Comment by TrainedMonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrainedMonkey | Hacker News Reader

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Here is small sample of that data. I went through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforce... and counted incidents by hand:

attack: 8

feeling + weapons: 1

fleeing: 2^

weapons: 6

mistake: 3*

^ - cop charged with manslaughter

* - a robbery suspect lied about a gun. - mistook cell phone for a gun. - pulled out toy submachinegun

a. This adds up to 20, so I missed one. I got no idea which one.

b. Allegedly every mistake killing had at least one mitigating circumstance (And only case of a guy just fleeing and being shot got cop charged with manslaughter).

I did a quick perusal of other months in 2012, and they look similar. According to wikipedia cops killed 587 people in 2012 [1], at the same time 120-127 cops were killed [2]. If pattern established in my quick count holds, then a U.S. cop is more likely to be killed than kill somebody who: does not flee from or point things at cops (especially things that might look like guns).

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforce... [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_police_officer...

P.S. I am really floored this is how numbers worked out. I would love detailed analysis/count/breakdown of these killing by law enforcement numbers.

You seem to be missing the point entirely, in an effort to defend the honor of the police.

Hint: The point you are suppose to get here is not that the police are terrible.

I am not saying anything. What I did is try to get some numbers together and was astounded by a result. I am not sure how I am making a point that cops are bad.

> I am not sure how I am making a point that cops are bad.

You certainly are not making that point. Far from it.

I think you and I are operating with different definitions of word bad. I took your comment to mean, that the fact that cops are about* as likely to die as to kill someone by mistake, means we got badly trained cops. Now I see there is more than way to read that comment.

* I made up number that was used for that based on a very small sample. Please let me know if I messed up somewhere, I am quite curious about it.

I like this breakdown as it shows the problem with the title of the article "You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist".

For me at least I'm very unlikely to be attacking cops any time soon...

Was going through the summaries too. Problem is the mitigating circumstances stats are useless. An officer literally has their life on the line when writing their report. They'd have to be just about insane to not say they thought the person had a gun, moved their hands towards their waistbands, made a furtive movement, etc. Maybe the data is good for historical trends but that's it.

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