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Comment by plank_time | Hacker News Reader

The paranoid mentality that any call could kill you is the exact reason why so many unarmed black people are shot. If you can’t carry out a day’s work without the unreasonable fear that you will be shot, and any action makes you “fear for your life” so that why you emptied your clip into a car, then you shouldn’t be a cop. Cops needs to have cooler heads and this should be measured and verified before allowing them to carry weapons.

I’ve heard that ex-military make the best cops because they are used to dangerous situations without panicking. I fully support this because they know that they aren’t GI Joe.

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> I’ve heard that ex-military make the best cops because they are used to dangerous situations without panicking.

This is a good point and one I think is missed. Police really do need more training. When departments started phasing out choke holds I think it was a mistake. The hold itself was not the problem, but lack of proper training.

I've read some proposals that want every police officer to be at a minimum a blue belt in BJJ. For perspective, that's a year or so of training. Someone going 3x/week means they will have 20-30 simulated fights PER week. That's how you get someone to stay relaxed in a stressful and physical situation.

Of course, when weapons are involved it's a different situation. But, in unarmed situation a person with a year+ of BJJ training will easily control the other person with little danger to either of them. And the LEO, knowing this, will not reach for their weapon first.

Maybe ex-combat military, but the vast majority of military never see combat.

Police departments increasingly utilize military gear and tactics. I wish they would also "take" the UCMJ, rules of engagement, and Geneva conventions.

Except "so many unarmed black people are shot" is a lie. A larger per-capita percentages of unarmed whites are shot than blacks.

Could you point me in the general direction of a source? I would like to find more about this.

The data do not support your statement. Using the search term "per capita police violence deaths" on DDG in private mode, the links below were results #2 and #4. (Results #1 and #3 were comparisons by country, and are not included here from irrelevance. This is not a case of cherry-picking results.)

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-cle...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123070/police-shootings...

Blacktriangle was specifically talking about unarmed people shot by police. Your links are about shootings that include both armed and unarmed people.

Got a source on that? I do, but it doesn't bear out your assertion:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

> Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 371 civilians having been shot, 71 of whom were Black, in the first five months of 2021. In 2020, there were 1,021 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 there were 999 fatal shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 36 fatal shootings per million of the population as of May 2021.

Note that your source is for all shootings, and they specifically make a claim about "unarmed" individuals being shot, the implication that while black individuals are more likely to be killed by police, those killed are more likely to be armed and potentially violent.

I don't have a source supporting or disproving that claim, I'm just pointing out that the source you provided doesn't address the claim they are making.

Fair point, thanks for noting

Even if it's true that more unarmed whites per-capita are shot, there's still an unacceptable amount of unarmed blacks that are shot (a threshold I would argue is crossed roughly at "any of them", but certainly before where it stands now). That data point should be used in the context of "it's even worse than you think", not the opposite.

Absolute death by police in 2020: white 457, black 241. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

Population: white 197M, black 40M. https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Race-and-Ethnicit...

Per-capita: close to 3 times as many black people shot. I couldn't find clear statistics for unarmed victims. Please post if they're much different.

This site says it's normally close to 2x more unarmed white people shot, so it would still be less per capita. It's still a relatively small number for both; a mid-teens amount of unarmed black people, and a mid to high 20s unarmed white people.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Note that we are not sure how many folks are killed by police every year let alone the demographics of those deaths. But even the data we have doesn't look good.

https://policeviolencereport.org/

US police departments are not required to provide this information. It must be collected ad hoc by outside orgs.

Many reports will (I kid you not) list sickle cell disease as cause of death during a police stop.

You used to be able to get data on armed vs. unarmed at killedbypolice.net, although it took a bit of effort. The site was simply a chronological list of all the known police killings in the US, for each giving name, age, race, gender, location, and linking to news stories covering the killing.

Unfortunately that site shut down, someone else got the name, and it now redirects to RoBarGuns.com, a gun review and buying guides site.

You can still get the data from archive.org here [1]. That has all the 2020 shootings up through July 20th, and has links for prior years back to 2014, and the last month of 2013.

I remember a couple years ago going through the then previous year and picking something like 50 at random (via a random number generator) and looking into the details, but I don't remember if I specifically took note of armed vs. unarmed.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200723033637/https://killedbyp...

https://policeviolencereport.org/

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

Those aren't unarmed, though (you pointed that out but I wanted to make it clear)

One of the most pernicious myths about police shootings is that officers shoot unarmed black men at an alarming rate, when in fact just 2% of the people who were killed by an officer were unarmed and black. Since the beginning of 2015, law enforcement officers across the country have actually killed 33 more unarmed white people than unarmed black people.

Any number more than 0 is too many. "Cops shoot unarmed white people too" is not the defense of cops you think it is.

You are correct, however it does frame the issue differently, i.e. we need to find out how to not shoot people vs all cops are racist.

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