

German Police Used Only 85 Bullets Against People in 2011 - gscott
http://news.yahoo.com/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-155155175.html

======
lispm
A bit perspective:

Germany has around 82 million people.

Estimated 45 Million shooting weapons are in possession. Many of them illegal
(for example people inherited weapons from their parents but did not register
them, weapons were imported from East Europe or illegally left behind by the
leaving soviet army).

The ownnership is highly regulated. If you want to buy a weapon, you need a
permission a Waffenschein and/or Waffenbesitzkarte (owner registration). A
'Waffenschein' is a permission to carry a gun in public. This permission is
usually only given to Police, professional bodyguards or similar. A
Waffenbesitzkarte allows you to have a weapon for sports (or similar) and you
are only allowed to carry the weapon in a closed and sealed transport box
without ammunition. To get a Waffenbeitzkarte is not that easy - for example
if you are under 25 you need a psychological check.

Thus the only shooting weapons one ever sees in public is usually from the
police or a forester.

Around 20000 crimes are done with weapons. This is 0.3% of all crimes. At 4500
crimes there is some shooting.

In the statistics cited by DER SPIEGEL (
[http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/polizei-
schoss-2011-se...](http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/polizei-
schoss-2011-seltener-im-dienst-a-832037.html) ) it is mentioned that the
police shot 8812 times at animals. Almost all these cases were animals who had
serious injuries due to traffic accidents.

But many Germany use weapons for sports. For entertainment see this video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyq90LEZe4k>

~~~
diminish
lived for 3 years in germany; i was extremely clubbing. Forget shooting you
don't see much fighting neither. In comparison, in my one year in England, I
witnessed 5 club fights, and in Russia two gun fights. It seems mostly an
attitude of the society towards violence and guns. On the other side, in
Germany, you frequently see your neighbor calling the police if you make some
noise.

~~~
PaulMcCartney
I'm led to believe that societally they are repressing their anger and
aggression in reaction to WWII. The lack of bar fights and the number of
shootings are strangely low. I think this is the most compelling explanation.
It is known that the atrocities committed by their people during WWII weighs
heavily on their psyche.

~~~
ralfn
Despite what you may think, the war crimes during ww2 were not the result of a
culture unique to Germany. For example, in my country, Holland, relatively
more jews were killed, because the dutch people gave them less shelter than
the german peope did, and were more likely to rat them out. Nazis got to power
in Germany, but as a cultural movemet was a lot larger than just germany. And
nobody cared about the jews: for example, not a sinle rail road track was
targetted by any of the thousands of bombings by allied forces.

What happened should be in every euopean nations consience, and generally is.

~~~
PaulMcCartney
Yes but I believe that psychologically these other European countries and
peoples aren't as haunted by the identity of being vicious killers or
conquerers. They see themselves as mere sidelines players and thereby sidestep
the psychological burden that looms over the Germans, of being active and
causal forces in the war and in the murdering of millions.

~~~
Permit
You do realize that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Germany citizens were
not alive during World War II, right?

------
nkoren
Meanwhile, in America, not only is there no national tracking of firearm
discharges -- there's no national tracking of _how many people are killed by
police_.[1] The FBI tracks "justifiable homicides" by police -- which seems to
range from 350 to 400 per year[2], and is limited to "The killing of a felon
by a peace officer in the line of duty"[3] -- but it explicitly refuses to
track all _other_ killings by the police. (And rather strangely, there seems
to be no private group which tracks these figures either. When I've googled
for it in the past, I've found anecdotal stories claiming that groups which
attempt to compile these figures are _strongly discouraged_ from doing so. But
now I can't seem to find those claims, however.) News reports of the shootings
of unarmed non-fellons would suggest to me that there are a few score such
killings every year, but there's no way to be sure.

Moral of the story: Germany is a profoundly civilised country. America, not so
much.

[1] [http://www.lvrj.com/news/deadly-force/142-dead-and-
rising/na...](http://www.lvrj.com/news/deadly-force/142-dead-and-
rising/national-data-on-shootings-by-police-not-collected-134256308.html)

[2]
[http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_informati...](http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_14.html)

[3]
[http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_informati...](http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_information/homicide.html)

~~~
arethuza
"Germany is a profoundly civilised country. America, not so much."

I don't think making unnecessarily provocative comments like this adds much to
the discussion.

~~~
soc88
Can you point to the "provocative" part? I don't see it...

~~~
evilduck
At risk of invoking Godwin's Law...

The USA and Germany have both done terrible things, claiming moral superiority
of one or the other is treading on thin ice.

~~~
chc
At the risk of invoking common sense: Things that you did nearly a hundred
years ago are not especially relevant to the discussion of what you're doing
today.

If somebody used to smoke in the 60s and now campaigns to help fight substance
abuse, can we still not call them an anti-smoking advocate?

Would it be accurate to call you a gamete? You used to be one, after all —
probably more recently than the terrible things you're talking about Germany
doing.

It's useful to remember the past, but to excuse present wrongs because of past
ones is inane, as is placing equal people on the person who did the deed and
his or her grandchildren.

~~~
hej
You are funny. Those stats have always looked quite similar for Germany, back
to the fifties. Alone for that reason they cannot be a good indicator for
whether a country is civilized. I’m sorry, but state sponsored murder of 11
million innocent people is not outweighed by the police only shooting very few
bullets at criminals. Talking in those terms is just bullshit, it’s a weird
worldview, one that especially Germans should be ashamed for expressing.

But that arrogance is common. It’s annoying.

~~~
chmod775
Most of the people that where 20 in ~1930 are not alive today. I'm a 17 yrs
old German and I can't feel responsible for what some people I dont even know
have done a hundred years ago. That would be as stupid as the concept of
original sin....

~~~
hej
You should feel responsible. You should be willing to learn something. I
certainly do.

~~~
chmod775
Have I killed Jews? Did my dad? My Grandfather? Nope. My family lived outside
the big cities the entire time.

Even so. If your Grandfather killed someone before you even were born. How
could you feel responsible? It's not like you were able to whisper: "kill him!
Kill him!"

But of course we can learn from that tragedy. Everyone can. But learning
something and being responsible are two completely different things. It's ok
if you say Germany's responsible though.

------
gurkendoktor
Two things... First, as a German, we do have discussions about police
violence. But they mostly relate to using water throwers and brute force.
Demonstrations in Berlin are known to look like a cliché British football
match sometimes.

Second, I looked up the list of countries by firearm deaths. Any Finnish folks
here to explain what's going on there?! I didn't expect any European country
to be so high up on the list.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-
re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-
related_death_rate)

~~~
exDM69
I'm from Finland, maybe I can give some background.

Finland has a high rate of gun ownership due to popularity of hunting and
farmers, who use guns to keep unwanted wild animals at bay. In addition to
that, there was a fair amount of guns left over from WWII, and there was a
well-known case where guns where stashed away to form a resistance militia in
case of foreign invasion (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_Cache_Case>).

In addition to that, Finland's southernmost tip is roughly at 60 degrees
northern latitude, roughly at the level of Anchorage, Alaska. That means that
3 months of the year, this is a cold, dark and desolate place where the only
thing you can do is get drunk and wave guns at your friends and/or yourself in
a state of delirium tremensis.

Also note that firearms-related suicide is far more common than homicide, in
that Wikipedia statistic it's about 6 times more suicides than homicides. (The
Finns prefer to stab each other and shoot themselves).

It is a very rare occasion that a police officer fires a gun at a person in
Finland.

~~~
Tichy
"a cold, dark and desolate place where the only thing you can do is get drunk
and wave guns at your friends and/or yourself in a state of delirium
tremensis"

Luckily there are computer games now :-)

~~~
wookietrader
Or you can start programming on an operating system during that period, like a
certain Linus did.

~~~
pimeys
Or you can move to a warmer and lighter place, like tens of thousands of Finns
did. Even Linus.

~~~
chrismealy
Portland? Only barely.

~~~
pimeys
Well, it's more south than Berlin, where I'm currently living. Even Berlin has
2-3 more months of summer and no completely black winter compared to Helsinki.

------
radicalbyte
The UK, with a population (~60m) close to Germany, has very few incidents a
year where police discharge firearms.

Stats from 2000-2007 show between 5 and 11 incidents where firearms were
discharged per year:
[http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.homeo...](http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/non-
personal-data/police/police-firearms-use-2007-2008?view=Standard&pubID=807224)

Unfortunately, when they do use them they do so to kill innocent foreigners,
execution style (which then gets largely swept under a rug):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Meneze...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes)

~~~
sdfjkl
One thing I found very surprising when moving from Germany to the UK was that
your average UK "beat cop" doesn't carry a firearm. They call in armed police
when needed, but this seems to often result in delays in pursuing criminals
and sometimes escalation where armed criminals are given the time to take
hostages and/or barricade themselves in.

On the other hand, when seeing some recent encounters with these beat cops, I
was glad they weren't armed. Overall I got the impression that the UK police
forces suffer from a training or selection problem that wasn't apparent in
Germany.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Firearm use varies throughout the UK. For example in Northern Ireland all
Police carry firearms.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_firearms_in_the_U...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_firearms_in_the_United_Kingdom)

------
jscheel
Although the URL says Yahoo, this article originally comes The Atlantic Wire,
a sister site of The Atlantic. Content aggregators on major news sites cheapen
the experience. It's bad enough that nearly every news publication merely
regurgitates AP stories, but to also outsource your op-ed takes away the one
defining characteristic you have left.

Cocerning the content, this article is literally dripping with contempt for
America, and makes no attempt to actually find the story behind the statistics
other than to postulate that America is "gun crazy." Poor reporting by a
relatively inexperienced writer (who happens to be from NYC, which may explain
his stance).

Finally, this story really has zero bearing on anything HN related, other than
the fact that it throws around a little statistical trivia. What gives?

(edited for clarity, typing in this text field on an iPad is torture)

------
tzs
Anyone know WHY this is?

Germany is certainly not crime free, so some possibilities that come to mind:

1\. Perhaps German criminals, for whatever reason, are more docile than
American criminals and give up when asked to so there is little need for the
police to use violence.

2\. Perhaps German criminals aren't as well armed as American criminals, and
so when the police try to arrest them the criminals know they are outgunned
and give up.

3\. Perhaps German police are not very good at tracking down armed criminals
and so the are few chance for the police to use guns.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that #2 is the most likely of those three
possibilities, but I've surely not thought of all the possible explanations.

Without some insight into why they fire their guns so rarely, this statistic
is just interesting trivia.

~~~
noonespecial
I have a different theory, having lived in both places. Police in America seem
to be willing to escalate a confrontation or "chase" to almost _any_ level in
order to prevent a bad guy from getting away. Where I lived (near DC) a police
officer stood in front of a car to prevent an unarmed teenager from leaving an
IHOP without paying the bill, when the kids wouldn't stop, he shot up the car,
killing a passenger(1).

Sometimes, when the offense is minor _its OK to let the bad guy get away_.
Firing repeatedly at a moving vehicle in a crowded parking lot is _never_ ok,
even if someone might get away with murder.

Polizei seemed much more calmly methodical and much less cowboyish. I can't
imagine this situation occurring in Germany.

(1)[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/02...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/02/27/AR2006022701515.html)

~~~
brazzy
I think you're right. It's a common trope in German crime shows on TV to see
the police chase a dangerous criminal on foot _with their gun drawn_ and then
watch in frustration as they get away - but not shoot at them.

> Sometimes, when the offense is minor its OK to let the bad guy get away.

Especially since, with a bit of methodical work, you usually have a good
chance of catching them later.

~~~
tluyben2
In the Netherlands you have to, before you are even allowed to shoot _at_
someone, point the gun in the air, call out "Halt or i'll shoot!" and shoot in
the air which you have to repeat 3 times. We had some hilarious TV about that.

~~~
sthlm
Isn't shooting in the air potentially dangerous, since the bullet (assuming
straight up in an empty space) will return to the ground with the same
velocity it was fired at?

~~~
rpledge
No, terminal velocity will limit the fall speed to be much less

[http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1199/can-a-
bullet-f...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1199/can-a-bullet-fired-
into-the-air-kill-someone-when-it-comes-down)

~~~
harshreality
That link does not say that it's not dangerous. It is less dangerous than a
bullet fired at close range, and it is not as likely to be lethal, but it
still _can_ be lethal, or cause serious bodily harm, and therefore it is still
very dangerous.

Furthermore not all warning shots fired into the air are fired at high enough
angles that the bullets decelerate to terminal velocity before hitting
something.

Even if it reaches terminal velocity and doesn't hit anyone, in an urban area
it can easily hit someone's property and cause property damage to roofs
windows or walls.

------
eiji
The german police patrols in 2 person teams. You'll never see a single
policeman in a car. This changes the dynamic of every confrontation.

------
peteretep
I tried to find similar figures for the UK, but could not. Best I could find
was:

"From 1990 to 2011, police shot dead 53 people" >
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/riot-d27.shtml>

~~~
peteretep
[http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/about-us/non-
perso...](http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/about-us/non-personal-
data/police/police-firearms-use-2007-2008)

Suggests that police in England and Wales discharge firearms in ~ 6 incidents
a year.

(updated: UK -> England and Wales)

------
DanBC
For comparison, here's some information about New York police:

([http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/nyregion/08nypd.html?pagew...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/nyregion/08nypd.html?pagewanted=all))

> _The number of bullets fired by officers dropped to 540 in 2006 from 1,292
> in 1996 — the first year that the city’s housing, transit and regular patrol
> forces were merged — with a few years of even lower numbers in between.
> Police officers opened fire 60 times at people in 2006, down from 147 in
> 1996._

------
cnbeuiwx
Not to mention the police attitude to people. Its like nazi Germany in the
United States. Police can do anything and get away with it. Im watching the
police in the US and comparing to Europe, and I cant believe the amount of
sadistical violence that is going on there. Maybe because ex military people
become cops?

Its a very scary place. I dont even go there as a tourist because they have a
legal right to throw anyone in jail without trial if they want to.

That being said, ordinary people are very friendly. But the government and the
police are scary as hell. Totally dark forces going on there.

~~~
TDL
"Its a very scary place. I dont even go there as a tourist because they have a
legal right to throw anyone in jail without trial if they want to."

The U.S. is not a scary place. Violent crime is the lowest it has been since
the 1950's. Also, the police do not have the right to just randomly arrest
people. I have no idea where you came up with this notion, but it is
manifestly untrue. There is much to criticize in law enforcement trends in the
U.S. and this type of hyperbole is completely unmerited.

------
diminish
that's a slow weekend in LA.

------
staunch
What's really odd is that there were "49 warning shots". Police in the US
aren't allowed to fire warning shots. For good reason too, it's a completely
reckless thing to do.

~~~
Someone
If the US police isn't allowed to do reckless things, where are all those car
chases I can see on TV filmed?

I would think those would endanger bystanders much more than shots fired into
the air (which might only kill you if you are really, really, unlucky, as in
'having a weak skull and watching up, getting the bullet in an eye socket' or
so.

~~~
biafra
Bullets fired into the air can and do kill people because most of the time
they do not loose their spin and hit with a higher speed than terminal
velocity.

Source:

<http://mythbustersresults.com/episode50>

Bullets fired into the air maintain their lethal capability when they
eventually fall back down.

busted / plausible / confirmed

In the case of a bullet fired at a precisely vertical angle (something
extremely difficult for a human being to duplicate), the bullet would tumble,
lose its spin, and fall at a much slower speed due to terminal velocity and is
therefore rendered less than lethal on impact. However, if a bullet is fired
upward at a non-vertical angle (a far more probable possibility), it will
maintain its spin and will reach a high enough speed to be lethal on impact.
Because of this potentiality, firing a gun into the air is illegal in most
states, and even in the states that it is legal, it is not recommended by the
police. Also the MythBusters were able to identify two people who had been
injured by falling bullets, one of them fatally injured. To date, this is the
only myth to receive all three ratings at the same time.

~~~
ajuc
Still - what are the odds that bullet fired in the air (let's say at 60
degree) will actually hit someone?

Most people during the day are under the roof, and with average population in
New York being 10 000 persons/km2, sth like 99% of that under the roof at any
time, so the figure goes down to 100 people per km2, assuming people are 0.5
m2 target for the bullet it's 50 m2 / 1000000 m2 , or 1 chance in 20 000. And
I probably still overestimated that.

Certainly odds that bullet aimed at someone will hit are much higher (yeah, I
know, it's most probably criminal you are shooting at, and falling bullet will
most probably hit bystander).

EDIT: and warning shot can be shoot to the ground near the criminal, or into a
wall.

~~~
chipsy
I should add that bullets can go through the roof, and this has been
documented to happen in some of the incidents of upward-aimed fire causing
injury.

But I agree with the idea of aiming towards locations where the bullet is
likely to penetrate but not go through. The ground might be dangerous because
of the potential for ricochet - but many other surfaces could be adequate.

------
davidw
If the top comments on an article are about whether the US is a "civilized
country", it's probably not Hacker News.

------
gnarbarian
That's only because they made people line up to save bullets.

------
batista
> _German Police Used Only 85 Bullets Against People in 2011_

Only? That's far too many for Europe. 20-30 would be a much better number.

------
aresant
"used only 85 bullets"

What an odd way to quantify police violence.

Right? Wrong? Justified? Article provides none of that.

