
Why American Cops Kill So Many Compared to European Cops - karyon
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/american-cops-lethal_us_565cde59e4b079b2818b8870
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IanDrake
There is so much misuse of statistics in this article it's hard to take it
seriously.

If you're going to make blanket statements about the US vs. Europe than
compare those two entities, don't cherry pick a European country for one stat
and then another countries for other stats.

Also, sometimes the author compares absolute figures and at no time does the
author ever use risk adjusted numbers.

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the_why_of_y
Maybe you missed the big picture in the middle that has the subtitle "Annual
fatal police shootings per million residents" with a big green happy(?) face
for the US with the number 3.42, and variously-colored small happy faces for
various European countries with hard to read numbers proceeding from 0.187 to
something almost unreadably small that might be 0.016.

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IanDrake
I didn't miss that. Those aren't risk adjusted numbers and are meaningless.

I think if you were to re-read my comment you would see that I wrote he
_sometimes_ uses absolute figures and _never_ uses risk adjusted numbers.

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the_why_of_y
I'm not sure I understand: are you arguing that because there is a
substantially higher percentage of people being shot in the US, it is expected
that there should also be a higher percentage of people being shot by police
in particular in the US?

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IanDrake
There are many factors.

What is the total population, what is the violent crime rate, what is the
prevailing attitude of civilians towards police, how many police encounters
are there, how well does the government record these statistics, etc...

You can't be shot by a police officer if you don't encounter one. In the US,
most police officers know if you have a criminal record, a warrant, or LTC
before they even approach your car. If your culture thinks arguing with cops
is a good idea, your culture also might be more prone to violent clashes with
police.

All those things factor into the individual situation, thus I would expect
these would be represented in aggregate figures as well.

The problem is that none of these risk factors are considered and thus produce
meaningless statistics.

As a surfer I see this same BS with shark attack stats. Most of them go like
this: There were 150 shark attacks the the US last year and there's 300M
people in the US, so your chances of getting attacked are 150/300,000,000.

I hope you see the obvious flaw in that. Some one in Arkansas isn't at risk.
So a better number would be everyone who visits the ocean. But now you're
counting people who probably only dipped a toe in the water or stood in waist
deep water for 15 minutes.

The real people at risk are swimmers and surfers and to get real numbers you
don't just need to know how many people are in the water, but also how much
time they spend there. And more than that, you need to know what time of the
day it is.

When you're done, the final numbers will be a table, not one neat number. Each
number in the table will represent the time of day and be expressed as a
probability per unit of time spent in the water.

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forthefuture
It's a lot harder to beat someone to death from the window outside their car.

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dogma1138
To be fair and not less important to understanding the issue; the opposite is
also true.

Cops are considerably less likely to be shot or even assaulted in Europe,
being shot on the line of duty is almost unheard off.

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elgabogringo
Cops are racist. But when they aren't racist they kill people because guns.
Let's pass gun control so only cops (Ed: and criminals) have guns. Then we can
be awesome like Europe (Ed: though our demographics look nothing like the
countries mentioned)

There, did I get that right?

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splawn
assuming you are giving an example of a straw-man.. then yes, spot on.

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williamstein
I think he is sarcastically summarizing the article.

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splawn
My guess is neither one of you read the article.

(hint: it doesn't mention gun control anywhere)

