Police fatally shot 1,055 people in 2021, highest total since tracking began | Hacker News Reader

Police fatally shot 1,055 people in 2021, highest total since tracking began

washingtonpost.com

27 pointsjbegley30 comments

It's too bad they stopped creating the interactive version of this like they used to[1] (unless I missed it). It was really instructive to visualize some of the not so obvious truths in the data. For instance, white males are more likely to be shot by police than their percentage of the overall population would suggest (along with black males and hispanic males).

Whereas asian males, and females of all races (including black females) are less likely to be killed than their percentage of the population would suggest. This isn't the narrative portrayed in the media, and I wonder if this is what led to them changing how they present the data.. It suggests that the problem is actually gender-based, not race-based.

Interestingly enough, it also shows a significant correlation to violent crime rates by demographic groups (white, black and hispanic males committing violent crime at higher rates than asian males and females of all races, which would likely lead to more potentially dangerous interactions with police.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...

For comparison: 14 or 15 killings by police in Germany in 2019 (depending on the source). Germany has ~80 million inhabitants, compared to the ~330 million in the US, so you'd expect roughly 60 killings by police in the US if the level of violence was similar.

The English Wikipedia entry lists the circumstances for each killing by German police forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

The German version talks of 15 killings for 2019.

There are so many guns in the USA the police simply shoot first and ask questions later rather than trying to de-escalate and become victims in the process. We just had two cops shot dead in the Bronx responding to a domestic dispute between a middle aged man and his elderly mother. This is the grim reality we've been building in the USA.

Number of guns isn't the issue IMHO.

The number of people who don't follow basic instructions is. "Put your hands on the wheel. Or put your hands up.

Also, the number who want to argue and resist. If you've been told to drop the gun on the ground in front of you, but choose to wave it instead, you should expect you will be disarmed, even if it results in your death. Reaction time kills.

Do you have data that supports this?

I've watched numerous bodycam videos where people were told to do something to make themselves and the officers safer. They mostly show the ones that go bad. How often do you see a posted video where a person laid down the weapon and followed instructions? Rarely, because they rarely go bad.

Not saying there aren't screwups, because obviously there are. Amir Locke (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWCpkPBKFR0) for example appears to be a terrible result of a poor practice, No knock warrants.

This one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ1mo-ecOzI) is an example of not following direction.

There is no shortage of evidence if you look for it instead of having it spoon-fed by the media. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cops+shoots

I've been watching https://www.youtube.com/c/PoliceActivity/videos (publisher of police body-cam deadly-force-used incident videos) for a long time, and from that sampling it seems that the number of police shootings (a significant proportion of which result in a non-police fatality) that can be reasonably labeled "suicide by cop" (or similar mental health related) is disturbingly high. A recurring scenario: 911 call of suspect brandishing a knife -> suspect charges responding police officers while brandishing the knife in an attacking manner and yelling "shoot me". Police policy and training clearly allows (supports) officers in this situation to shoot their attacker, and also clearly enables them to continue firing until there is no doubt that said attacker is absolutely no threat to anyone in the vicinity.

> There is no shortage of evidence if you look for it instead of having it spoon-fed by the media. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cops+shoots

literally all of the videos in that search are coming from broadcast media sources. have you considered that police are also much less likely to release bodycam footage to the media if it portrays them in a negative light?

That's not data though, that's anecdotes. A handful of videos is hardly a fair sampling of a thousand incidents per year. The videos that percolate up are going to be the exceptional circumstances either way. Are there hard numbers you can point to that are published by folks other than the departments themselves?

What if you're asleep in your bed and the police burst in looking for someone else?

I'm sorry, but this sounds like someone who has never been to another country or seen how police works in other countries. I'm of course talking about comparable western countries (which are all way safer than the US, I believe). Instead of looking how the police could be improved you really think it's the people who interact with police?

It doesn't have anything to do with the lousy few weeks of training police get? The fact that they're often uneducated, the fact that bad behavior goes unpunished and everything else that is wrong with the US' system? It's the people?

I've been to Germany, Austria, England, Mexico, most of the Caribbean. What I've observed in other countries is a general higher level of civility and respect for police. People don't curse at them, generally. And police typically don't put up with what US police often do. You want the police to improve. I want society to improve. That includes the police. And improvement doesn't mean teaching everybody to whip out a cellphone to try and catch an officer not being perfect.

Just two in the UK during 2021.

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

The total number of police who were intentionally killed is also at at the highest since we started tracking as well.

> Police have fatally shot roughly 1,000 people in each of the past seven years, ranging from 958 in 2016 to last year’s high.

So not such a huge escalation, since "tracking began" in 2015.

If you stick with the article all the way to the bottom, it admits as much:

> The relative stability of the annual number of fatal shootings does not mean the total is unchangeable. Wheeler said societal interventions, such as new policies around use of force, could shift the total from its expected range.

Makes you wonder what agenda the headline writer is trying to push.

Probably the agenda of making a living.

Since coroners lie to protect Police Departments, the number is far higher than just ~1000/year. An earlier study showed the actual number murdered was roughly ~2000/year.

But journalists & academics lie to protect criminals, so perhaps that balances things out.

Do they? And if they do, you think a lesser sentence is equivalent to extrajudicially murdering unarmed civilians?

Strange world you seem to want to live in. I pray your family never becomes a victim of your nonsense.

ABC claims 2021 had the lowest with 888. Claims the data is from Washington posts database. I can't read the Post article, so which is it. Why the discrepancy? https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/US/fatal-pol...

Shows you how screwed the stat tracking on gun kills in America is; different sources give significantly different kill numbers.

Gunviolence claims it's more like ~1300 for police gun homicides in 2021 https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls.

I'm still trusting the CDC a bit more on these statistics then media outlets of varying political agendas.

Those are, generally speaking, not homicides. Killings, yes, but not unlawful.

"Let's solve this by blaming each other and then doing nothing" - America, yet again.

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