
Police Homicides in the United States - DyslexicAtheist
https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/
======
danielvf
I'm wondering about the source data used for this. I looked up the nearest
city, and the first two records listed aren't remotely homicides.

In the first, a armed felon killed himself during after an eight hour standoff
with the police.

In the second, a man attacked a clerk at a hotel. When police arrived, then
man was lying on the floor, bleeding. Police immediately called for medics,
but the man became unresponsive and died before fire/medical arrived.

These deaths are both counted as "arrest-related-deaths", which is to say, the
actual moment of death was when the police were on scene, but in neither case
did the police even use force. I didn't see a place in the article where these
kind of situation was excluded. Did I miss something?

[Edit, after more digging into the BJS data, it does contain a homicide flag,
which is on about 61% of the records. As long as the OP is filtering by this,
it's a good start. But take stats on public police killing websites with a big
grain of salt, since these kinds of non-force cases are still included in the
top level stats for the sites I checked.]

------
TeMPOraL
Interesting analysis.

As a counterpoint to the headline that might be little fear-inducing, my first
reaction when reading it was: only so little? Things must be bad.

I mean: the perfect situation is when there are no homicides at all. But in a
little less perfect imaginary world, in which bad people never get the chance
to hurt innocents because police stops it, some bad people might still go down
resisting arrest, at which point 100% of all homicides would be police-
inflicted, and that would be _good_. Not perfect, but better than what we
have.

Statistics are funny this way.

The real question is, how many of those killed by the police were killed in
totally justifiable self-defense, and not just because of policemen being
trigger-happy. Or, put another way, what's the probability that a person who
is not resisting arrest to get "accidentally" killed by the police.

~~~
keiferski
This is based on a false assumption: that the proper police response to life-
threatening criminal acts is to kill the perpetrator.

If you get past the _they deserve it_ Puritan mentality, the ideal scenario is
for police minimize death (of criminals and police officers) at all costs.
Numerous other countries handle violent criminals in ways other than "kill
them immediately"; the tendency of police officers to use immediate lethal
violence can most likely be explained by the aforementioned Puritan
"punishment" mentality, a strong culture of guns and violence encouraged
constantly through the media (news, movies, and otherwise) and a myriad of
other factors.

~~~
vidarh
An example I tend to give is the case a while back where someone was wielding
an axe. Two police officers went after him, and the axe-wielding man was shot
and killed because he went for one of them.

Success, surely? He protected his partner, who might have been harmed.

The way something like this would likely have gone down somewhere like the UK
would be that the first responders would have called for reinforcement, and
then _kept their distance_ and waited. You don't engage someone armed unless
there is immediate danger to others. She should never have been close enough
to be in danger.

In the UK they may or may not call in a firearms team in such a case, but if
they did, they'd be brought in as a precaution. More likely they'd close down
the area around him and _wait_ , and wear the guy down, and then see if they
could get him to drop the weapon peacefully.

For comparison there was a case of a man robbing a house near me a while back
unarmed, and the police brought in 20 officers, chased him until he climbed
onto a roof. Then they simply waited for 4-5 hours until he accepted he had no
way out.

So many of the cases I hear about from the US is down to impatience and
seemingly some kind of belief that they need to stop things as quickly as
possible rather than trying to stop things with as little conflict as
possible.

I don't think it's necessarily so much punishment as fear that if they don't
do something, things will escalate. But most of the time if you contain a
threat and wait, the level of conflict will de-escalate. So much violence
boils down to fear that the other side will be willing to use more violence.
And that fear is pervasive through some groups of people. E.g. we see that in
the insistence of keeping or carrying weapons.

~~~
michaelt
I wonder if some of the preference for violence in the American policing
tradition goes back to Western films - where outlaws are wanted dead or alive,
a quick draw is the main thing a lawman needs, and the climax of the film is
the lawman meeting the bad man in the street, drawing first and shooting him
dead.

~~~
arca_vorago
There are so many comments worth responding to in this thread, but this one in
particular raises my ire. Are you really trying to reduce policing tradition
in America to western films? How about the real west, where self defense was a
way of life. I don't want to be too combative but I seriously don't understand
peoples inability to understand the principles of self defense as a natural
human right, and yes that includes killing when applicable. It just reeks of a
naive liberal mindset when people try to say you shouldn't shoot someone who
breaks into your house in the middle of the night. Police don't have a duty to
protect you, and very often will not protect you, and most of the time will
just draw chalk lines around the bodies.

Its your own responsibility to protect yourself and your loved ones or other
people who can't protect themselves, that's a fact, and it's high time the
anti-gun crowd pulled their heads out of their ass, because a gun equalizes an
otherwise unequal situation.

God made humans, Sam colt made them equal. I'm an atheist but the principle
still stand. This goes for one of the most vulnerable classes of humans as
well, women.

As a combat vet I have some major issues with the militarization of police,
and their poor training/methods, so I got a bit ot. If we were to have a real
conversation, I think we would be better served to talk of the pinkertonian
origins of policing, or the CIA/FBI influence on it (eg. OccupyWall Street
snipers), and the general lack of punishment of oath breakers, or the thin
blue line.

Instead far too many use it to pivot to a session of anti-gun circlejerking.

~~~
michaelt

      western films? How about the real west, 
      where self defense was a way of life.
    

I restricted my comment to western films as I can talk about them truthfully,
having seen several. I can't comment on the real west truthfully as I wasn't
there and neither have I engaged in the serious scholarly study that would let
me tell reality from legend.

I'm not sure how the rest of your comment relates to my comment.

------
foepys
3 years ago German police officer /u/krautcop posted on reddit about his
opinion on why police violence is much higher in the US than in Germany. [1]
This might open a new perspective to some people.

1:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2dgwkp/what_makes_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2dgwkp/what_makes_american_police_use_deadly_force_much/cjpgcbe/)

~~~
tomalpha
That is an excellent, well thought out and well written post.

It’s not short but it’s well worth a read. I think he pretty much nails it. He
also manages to be reasonably objective which can be tough for someone close
to the subject matter.

To summarize crudely, through the lens of my own biases and in a way that
doesn’t do it justice at all (no really, go read it in full):

\- Police in Germany don’t have to shoot first or have twitchy trigger fingers
because it’s so unlikely anyone will shoot at them. So they don’t.

\- The problems in the US are systemic, deep rooted in the culture of the
society not just the police, and gun availability doesn’t cause the deaths but
does significantly exacerbate the problem.

~~~
sjg007
It's highly unlikely anyone will shoot at a cop in the USA as well, especially
during a traffic stop.

~~~
foepys
There are enough videos on the internet where exactly this happens to US
officers. I don't want to link any because they are often very graphic but you
can find one in 10 seconds on youtube.

I dare you to find a single article about something like this from Germany or
even the EU.

~~~
sjg007
Just because there are videos and it happens doesn’t mean they happen enough
for cops to be afraid.

~~~
tomalpha
I think the point being made is that however rare it might be in the US that
it’s even rarer to the point of non-existent in Germany (or the UK etc).

Edit: things don’t have to be very common for people to have deep seated fears
and want to try and avoid it (however much they might or might not be
overreacting doing so).

------
myopicgoat
The question discussed is interesting and important but I felt the structure
of this article is somewhat unfortunate: it explains very well and objectively
some of the statistical issues and solutions with censored data but then when
discussing how it’s applied to the particular case of police homicide does so
with a rather obvious bias towards assuming that the situation is very bad and
comes up with a number, manually inflated, of 1500/y. It may be, but it’s
unhelpful to mix stats and opinion and not separate the two clearly IMO. It
would have been nice to present the raw data, then the statistical techniques
and then finally an opinion based on the results.

That being said some important points are highlighted in terms of a lack of
accountability of the police in the US.

~~~
jonchang
Can you point to exactly where you believe the analysis becomes inaccurate due
to the researchers' purported bias? I found the analysis quite clear and the
paper was even more illuminating.

If your issue is with the "final" 1,500 number (increased from 1,250), you'll
find that it's well-supported in both the blog post:

>>> Keep in mind that the Bureau of Justice Statistics report itself excludes
many jurisdictions in the United States that openly refuse to share any data
with the FBI. The true number of homicides committed by police is therefore
even higher. Though not a true estimate, my best guess of the number of police
homicides in the United States is about 1,500 per year.

And the paper:

>>> As mentioned in Banks et al. (2015), these list intersection counts only
include jurisdictions that reported any data (about 70%). As such, these
numbers should be interpreted as estimates of the number of people killed by
police in the reporting jurisdictions. If the reporting jurisdictions are
missing from the dataset not because there were truly no killings in those
areas during this period, but instead because they chose not to report
homicides by police, the true number of police homicides could be 30% higher
than we have suggested here.

Note that 1500 represents a 20% increase over 1250, which is lower than the
30% maximum estimate presented in the paper.

~~~
leereeves
> If the reporting jurisdictions are missing from the dataset not because
> there were truly no killings in those areas during this period, but instead
> because they chose not to report homicides by police

That's a rather large assumption that needs to be justified.

~~~
jonchang
It is justified, both in the citation and the actual text. The ARD dataset is
driven by self-reporting from various local agencies. The fact that the FBI's
SHR data and the ARD dataset have a mismatch (that is, there are police-
related homicides in SHR that are not present in the ARD data and vice versa)
is proof enough that there is underreporting in these datasets!

~~~
leereeves
I just realized that underreporting is already accounted for in the 1,250/y
thanks to the statistical analysis described in the article.

A = the number of jurisdiction-reported homicides

B = the number of media-reported homicides

M = the number of homicides on both lists

N = AB / M

Now, if jurisdiction-reported homicides are unreported by a factor of X, we
can derive a more accurate figure for A by multiplying A by X. We also
multiply M by X, because adding cases to list A also adds a similar ratio (on
average) to the matches between both lists. And the estimate doesn't change.

N = (XA * B) / XM = AB / M

This assumes, of course, that homicides in the jurisdictions that don't report
to the FBI or BJS are still reported by the media. That may not be true but if
it's not true, it must be proven false.

------
adamnemecek
I’m guessing this was posted in response to the release of a cop who murdered
David Shaver [http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-daniel-
sha...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-daniel-shaver-
police-video-20171208-story.html)

When did this dystopia begin? It wasn’t too long ago right? What can I do to
prevent this? There isn’t an organized dissent group. Idk what it really that
I want.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
I would think Black Lives Matter would be an organized resistance group, no?

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
It's an organized resistance group, but it's not what we need. Just the name
Black Lives Matter is loaded with racial connotations that don't help the
situation. We need to focus on police demilitarization everywhere and with
everyone, not just around a single race.

~~~
dadada07
Black Lives Matter does want demilitarization everywhere and with everyone.

You're getting hung up on the name.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
It's not just me. It's just not a good organization to stand behind to focus
on the demilitarization of the police. It's too racially motivated to gain
popular support.

"Black Lives Matter is an international activist movement...that campaigns
against violence and systemic racism towards black people... The U.S.
population's perception of Black Lives Matter varies considerably by race...
former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, has accused it of
racism." [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter)

~~~
TaylorAlexander
To me that’s appropriate. Black people are at the forefront of police abuse in
the US. Solve the problem of black people being abused by police and you’ve
solved the problem in general.

I totally agree that many people have a distorted view of the movement but to
me that’s a reflection of problems with our culture more than problems with
the movement.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> Solve the problem of black people being abused by police and you’ve solved
> the problem in general.

This is why BLM should _not_ handle this situation. They think they're the
only ones that cops are jerks to. The issue isn't racism, it's the inability
of our police force to self-police and remove the bad apples.

> many people have a distorted view of the movement

It literally says that it has "campaigns against violence and systemic racism
towards black people." Its focus is not police reform for everyone.

------
flexie
In a few hours the Americans will wake up and a bunch of them on HN will say
that it's a loaded or divisive or misleading title or that the statistics is
flawed. And HN is decisively more progressive than most of the country which
simply ignores this kind of news.

It is the way it is in America, because - as a whole - they don't care that
much about gun violence.

It's mostly blacks and Latinos getting killed and they are still minorities.
And the poor white Americans that also fall victim to police and other gun
violence just don't have much political influence.

~~~
chrisan
> It's mostly blacks and Latinos getting killed and they are still minorities.
> And the poor white Americans that also fall victim to police and other gun
> violence just don't have much political influence

Honest question: Couldn't this just be grouped into "poor people" Are affluent
blacks and latinos being killed?

I am not denying racism by any means, but it seems people of poverty are most
at risk.

~~~
sintaxi
Even more accurate would be to say people who commit crimes are most at risk
of being killed by the police.

------
always_good
One of the worst videos I've seen on the internet is the Daniel Shaver
execution from last year:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M62Va6Ft2cw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M62Va6Ft2cw)

The Sergeant (voice in the vid) thinks he's fucking Jigsaw, and he wasn't even
the guy that pulled the trigger. America is fucked.

~~~
Shivetya
No, America is not fucked. If these videos did not have impact then we would
be fucked. That they are still so shocking shows that we haven't become police
state dystopia that we see in fiction or sadly in parts of this world.

~~~
always_good
How exactly does being shocked move the needle on how many militarized power-
tripping clowns there are on the police force? How's that going to change the
incumbent culture of badge protection?

Being shocked certainly hasn't stopped it from happening. So what's the
secret?

I'm shocked this time because I haven't seen footage so bad. But I won't be
shocked the next time...

~~~
tomalpha
Not OP, and not quite he same argument, but at least you’re still shocked.
That might be cold comfort to the dead man, but it does suggest there could be
a glimmer of hope. If everyone stops being shocked at things like this, it
will have been completely normalized.

As soon as you’re at the point where someone can say _unchallenged_ something
like “oh yeah, another black man’s been shot, who cares”, then perhaps there’s
less hope.

The US isn’t there yet is it?

------
tomohawk
Michael Brown was shot because he was charging at a police officer.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/us/witnesses-told-
grand-j...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/us/witnesses-told-grand-jury-
that-michael-brown-charged-at-darren-wilson-prosecutor-says.html)

Lumping him in with actual victims does actual victims a disservice.

~~~
stctgion
If an unarmed man charges at you, you don't have the right to kill them.
Police forces all round the world manage fine with battons and other non
lethal weapons.

~~~
tomohawk
There's plenty of other exemplars of police violence to make the point. No
need to turn the incident with Michael Brown into something it wasn't.

I'd hardly describe a violent, 6'4", 300 pound guy charging at me as something
that needs to be dealt with with kids gloves.

According to our legal tradition, you can use deadly force if you fear for
your life. This is the universal right of all free people - to defend
themselves.

~~~
perfmode
Regardless of the legality, I reserve the right to an opinion on the matter. I
consider it cowardly to shoot an unarmed man, violent or not.

------
RickJWag
I have known many cops, correctional officers, military police, etc.

Without exception, all the ones I have known have been good, helpful people
who would not harm someone intentionally. (There are obviously a few bad ones,
but none that I have known.)

It's one of the hardest, scariest, least fairly compensated jobs I can think
of. Thank God for cops.

------
DoreenMichele
I can't manage to read the whole thing. It starts from an assumption of guilt
and corruption. It is looking for support for an accusation. Such an agenda
does not make for good science.

Don't get me wrong. I would be very interested in finding real solutions for
the tendency to see Blacks gunned down by the police. My assumption is this
known trend is the driving force behind this piece.

I just think this is the wrong way to approach the problem space.

 _How to lie with statistics_ is an excellent book. I highly recommend it. It
is a large factor in my decision to not bother to read this piece too
thoroughly.

~~~
cup
>finding real solutions for the tendency to see Blacks gunned down by the
police

Stop hiring racist police. Stop aquiting police of murder. Stop using tax
payers dollars to pay for compensation claims.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Stop hiring racist police._

One of the problems is that racism is insidious. People who self identify as
idealists who are not racist will still agree with cultural norms that are
secondary or tertiary forms of racism.

To try to illustrate this idea:

In my twenties, after months of hearing about my husband's new best friend
from work, I finally met the man. He was black. My husband and I were both
white. My husband had never once mentioned that his new best friend was black,
even though he talked about him constantly.

I was shocked to realize that I had assumed he was white since my husband did
not mention his race. In that instant, I realized this assumption was the
product of a racist culture where such details mattered and needed to be
stated privately ahead of time to avoid any awkwardness or misunderstanding.

I realized that was how racism worked -- you just have certain social norms
that may seem innocuous, but that reinforce the ongoing issue. Many people
will not consciously question myriad social norms. People soak up social norms
by being exposed to them and trying to fit in. There usually isn't lots of
overt _instruction_ on how and why we do such things.

So, first you need someone to sort this out in their own heart and mind.
Second, they need to disseminate this new standard, often at enormous risk to
themselves. Questioning social norms is generally dangerous business and has a
history of getting people killed.

Trying to find genuinely not racist people in a generally racist culture is
very challenging. Most people from such a culture who see themselves as not
racist will still have ugly bad habits and mental models.

And then, when they need to decide whether to pull the trigger or not, their
biases will show, not because they hate Blacks so much that they want them
dead, but because they don't trust Blacks as much as Whites.

I don't believe this is a problem that will really be solved by simply
punishing people more a la _The beatings shall continue until morale
improves._ Instead, we need to improve trust and I don't how that can happen.
But it certainly won't happen with our current approach to the problem space,
where trust issues between the races in America seem to not even be part of
the discussion.

My original comment was downvoted to the negatives and one of the first three
replies is a personal attack. The US was founded on the idea of _innocent
until proven guilty_ , but the public is not willing to follow that precept
for this issue. Witch hunts tend to result in finding people guilty because
that is what they set out to do. It is a very serious and damning flaw in this
paper, but my comment on that aspect is not PC and is reason enough to lump me
in with killer cops as part of the problem.

In such an atmosphere, good luck with even having a productive discussion. And
if you can't even discuss it, you are unlikely to solve it.

~~~
DoreenMichele
A more nutshell version: Would HN be taking this paper seriously if it came
from the opposite direction of bias and were written by a White Supremacist?
No? Then why does anyone have a problem with me pointing out the obvious bias
and agenda in the piece that is broadcast from the start?

------
gt_
It’s understandable that Americans continue seeking measurable blame, but I
_think_ this is a complicated result of wider cultural issues, none of which
can be isolated. So sad.

~~~
snsr
> _but I think this is a complicated result of wider cultural issues, none of
> which can be isolated_

The lack of accountability for murders committed by police in the US is not a
difficult "issue" to isolate.

~~~
gt_
I think the causes for it, particularly why we are apparently unable to adjust
it are.

------
cyphunk
The description of this technique is excellent. I once used this many years
ago to determine the hidden depth of card card sharing networks for pay tv.
it's not exact but it does help quantify issues with deep unreachable data,
and sets a base line to compare against over time.

------
drallison
The frequency of police homicides suggests that we, as a society, need to
_disarm the police_.

------
tsmarsh
Whats the ideal here?

1\. Doctors 2\. Foreign combatants 3\. Police 4\. Motorists 5\. Other

I can see how all of those groups perform tasks that might result in the death
of strangers unavoidably. Doctors are the only ones who I’d actually pay to
wager with my life, so I’d them to win.

I’d like a world without wars, but I’m happy that we have a stading military.

I lived in the UK for 30 years. It’s national news when they kill someone and
they stand up and appologise for not having a better solution. That feels
about right. But their number isn’t zero.

And finally, cars. We’re already talking about the trolley problem wrt
automated cars. It seems we accept that death from going 2-3 times our natural
speed in vehicles 10x our weight is dangerous. But It would be nice if
technology could get that death rate to lower than law enforcement.

------
briandear
How many police officers have been killed in the line of duty this year?

------
katastic
That's a super careful wording when you realize two thirds of all people are
killed by someone close to them.

~~~
cybersol
The article says that 75% are killed by people close to them. Of the remaining
25% killed by strangers, two-thirds of those are killed by non-police-
officers.

~~~
chrisan
Can we then say 8.3% of people killed are by police?

75% killed by people close to them (not sure if they showed police close to
them deaths)

16.6% killed by a stanger

8.3% killed by a police stranger (not that that is good!)

------
sintaxi
Keep in mind the ideal number would be 100% via proper police procedure.

------
pm24601
and this is why i don't like to deal with police. They can't control their
weapons

~~~
ako
They can't control their weapons because they have to operate in a society
that can't control its weapons...

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Other countries have plenty of weapons around, yet don't have police that use
deadly force immediately. Finland is a prime example[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country)

~~~
indubitable
It's not about the weapons, it's about the people with the weapons.

Finland has a national murder rate of 1.6. [1] At first that doesn't seem too
bad as our murder rate is "only" about 300% higher. But that comparison by
itself is quite misleading. Crime, and especially the most violent crimes
including murder, are not evenly distributed in the US. They're heavily
centralized into relatively small areas. So for instance these [2] are the
crime data for Ferguson, Missouri where Michael Brown was killed. In the year
Michael Brown was killed, their homicide rate was double the US average. It's
now skyrocketed to 42.8 - 2,675% higher than Finland.

To give some context to that 42.8 the murder rate in Mexico is 16.35. In
Columbia it's 26.5. As a matter of fact, in terms of nations - there are only
5 places in the world more dangerous than Ferguson, Missouri -- a town of some
20k people. I'm certainly not condoning police actions, but at the same time I
think people don't really consider these situations in terms of context.
Somebody, seemingly without irony, suggested we ought disarm the police.
Imagine disarmed police in Mexico.. now increase the danger they face by 300%.
That's what disarming police in areas like Ferguson, Missouri would be akin
to.

This sort of reality is very foreign to us, who I suspect for the most part
have led very privileged lives. And so we extrapolate our lives to a situation
where suddenly the police are just killing people. And that would indeed be
insane. It's so foreign for us to imagine how dangerous many places in the US
are -- and it's these locations where the systemic police violence tends to
also be heavily centralized.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

[2] - [http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Ferguson-
Missouri.html](http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Ferguson-Missouri.html)

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> I think people don't really consider these situations in terms of context.

Then let's add some context to this conversation. This whole post was made
because of the recently released video of a police officer executing a
citizen[1]. That police officer was then acquitted. This kind of police
response would never occur in other civilized countries, regardless of the
relative murder rate.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M62Va6Ft2cw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M62Va6Ft2cw)

~~~
indubitable
I'm having a bit of a parallel discussion elsewhere and I think my response
there is completely appropriate here, but I'd rather not just cut and paste
the same stuff all over the place:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15885977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15885977)

The downside of threaded discussions!

------
Banthum
The statistical abuse in this headline is extreme. It's so meaningless, yet so
carefully designed to appeal to irrational confirmation biases. Consider some
extremely simple thought experiments:

e.g. Imagine a world where police do their job even better, and eliminate
_all_ murder. But, in some cases, they have to kill the murderer before he
takes an innocent victim. They never kill unless it's absolutely necessary and
justified. In such a world, this statistic rises to "All people killed by
strangers are killed by police", which sounds worse than the headline, yet
such a world is obviously better than ours.

e.g. Imagine a world where police never do anything. They drink beer in the
station all day. All people killed by strangers are killed by non-police. Such
a world is much worse than ours, yet this stat looks a lot better.

Just these very simple thought experiments should give you pause about what
this statistical comparison actually means (or if it means anything at all).

\---

My two questions to those who think this is some sort of obvious travesty:

1\. What would be a healthy ratio between [people killed by non-police
strangers] and [people killed by police]? 1:5? 1:10? 1:100? Why?

2\. How is this random choice of two statistics not just another variation on
the Chinese robber fallacy? [1]

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-
chine...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-
robbers/)

~~~
oblio
Well, maybe it helps to compare:

Germany: 2155 homicides in 2011, 6 by the police.

~~~
WillPostForFood
How many German police officers are killed a year? In 2011 it was 69 in the US
(and another 58 died in accidents).

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jopsen
A Google search suggest 0-2 depending on what year you pick, see bottom of:

[http://www.dw.com/en/two-german-police-officers-killed-by-
fl...](http://www.dw.com/en/two-german-police-officers-killed-by-fleeing-
murder-suspect-in-brandenburg/a-37749390)

In most of Western Europe it's extremely rare that police officers are killed
in the line of duty.

Note: most countries count the number of bullets fired by police, as well as
number of times a weapon was drawn, in the US they don't officially count
people killed.

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Feniks
Say what you will about US police departments: they keep the population in
line and when shit goes down they don't run away.

Trust me: you do NOT want the police to be your friend. They tried that
experiment here.

