
You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a Terrorist - cryoshon
http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-killed-police-officer-terrorist
======
cubano
And you are five times more likely to be killed at a railroad crossing then by
a police officer.[1]

Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism , and while you
will be hard pressed to find someone with a bigger animus towards the current
USCJS then I, I think we should all be on the lookout for hyperbole, no matter
what underlying meme it may be promoting.

[1]
[http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a3...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a3134/how-
trains-can-be-silent-killers-16627219/)

[EDIT] The original stats used for this analysis have been changed and edited
as different versions of the OP have been posted.

~~~
airza
This extensively documented site
([http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2013.html](http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2013.html))
suggests that 768 people were killed by police in 2013, compared to the 784
people murdered by trains. If my math is correct, 784/768 is not five.
Additionally, that site's statistics are only for may-december, so the actual
number is probably around 50% higher.

~~~
Gravityloss
The authorities can already track the location and speed of all people with
smartphones.

The location and speed of all trains is also known.

The solution to prevent crashes is thus obvious. Hit the car before the crash
with a drone-fired missile.

~~~
ianpurton
"The location and speed of all trains is also known."

Just need an app that alerts you to oncoming trains.

~~~
JupiterMoon
You got one inbuilt. It's logic goes something like

    
    
        if myself.is_near(train_tracks) and (myself.can_see(train) or myself.can_hear(train)):
            myself.risk_of_oncoming_train = True

~~~
Lawtonfogle
risk_of_oncoming_train is a boolean? Sounds more like something that would be
representing a chance, so I would be expecting something like a floating point
number.

~~~
JupiterMoon
I was thinking that being hit by a train is a situation that I want a 0
probability of. So personally if the probability is non-zero I would
immediately act to reduce it to zero. Hence a boolean does the job for me.

------
mcnamaratw
I like numbers, but this one might work better if they put some context:

"You're 50% more likely to be killed by lightning than by a terrorist." or
"You're six times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a
bumblebee."

Or the somber "You're 150 times more likely to be killed by a motor vehicle
than a terrorist." (The War on Vehicles should apparently be funded to the
tune of $150T a year, if I understand the value of American lives properly.)

~~~
dllthomas
If something on the order of the 9/11 attacks happened every other day, we'd
still lose more Americans to heart disease.

~~~
nsxwolf
It has been 5,161 days since 9/11\. Every other day would be 2,580 9/11 sized
attacks.

The entire country would be in ruins. There would be no more cities, and the
economy would have ground to a halt. We would all be living in a post
apocalyptic nightmare, with knock on effects leading to far more deaths than
the direct numbers from the attacks.

This is why I hate these comparisons to heart disease and whatnot.

~~~
dllthomas
You are correct that, beyond a point, the effects are substantially nonlinear.
Of course, our reactions would also not be static.

My point was not prediction of specific outcomes, but rather to illustrate the
_tremendous_ disparity between the two scales - even in a year when we lost an
order of magnitude more people to terrorism than is typical.

(You are also correct that there are substantial effects beyond the direct
loss of life - but that is true with heart disease as well.)

 _" The entire country would be in ruins. There would be no more cities"_

This is still exaggerating the scale.

If we say 3000 9/11 sized-attacks and 3000 dead in 9/11, that's 9 million
people. In that time, our population grew by 50 million.

If we say the 9/11 attacks destroyed 10 million square feet of office space,
that's 30 billion - about twice what we added between 2003 and 2012 (per
[http://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/reports/2012/build...](http://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/reports/2012/buildstock/)),
so plausibly about what we've _added_ total in that time.

There may be "no more cities", but it would be due to a response of radical
decentralization (probably not a bad move, in that situation) not because the
cities were physically destroyed.

------
philipkuklis
"[...]one should ask why police officers are such a significant source of
danger."

The statements are based on data from 2011. 155 people were killed by police
officers in US, total population was about 311.7 million back then.

That's roughly 0,00005% and we don't even know the circumstances in which they
got killed.

Saying you're 8 times more likely to [insert extremely unlikely event] than
[insert exceptionally unlikely event] might be true but it's pure
sensationalism.

~~~
delinka
Indeed it is sensationalism. And it highlights the fact that we're expending
far too much effort and money on handwavy "solutions" to handwavy "terrorism."

~~~
_dark_matter_
They don't see it that way. Obviously our efforts have been so fruitful that
terrorism has been wiped out.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Obviously our efforts have been so fruitful that terrorism has been wiped
> out.

If that's the perception, maybe we need to direct the same effort to the now
more serious problem of police shootings of citizens, so those can be wiped
out to the same low level as the terrorism threat has been reduced to.

------
chrisBob
The problem is the people are going to look at this the wrong way. Its not
that you should be scared of police; its that you shouldn't be scared of
terrorists.

~~~
xacaxulu
I'm scared of police and I'm basically a WASP. If I were black or latino, I'd
be even more scared. Civil asset forfeiture, drug dogs that _always_ indicate
presence of drugs, camera/drone tracking of movements of people, illegal phone
searches, militarized police departments with special forces type weapons and
vehicles, etc. I'm a former US Marine and the police are basically becoming a
domestic occupying military force, similar to what I saw in Afghanistan. I'm
more scared of police than terrorists because it's statistically way more
likely that I'll die, be injured or be defrauded by a member of the
police/legal/civil industrial complex.

~~~
steveeq1
And you are statistically more likely to be killed by a black man than you are
by an actual policeman. I agree with chrisBob in that you shouldn't worry
about the dangers of policemen in the same way you shouldnt worry about the
dangers of black people, even if it's statistically "true". It's simply a bad
way to look at it.

There is a lot of police brutality news lately in the media so I suspect a lot
of availability bias is going on. Things like shark attacks, airline crashes
and terrorism tend to get a lot of mental coverage because it sells. And it
tends to get a lot of people worried despite their actual nominal
probabilities in the grand scheme of things.

~~~
xacaxulu
I think that's an over simplification of the issue. And I strongly disagree
that I'm more likely to be killed by a black man _unless_ that black man is
wearing a badge.

~~~
steveeq1
Do you have a statistical source for this assertion?

------
ctdonath
You can also significantly adjust your odds of being killed by police by
choosing behavior unlikely to attract lethal force.

The core issue with terrorism is you have no such choice, the terrorist making
the decision to kill people doing absolutely nothing to warrant lethal force.

ETA: I didn't say "make your odds 0%", I said "significantly adjust". Sure you
_could_ be shot for no reason, and a few are, but nearly all killings by
police occur precisely because the decedent was knowingly perpetrating a crime
for which lethal force was a not-unreasonable response. If you choose to not
do something which police would reasonably kill you for, you will
significantly reduce the odds of being killed by police.

The lead statistic would be more useful if we divide the odds between, say,
those with vs without criminal records.

~~~
jMyles
> You can also significantly adjust your odds of being killed by police by
> choosing behavior unlikely to attract lethal force.

Well this is the part that it's dispute, particularly regarding people of
color.

~~~
briandear
People of color have the same ability to not conduct criminal activities or
resist arrest or attack police officers as everyone else. Yet, why does a
higher percentage choose to do so? Why is South Chicago less safe than the
Appalachian per capita?

------
jobu
This is where that quote comes from:
[http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-
makes-...](http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-
stupid.html)

 _" You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a
terrorist attack"_

------
melling
"400,000 Americans have been shot and killed since 9/11;"

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/27/polic...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/27/police-
officers-too-often-scapegoated-problems-society-obama-says/74662192/)

Since we're fucking around with numbers can someone figure out the probability
of being killed by another American than a terrorist?

~~~
ctdonath
Raw annual odds of being murdered in USA (presumably by another citizen):
0.0045%

------
cryoshon
A frank discussion of where our national priorities are versus where they
should be would include the data point in the article.

We spend trillions killing Muslims across the ocean for the privilege of
"safety" at home, where we are killed by the police in greater frequency than
the Muslims ever did.

~~~
briandear
We are also killed more frequently by illegal aliens. Let's put our troops on
the border rather than Afghanistan.

------
notliketherest
You're eight times more likely to be a terrorist if you get shot by a police
officer.

~~~
GFischer
Unfortunately funny but containing a kernel of truth.

In my country, police tries to make killings look less bad by ascribing as
many crimes as possible to "gang killings" ("ajuste de cuentas" in Spanish).
In one case I knew of, a guy was killed when he resisted robbery, and the
police told the press he must have been involved in something !!

------
olivermarks
IMO the word 'Terrorist' is a hopelessly useless propaganda word used to
incite fear of the bogeymen in the population.

It also lumps all sorts of people together, from credible conceptual
revolutionary ideas to psychotic mono religious zealots. Slight digression
from the point Cato is making but the headline inevitably falls into the
sensationalist trap for this reason...

------
JoeAltmaier
...and twice as likely to commit suicide, than be killed by anybody.

~~~
DiffEq
So this is the problem with statistics; these statistics apply to the average
person. But there is no such thing as an average "real person". For instance
MY chances of suicide are zero; and the chances of me being killed by a
terrorist are far below the average person because of where I live and where I
spend my time; the same goes for being killed by a police officer. This
applies to MOST people for at least the "being killed by a police officer
category". I think we all know the subset of society that is most prone to
being shot by police officers: those that are breaking the law.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Agree in principle. But the chance that each of us will die by suicide is not
actually zero. Its more closely related to the chance we will experience
debilitating depression. Its a disease issue; no one is immune.

------
irixusr
I don't really fear police (white 30 year old with no accent) because I know
it's fairly rare that some thing bad will happen to me with them.

I also don't fear terrorists who are even less likely to harm me, or the
monsters under my bed.

~~~
ElComradio
You are also less likely to hide in the bushes to ambush someone who annoyed
you, more likely to get out of the middle of the street when the cop yells at
you to do that, and to not be selling loose cigarettes in public.

~~~
irixusr
I'm a coward, not a saint. Nor am I very "progressive" (yuck) so I'm not
trying to be apologetic to minorities. But I've done things that get black
folks killed that white folks get warnings for.

And that's the problem. No one should get killed (or jail!) for selling cigs
off the street

------
bprieto
It depends on the value of "You". Even if we are talking only of USA and not
any other country, you don't have the same probability of being killed by a
police officer if you are a white person living in a rich area than if you are
a black drug dealer in downtown Detroit. And although terrorist might be more
"random" in selecting their victims, you probably are more prone to being
killed by a terrorist if you live in a big city than if you are in a small
village.

So my point is this comparison, stated like this, is useful only to those that
want to confirm their beliefs on "police brutality".

------
simonh
Do we know what the ratio is between persons actually engaged in criminal
activity killed by police officers (in the US), and innocent citizens? I
realise it would be hard to have much confidence in any such statistics, but
the point is if I visit the US and I have no criminal intent, my personal risk
of getting killed by an officer is certainly not zero, but I expect it would
be low compared to the risk for persons who do have such intent. Conversely,
my risk of being a victim of terrorism has no significant correlation to my
intent.

------
Ch_livecodingtv
It definitely is not a good reputation to police officers. Some articles would
even say 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist
is even underestimated. It's awful thinking that there may be police violence
and killings that's grossly under reported.

[http://thefreethoughtproject.com/u-s-citizens-58-times-
kille...](http://thefreethoughtproject.com/u-s-citizens-58-times-killed-
police-terrorists/)

------
hieronymous
And we are even more likely to be killed by each other (homicides, vehicle
accidents) and ourselves (suicides, vehicle accidents). Honestly I take issue
with the statistic. Many criminals are shot and killed by the police for good
reasons. I would like to see the statistic for the likelihood of being killed
when not in the commission of a crime or unlawfully resisting arrest. This is
just sensationalizing the issue.

~~~
thatswrong0
If police forces were required to report all killings, then we could know that
statistic. But they aren't, so we can't.

------
arca_vorago
Cyber-terrorism is the new terrorism is the new communism is the new facism
and so on. The military industrial complex works to serve itself, and it will
invent or even create and support enemies if those enemies can be used against
the public to push a bigger budget. (See Operation Gladio A and B)

The thing to realize though is that the threat is from hard to find
potentially non-nationstate actors, and the threat is somewhat real, but it is
hard to detect and creates a constant state of fear... which is great if you
want to capitalize on that fear. To a certain extent it worked for a better
good by bringing tons of money into America which along with the UK and Israel
is one of the top arms suppliers to the world. (a great intro book on this
subject is the updated _The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade_.)

My problem is that this model of fear and money has been taken to the extreme
is now eroding freedoms at home, and bankrupting us. Many republicans will
rant and rave about the budget, but if you ask about cutting waste, fraud, and
abuse (WFA) in DoD/Pentagon they hardly ever admit such WFA exists (even
though everyone actually familiar with it knows how excessive it is,
especially at the Pentagon.)

The other problem is that secretly, unbeknownst to you or the general public,
in the smokey closed door places in the Beltway, the strategic thinkers have
been saying we are returning to a neo-cold war, and to the tripolar world, and
thats the real reason for our expansionism... used a measure of containment
against our future enemies, (Russia and China) in the upcoming resource wars.
Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria/Somalia/Georgia/Ukraine/The Stans, all make sense
if you look at it from this perspective. Don't get me started on the
petroldollar and world finance schemes.

I don't know enough to quite disagree with that justification, but my problem
is that if that's the real reason, the public deserves to know, but our reps
and the military brass have all just held that close to their chest and we are
hemorrhaging money that gets wasted and it all ends up in VA and NY, and our
constitution is being undermined, while our media is captured and corruption
is rampant in all three branches of government, and the surveillance state
grows so the intel agencies are more and more powerful against their own
people and less and less useful abroad...

All this spells disaster in my opinion.

------
hwstar
1\. American cops are armed to the teeth because the perps carry guns. I'm not
saying that we should repeal the second amendment, but because the perps are
more likely to be armed, the environment is far more dangerous for cops in the
US than just about any developed country.

2\. It used to be prior to Tennessee v. Gardner (1985), a cop or citizen could
shoot a fleeing felon for just about any reason. Now they have to have make
the decision that letting the felon flee is more dangerous to society than
taking a human life. This has gotten a few police officers jailed recently.

------
gotchange
> You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a
> Terrorist

I hate to say this and defend those people but that statistical observation is
due to the fact that security, intelligence and law enforcement officers are
doing their job in foiling most of the terrorist plots and averting
disasters.*

However, if terrorists were given free rein, the casualties number on their
side would much much higher just like what's occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq or
Syria.

*: Not counting false-flags or stand-down operations.

~~~
monocasa
If that were true, we'd be seeing non bullshit terrorist convictions. I'm not
a big fan of paying for snake oil.

~~~
gotchange
To what factor would you attribute this observation if you are not buying the
law enforcement competence theory?

From the top of my head, the Garland Texas terrorist attach was foiled due to
the officers competence who shot down the two terrorist who were about to go
on a rampage a la Charlie Hebdo at the center.

That's just one example to support my argument

------
myth_buster
What you fear and what kills you.... I think this[0] is relevant.

I believe people whose counter argument is to compare death by police officer
to other causes of deaths are missing the point.

[0] [http://www.macleans.ca/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/FEAR.jpg](http://www.macleans.ca/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/FEAR.jpg)

------
pmlnr
Note: US only.

~~~
PMan74
Indeed, cops here don't even have guns, he'd have to beat me to death

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Haha agreed. But where we live other comparisons probably apply, things like
obesity or traffic ought to be feared much more than terrorism.

Internationally it still boggles my mind why there's so much attention for
things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. Remember bring our girls home? All the way
to the whitehouse. Since the kidnapping of the 219 girls, about 300 thousand
have died of aids. There's this fetish with terrorism as a threat to human
livelihood I don't understand. Obviously those were 219 too many kidnapped
girls, but I don't understand why we focus so much attention on things that
relatively affect us in the least, if 200k people died of terrorist attacks in
a single country per year, year after year, you'd expect it to be headlines in
the press every single day until it's over.

------
joesmo
I guess the only thing we have to fear is not just fear itself but the fearful
themselves who are driving the madness in this country because of their fear
of what is essentially a ghost (terrorism). So much for JFK's America. Today's
America is filled with fearful cowards, just like the people in charge the
past fifteen or so years always wanted.

------
Karunamon
Tangentially related, but I'm a little bit surprised to see something like
this coming from CATO. Traditionally, a focus on police abuse and statistics
like these have been the purview of the American left, while CATO is a
conservative think tank.

It's very heartening to see this problem addressed by the other side of the
aisle.

~~~
scarmig
Cato has been good on these issues since forever. I picked up my instinctive
knee jerk support of civil liberties from them when I was a wee little thing.

------
tptacek
Eight times epsilon being...

I don't think this headline means what Cato wants it to mean; as it stands,
what it's saying is that you simply aren't going to be killed by a police
officer.

It doesn't make more sense as a resource allocation argument either, since
Cato opposes the "war on terror".

------
throwaway049
Being a middle income white person not involved in crime, I suspect my risk
for being killed by the police is below average. As I live in London and
travel on public transport my risk for being killed by a terrorist is above
average.

~~~
rmxt
Poor comparison -- you are drawing a comparison between averages that are on
different orders of magnitude. Being "below average" in one case and "above
average" in another case doesn't make suddenly make them equivalent.

------
novaleaf
I am actually very surprised it's only 8x, considering how infrequent I and
other Americans encounter terrorists.

------
wnevets
CATO isn't known for its honestly. What a terrible headline and comparison.

------
lumberjack
But the latter does far more damage to the state.

------
tmaly
bummer

------
a3voices
This is ignoring black swan events. There is no chance that police officers
will kill 10 million people tomorrow, but there is a non-zero chance that
terrorists will.

~~~
Zigurd
No, there isn't such a chance. The only WMDs with the ability to kill tens of
thousands are nukes. Terrorists only have nukes on TV, the kind with big
countdown displays on them. It's the difference between a black swan and the
fantasy of a black swan. The is no real-world hypothesis of how such a black
swan happens.

That's why black powder bombs are the highest technology terrorists actually
use, because it is the most effective thing they actually can use.

EDIT Before you hypothesize about "stolen nukes" know that it is impossible to
move a nuke undetected:
[http://www.rense.com/general16/nucla.htm](http://www.rense.com/general16/nucla.htm)

Terrorists and WMDs is fiction. And sometimes fiction is propaganda.

~~~
dudul
There are other ways to kill tens of thousands of people other than nukes.

Weaponized viruses is one. Other indirect ways such as triggering a large
scale war, economic warfare, etc.

~~~
Zigurd
No, there isn't. It is incredibly difficult to make effective chem/bioweapons.
Aum tried sarin gas and they would have killed more people with a $10 bomb.

Wars are caused by over-estimating the terrorist threat.

------
gopowerranger
Define "you". By "you" do you mean criminals and others who are evading,
resisting or shooting at cops? Or do you mean the majority of law-abiding
citizens without issues that involve the police coming after you?

I'm in the latter. So is my whole family, friends and, afaik, co-workers. So
do I think that 8x number applies to any of us? No.

------
dandare
We need to sacrifice some of our freedoms to increase our security from the
cops.

~~~
federico3
That's exactly what is happening with putting cameras on cops and their cars.

