Some police killings most likely could have been avoided if not for the disrespect given to the police.
Some police killings most likely could have been avoided if not for the disrespect given to the police.
I picked a few at random from the July group, and the closest any came to someone being killed for "disrespecting" the police was a couple of them who were shot for pointing guns at police, which is certainly disrespectful.
I have no idea why you are getting down voted.
If you have a group of people that have right to kill someone for legitimate reason you can be sure, I think, that some of them will be less reluctant to exercise this right if they are distressed by disrespect shown towards them by this person.
Take this guy for example (I just read about one at random):
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-man-wounded-lapd...
Unarmed guy who riding skateboard down the street was killed because he didn't obey commands from police and they were unable to subdue him. Technically he was killed for using potentially lethal weapon on police officer. For me if disrespect and police vulnerability towards disrespect wasn't a factor there, the policemen would back off after initial trouble and keep an eye on the guy while waiting for back-up.
One of the first things you notice after for instance binning all the deaths for a couple randomly-selected months: the modal circumstance for police-involved fatality in the US is "engage in a confrontation with police with a lethal weapon". This remains the case even after you discard from that bin every story in which the involvement of the weapon is contested. For every case in which the victim's family, friends, or bystanders argue no weapon was involved, there are several --- often 4-5 --- in which the victim was clearly armed; roughly 1:3 knives:firearms.
Really, the modal circumstance for police-involved fatality in the US is "engage in a confrontation with police while illegally armed with a firearm".
It's easy to see why the data would show this but the news narrative wouldn't. People who wave guns at police officers are almost always in some way marginalized: they're mentally ill, and/or already deeply involved in criminality. Those stories are unfortunately not newsworthy. There's a bigtime availability bias involved in analyzing police policy from the news media.
I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. I think the attention being focused on police departments today is an unalloyed good.
The next thing you learn is that we really need to do something about tasers, because if there's a top 3 set of circumstances for death involving police officers, "death after tasing" is at least #3.
Since you've looked at the data, could this be survivorship bias? Is there data on how often tasers are used where firearms would've been, in the absence of tasers? It certainly could be that tasers reduce the number of people killed by police, but it sounds hard to measure that.
I'd say that it all still leaves plenty of room, given how many people are killed by the police and how few are legally executed to believe that there's no huge gap between number of people legally executed and number of people killed by the police as a result of policemen vulnerability towards disrespect and propensity to escalate confrontation to maintain authority.
Remember how they dissed Snowden when that story broke out? But then once he became a cause celebre, they came over to his side.