asian woman half to death in NYC. There's currently a manhunt for a man in Texas who raped a 16 year old, spent a little over two weeks in jail before bailing out some paltry sum, then proceeded to shoot 2-3 people. This is a daily reality.

> Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately.

I know! Wage thieves, environmental criminals, bankers, the Sacklers...

I'd love to lock them up too.

This always makes me think the people who scream this have never been to jail/prison.

I'm sure solutions exist, I'm sure what we have now doesn't work.

We need rehabilitation instead of the 'gladiator schools' we have now.

America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The historical reduction in crime started before 1994, so there's not good evidence for a causal connection (controversially, Dubner and Levitt in Freakonomics argued it was Roe v Wade that was largely responsible).

Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems. It would be much cheaper to tackle the problem at its source: structural racism and poverty.

>Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems

Agreed. Any chance they're committing more crimes? Or over half of all murders?

We can control for poverty, which has been found to have a much weaker correlation with criminality than race. Systemic racism is a meaningless act of circular reasoning, because it seems to be defined only by statistical disparities, which themselves are attributed to systemic racism.

American racism is clearly systemic/institutionalized...

>And according to exoneration data, innocent African American suspects are 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of murder than innocent white suspects.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840501

Unfortunately spreading misleading information without second thought is yet another feature of white supremacist systems, not a bug.

From your source:

"Judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people. A major cause of the high number of black murder exonerations is the high homicide rate in the black community—a tragedy that kills many African Americans and sends many others to prison. Innocent defendants who are falsely convicted and exonerated do not contribute to this high homicide rate. They— like the families of victims who are killed—are deeply harmed by murders committed by others."

7x more murders per capita, 7x higher rates of false conviction. It's simple scaling. That means the system is being perfectly equitable.

>7x more murders per capita

Source?

> Official misconduct is more common in murder convictions that lead to exonerations of African American defendants

> 87% of black exonerees that were sentenced to death were victims of official misconduct

You should read the rest of the report because they make it clear institutional foulplay is a key component of the overcriminalization.

Disagreement with the systemic racist ideology is a feature of white supremacy! How convenient!

Unfortunately, people in cults get brainwashed and don't know it either. Here we have a prime example of how Jamestown and certain 1930s youth programs came into existence. Which color kool-aid are you going with?

Fallacies of elimination are fun...

Try forming an actual argument instead of just labeling everyone you disagree with as a white supremacist. Someone who so freely throws the word racist around, clearly doesn't think it holds much meaning.

- Define 'structural racism' and why it forces blacks to be far more criminal and violent than the rest of the population.

- Can poverty explain, for example, why blacks in Wisconsin commit 2/3 of all violent crime while they are only 7% of the state's population? There are wholly White and Native American cities in Wisconsin that are dirt poor - the poorest - and yet they are not committing insanely high levels of crime.

Criminalizing an underclass isn't a new concept, its been done in many places to many races around the world with varying success.

>why it forces blacks to be far more criminal

I think the fact that UK blacks commit crimes at a far lower rate than US whites throws a wrench in this type of oversimplification of the racial landscape.

Citation badly needed.

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/black-murder-victims-and-susp...

3% of the population and 13% of the murders in the UK.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41887-020-00055-y

5-6x homicide victimization rate vs whites, and 24x in males 18-24.

These multiples are fairly consistent globally.

You may have misread the original statement. I'm comparing the US white crime rate to the UK black crime rate.

It is clear US whites are far more likely to commit crimes.

Source? It doesn't seem to be true for homicide. The US white rate is consistently between 3-4 per 100k, and the UK black rate is often above 5 per 100k.

Either way, all this proves is that the UK is overall a safer country than the US. But the racial disparities within each country are remarkably similar.

It also points to the fact that a privileged (at least in regards to wealth/opportunity) race in the US commits crimes at the same or higher rate (depending on category) than an underprivileged race in the UK.

We can't remove bias and false criminalization from stats but the contrast between two sister countries is interesting nonetheless.

If the simplified overarching premise is "Blacks are uniquely criminal regardless of circumstance", why am I more likely to be a victim of criminality in a room filled with 1000 white Americans than 1000 black Brits?

You still haven't provided a source.

Are you arguing that Iran is more safe due to the fact they lock up less people?

You've provided a list of obviously more dangerous countries and then tried to use that as example of why incarceration, police, the system is corrupt in the US....

I'm confused. You think less police and less incarceration will suddenly make the US a less dangerous place?

he's not, but I will. our prison system creates repeat offenders, and makes violent offenders out of previous nonviolent offenders. less policing and less prison will absolutely make the US a safer place

Stats and facts please. Sounds like a lot conjecture from certain sources pushing an agenda.

There are very specific areas where this violence keeps happening and to claim it's due to the fact that they're being locked up more seems pretty dubious and simplistic to me.

> Are you arguing that Iran is more safe due to the fact they lock up less people?

No, I'm stating the fact that the nytimes (and the like) will repeat US gov propaganda about how Iran/terrorist-org-du-jour is so authoritarian that we need to "fight them over there to protect our way of life over here"... while nytimes (and the like) completely ignores the story of how our police are trained. And if you google "killology" for ten seconds, I think you'd agree a great way to describe it is "authoritarian".

> You think less police and less incarceration will suddenly make the US a less dangerous place?

No, it will take time. I mean there are entire generations of black males missing from their familial units. That kind of trauma don't heal "suddenly".

Not sure how you look at charts like this and not see that is is a rather unique issue to one country

https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/policekillings_rates....

You realize that chart only shows 10 1st world countries right and conspicuously very specific wealthy nations? Seems like someone is pushing an agenda.

Maybe try a source that calculates every country? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...

lmao "Uh, actually, the US is ranked the same as syria and brazil, sounds like someone has an AGENDA" isn't the red hot rebuttal you think it is

I agree the US has a violence problem on par with third world and war torn nations. However, the US is neither of these. Why does the violence persist?

It's statistically less rare than airline flight disasters, and yet those rightfully get plastered all over the news.

https://policeviolencereport.org/

1,127 people killed by police in the US in 2020.

https://www.airfleets.net/crash/fatalities_year.htm

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra...

Somewhere between 422 and 561 people killed in 2018, a year I specifically anti-cherry-picked as being particularly high within the last few years.

At what point is cops killing people "statistically significant" for you? Because many people think that should be pretty close to zero. Especially when, as indicated in the first link I have below:

* Only 16 cases, 1.42%, resulted in any kind of judicial action.

* 601 of those cases were "police responding to suspected non-violent offenses or cases where no crime was reported."

* "121 people were killed after police stopped them for a traffic violation."

I think you’re picking the wrong stats here. The article says that 55 unarmed people were killed by police last year. If armed people are killed by police in a shootout, that isn’t the same sort of obvious tragedy that a plane crash is.

Statistics around this are hard to verify. Chicago just had a 13 yr old killed. Police thought he was pointing a gun. Toy gun found on scene. But camera footage showed no gun and hands up when he was shot.

Is that classified as an armed or unarmed shooting?

Philando Castile had a gun is his car of which he informed the officer. Was that an armed or unarmed shooting?

The source I provided has the following:

* 80 unarmed.

* 65 "armed" with a vehicle.

* 180 armed with a knife or other sharp object.

* 59 armed with "another object".

* 670 armed with a gun.

* 73 undetermined.

So sure, let's just handwave that all those armed with a gun and also undetermined were justified self-defense, with whatever definition that carries. That still leaves 384 deaths.

See my other response here regarding my thoughts around "justified" killings:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26865592

It's only significant if those people were shot when it wasn't necessary. I think you'll find in the majority of these cases the shootings were more than justified and that includes many of the recent shootings/killings. If you want of fix the issue maybe try focusing on the actual problem which is the fact that these people end up in a life where they feel they need to be criminals to survive. Fix the socio-economic problems that cause this instead of what happens after they're already stuck in that lifestyle. You see this same sort of ridiculous logic in gun control as well. I'm sorry but the problem isn't as simple as taking away guns or blaming police. When people use this narrative I have question whether they actually even care about helping these people or if they want to just feel good and lie to themselves by picking out something they can easily blame. Focusing on police reform and gun control is such a white elitist argument. They can focus on a couple easy issues, pat themselves on the back and return to their lifestyles of luxury without even thinking about minorities afterwards.

Additionally, here are the leading causes of death in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Notice that unjustified police shootings aren't even close in numbers? Would you like to have a discussion about diabetes and how we fix it? Probably not, because it's fat shaming to discuss that but the extremely rare police shooting "epidemic" is what we should be scared of, not the fact that there's an actual obesity epidemic.

I think it's important to define terms. what, in your estimation, qualifies as a "justified killing"? Self defence? does the aggressive party have to be capable of lethal force in that case?

I would also like to point out that diabetes is something that an individual has some long-term control over, whereas it takes one cop with a hot trigger finger and some bad luck to get shot. The two are not remotely equivalent.

Isn't it basically legally defined already? Brandishing a weapon at a police officer seems like a pretty good bar to me.

"I would also like to point out that diabetes is something that an individual has some long-term control over, whereas it takes one cop with a hot trigger finger and some bad luck to get shot. The two are not remotely equivalent."

Oh they are plenty equivalent. Staying away from criminal activity and obeying police orders are certainly something you can control individually. That will keep you from being shot by a police officer 99+ % of the time.

What is a "justified" killing? Police are not a jury, and they are not executioners. I understand self-defense, but often these claims are made when the other person was a perceived threat and not a demonstrated threat. And that to me is a gaping issue. Police are supposed to be trained in appropriate use of lethal force, and that should mean that they are answering lethal force with lethal force. Not meeting the potential for lethal force with lethal force -- that definition can apply to practically everyone if twisted enough.

And "we" do talk about diabetes, mostly in the form of universal healthcare and drug costs. Why can't people get proper healthcare? Why does insulin cost hundreds of dollars a month?

They are in fact executioners when they deem it necessary for public safety and we have given them that option by law. Brandishing a weapon or acting violently doesn't seem like a "perceived" threat to me, it seems like an actual threat. I guess debate comes down to whether you want police to be useful or not.

"And "we" do talk about diabetes, mostly in the form of universal healthcare and drug costs. Why can't people get proper healthcare? Why does insulin cost hundreds of dollars a month?"

This is the same logic again. Focusing on what happens after someone gets in to such a bad state they need to take insulin. Why are they becoming so fat and eating such bad things that they need insulin at all? I'm so tired of the band-aid fixes. Healthcare doesn't fix shitty lifestyle choices.

If we gave them the power to kill via laws then we can take it away the same way.

>This is the same logic again. Focusing on what happens after someone gets in to such a bad state they need to take insulin. Why are they becoming so fat and eating such bad things that they need insulin at all? I'm so tired of the band-aid fixes. Healthcare doesn't fix shitty lifestyle choices.

People can have diabetes without being fat and unhealthy. And did you just say Healthcare doesnt matter, its the people making shitty choices that gives them crippling medical bills?

Your ignorance of the issues and privilege are showing something fierce.

Policing needs to be fixed. Healthcare needs to be fixed. Because something works for you doesn't mean it works for the general public.

"People can have diabetes without being fat and unhealthy."

Yes and that's called type 1 diabetes which is genetic and obviously not what we're talking about. Type 2 is a result of poor lifestyle choices that need to be dealt with before it gets so bad that the they need to take insulin to fix it. If you really want to help these people then that's how you do it, not by throwing millions at drugs afterwards. People that get to that point still have a lower life expectancy regardless of how much money you throw into "free" insulin.

"If we gave them the power to kill via laws then we can take it away the same way."

Sure and they will be less effective. Would you like to be the one to explain why a mass shooter wasn't stopped because we told police they don't have the right to use deadly force? You're not thinking this through.

Distinctly American

At this very moment there's got to be at least 100 countries with far worse police abuse than the US. Historically, any soviet/socialist country in the last 50 years would have been far, far worse.

Either journalists have never left the US, and know nothing about the world, and history, or they're willfully misleading. Don't know what's worse.

The most constructive way that the federal government responds to avoidable loss of life is arguably in its treatment of aviation. Whenever a plane crash occurs, big or small, headline-grabbing or obscure, a team of experts is dispatched to reconstruct exactly what happened. The aim isn’t to advance a legal process or punish wrongdoers, but to figure out which changes, if any, could prevent it from happening again.

We got trials. We're having one. And a Democratic representative went to the streets to ask for push, in case the outcome wasn't the desired one.

The author doesn't want investigation. The author wants an outcome.

Funny, "Police Killings" sounds like the issue is police being killed. For such a verbose language we sure do communicate dissatisfactorily.

I thought 'suicide by cop' was the preferred nomenclature.

Suicide by cop is different, and refers to when the person killed wanted to die at the hands of the police.

No idea how common it is, I’ve only seen it in media.

A better term for it might be “Police Lynching”. Most of these incidents seem to revolve around a black (but not necessarily) person failing to show the correct level of subservience to a police officer and provoking a visceral reaction of extreme violence. Not saying all of them are racist, but to some police, everyone is the wrong color (not blue).

>A better term for it might be “Police Lynching”.

No, it wouldn't. That is unnecessary hyperbole. Unjustified police killings, instances where the police were at fault, are a rarity. The big problem here is not lack of police training nor overreach, but violent, uncooperative suspects.

>failing to show the correct level of subservience

While there are some grotesque examples of that, like with Daniel Shaver, most police killings, the overwhelming majority of them, are due to them being attacked by someone or being confronted with an armed suspect who refuses to disarm.

>Not saying all of them are racist, but to some police, everyone is the wrong color (not blue).

Are there any actual instances of racism being the driving impetus for police killings at any time in recent decades? I cannot think of any offhand.

I would love to read your sources. can you provide them?

I had previously referenced the Washington Post's police shootings database, but that is now paywalled. I was referring to that stats stating that of the roughly 1000 police killings in 2019, something like 50 involved unarmed suspects. Of those 50, almost all of them involved those suspects attacking the police and lethal force being justified.

The Botham Jeans and Daniel Shavers, as horrifically egregious as those cases are, are relatively rare.

The first question I have about this is the evidence. If the police are the only ones giving evidence/testimony, then their findings are suspect, as they have the best incentive in the world to lie and fabricate evidence. And it's not just a theory, as there is actually body cam footage showing police planting evidence and lying.

The second question I have is, why are these incidents happening? What is causing these attacks, and why were they armed or felt the need to use their arms? Especially if they keep happening predominantly to black people? There's quite a bit of evidence that when a white person is armed and attacks the police, the police give the guy a break. Whereas when it's a black person, they're more likely to antagonize the suspect and then shoot first.

The racial element is very clear, black men are overwhelmingly more likely to be lynched by police than white men: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

The infiltration of polices forces by white supremacist gangs is also well documented: https://www.justsecurity.org/70507/white-supremacist-infiltr...

If you are claiming that these attacks are not racially motivated then to what cause do you assign them? The fact that they sometimes kill white people too doesn’t prove that they aren’t racist, it just shows that they are completely out of control. Half of them belong in jail and the other hal need to undergo dramatic reform.

What about police killings in the sense of officers getting shot? Plenty of sad cases.

I'm not sure there will be any meaningful change without making police accountable for their crimes. That's part of what fuels the rage against the system—not only are the police killing people, but everybody knows they probably won't be held accountable. Until we start doing that, nothing will improve.

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