Maybe criminals in the US carry and use guns because they fear violence from the police?
If you think the police are going to kill you either way, you might as well go out shooting! In the UK you know the police are going to respectfully arrest you and treat you well, so might as well give in rather than escalate it to a firefight.
But generally I think it's crazy that the police in the US are armed. Most policing doesn't need lethal weaponry, and community officers shouldn't be armed. Leave guns to specialist units when required.
I know Floyd wasn't killed with a gun, but I think disarming the police would be the right response and first step towards reducing police violence, as it de-escalates every interaction.
> In the UK you know the police are going to respectfully arrest you and treat you well
I agree this will be the case most of the time, but it's worth pointing out this is not always the case.
The MET in particular are rather infamous for their level of institutionalised racism, which while undoubtedly better than it used to be, still leaves much to be considered.
Anecdotally, I have family members in the police force in London and in Scotland. The ones in London like to regale others with tales of how much they enjoy donning their riot gear and using any excuse to batter people, especially if they are black. The ones in Scotland tell of how prisoners are routinely abused - usually at a "minor" level, such as slapping a prisoner for no reason, but in one indicent a prisoner's head was smashed off a radiator.
> "The ones in London like to regale others with tales of how much they enjoy donning their riot gear and using any excuse to batter people, especially if they are black"
If this is true then you need to immediately report it to MPS DPS and IOPC.
Yes it absolutely is evidence that means something. You have direct first hand evidence of racism. Even if it's not sufficient for action on its own it is still incredibly valuable evidence that may well be strengthened by other people's accounts.
Unless you are lying, you absolutely have a civic duty to report what you heard.
Mate, I don't know what's up with the "If this is true" and "Unless you are lying". What possible incentive could I have for making up such a thing?
> you absolutely have a civic duty to report
Real-life is just a tad more complicated than that.
As much as I abhor what they've said, they are family, and I'd liklely be ostracised by other close family members. In any case, effectively the evidence is my word against theirs from something they said a few years ago. Something they could simply claim didn't happen, or that they were just kidding around. If I was going to report it, the time to do so would have been then. Should I have done so? I battled with decision at that at the time, but ultimately didn't for the reasons I already mentioned.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say you are lying, I meant that in the sense people say stuff like "Unless you're writing this from beyond the grave then...". Reading it back I can see how it read.
I was trying to say that you had no reason for not reporting it (based on what you had said - it's too old, it's my word against theirs etc).
Obviously now you've suggested you have your own personal reasons. That's completely different and totally up to you. I was only commenting on the objections you had raised previously, which suggested you thought your information had no value, when it does.
Yes, I think it's important us in the UK not to be too self congratulatory on these issues. The UK have a similar racial skew in the number of people imprisoned from BAME communities compared to their representation in the overall population.
The reasons for this are many fold, ranging from poorer opportunities and education to more severe punishments for crimes committed.
That said, extrajudicial killings are extraordinarily rare in the UK. I don't think anyone, even someone from those communities, would ever expect to die during an interaction with the police in normal circumstances. While in the US it's becoming clear that there is a real fear of any police interaction being escalated to that point.
Moving away from law enforcement to mental health treatment we see black people are more likely to be detained under the mental health act, spend longer in detention, are more likely to be on CTOs, are more likely to be on forensic sections. In hospital they're more likely to be subjected to seclusion, restraint, and rapid tranquillisation.
> Maybe criminals in the US carry and use guns because they fear violence from the police?
Criminals carry guns because other criminals carry guns, and because prospective victims generally do not carry guns.
Most criminals are not going to be interested to pull a gun on the police. If they can make the gun disappear when encountering the police, they will.
> In the UK you know the police are going to respectfully arrest you and treat you well, so might as well give in rather than escalate it to a firefight.
In the UK you also don't face the same penalties. If it's twenty-five to life, people are likely to resist arrest by all means.
> But generally I think it's crazy that the police in the US are armed. Most policing doesn't need lethal weaponry, and community officers shouldn't be armed. Leave guns to specialist units when required.
Sure, most policing doesn't need arms, but most behavior doesn't need policing either.
If you were a police officer, would you, unarmed, engage another person wielding a hatchet? I'd say that's unlikely. Would you even take the job if you were unarmed?
Of course that means police kill/injure fewer people, but they also prevent fewer people from killing or injuring others.
> I know Floyd wasn't killed with a gun, but I think disarming the police would be the right response and first step towards reducing police violence, as it de-escalates every interaction.
It would de-escalate in the sense that there won't be any policing. Officers aren't going to engage a potentially armed criminal with just pepper spray.
If you could assume that the person you are trying to arrest most likely does not carry a gun, like in Europe, it would be different. That's just not going to happen in the US.
> If you were a police officer, would you, unarmed, engage another person wielding a hatchet? I'd say that's unlikely. Would you even take the job if you were unarmed?
Great example! Here's how the UK engage someone wielding a machete, without guns or any other weapons beside extendable batons.
They try to deescalate, they bring in reinforcements, they surround, then they disarm him using shields, not weapons, and he survives to stand a fair trial. No guns needed.
And if they thought they couldn't arrest him using shields they could call in a specialist firearms unit, who are specifically trained, authorised, and accountable.
This is ridiculous. You have six or seven officers trying to verbally reason with the screaming guy. Then, at an unspecified later time, you have about twenty to thirty officers subduing the guy.
Look, in this case maybe the screaming guy didn't actually intend to hurt anyone. You can tell by the fact that he isn't actually attacking. There also weren't any victims or bystanders involved.
Now, what happens if somebody actually tries to assault people? The perpetrator gets shot from a safe distance when those "special units" finally arrive:
In the US, this man would be dead. Here, he survived. That's not ridiculous.
> Now, what happens if somebody actually tries to assault people? The perpetrator gets shot from a safe distance, when those "special units" finally arrive:
Yes - that's how it should be. Leave an actual firefight to specially appointed marksman with specialist weapons, not day-to-day officers waving pistols around. And they don't need those weapons when attending other incidents.
> In the US, this man would be dead. Here, he survived.
Well alright, that's one machete-wielding life that was saved. How many non-machete-wielding lives are lost by having an underpowered police force?
I guess we'll never know.
> That's not ridiculous.
It's ridiculous that it takes six or seven officers so long to neutralize the threat, which may not even have been a real threat.
> Yes - that's how it should be. Leave an actual firefight to specially appointed marksman with specialist weapons, not day-to-day officers waving pistols around. And they don't need those weapons when attending other incidents.
So, you get called to a minor domestic disturbance, the unarmed cops show up and it turns out that the guy in question "upgraded" to a kitchen knife. They'll better be good at keeping him occupied with trivia questions until the properly equipped force shows up.
I'm sure there's a trade-off between having police officers armed and dangerous versus having them be harmless. However, most countries in Europe - even those with low crime rates - choose to arm their officers. Deadly incidents remain rare:
> It's ridiculous that it takes six or seven officers so long to neutralize the threat, which may not even have been a real threat.
So just kill people to save a handful of officers having to spend 15 minutes sorting a situation out?
> So, you get called to a minor domestic disturbance, the unarmed cops show up and it turns out that the guy in question "upgraded" to a kitchen knife. They'll better be good at keeping him occupied with trivia questions until the properly equipped force shows up.
How do you think it works in practice in the UK at the moment? If someone attacks you with a kitchen knife you can defend yourself and arrest them using a baton or a Tazer - you don't need a gun that's an insane murderous overreaction.
Our rate of both people killed by the police, and people killed by other people, is very low. Learn from what we're doing.
> So just kill people to save a handful of officers having to spend 15 minutes sorting a situation out?
That's a false dichotomy. What if it had been only two officers? That would be the situation if there happened to be a patrol around.
How do you know how the crazy guy would've reacted when facing a gun? Perhaps he would have surrendered.
What about the officer's safety? Having a gun doesn't mean you have to shoot it, it means you have better means to defend yourself and others.
The fact that almost all other police forces in Europe have guns but then tend to not fire them at people tells me that guns are not the problem.
Either way, I'm not willing to put the lives of police officers on the line just to save a couple of machete-wielding crazy people from a "suicide by cop" situation.
> How do you think it works in practice in the UK at the moment? If someone attacks you with a kitchen knife you can defend yourself and arrest them using a baton or a Tazer - you don't need a gun that's an insane murderous overreaction.
No it isn't. If you are getting attacked with a knife, you and or other person, officer or not, are morally and legally entitled to defend yourself and others with lethal force.
For your own safety, don't bring a baton to a knife fight. You can not intervene at a distance and you're risking your life.
As for Tazers, they don't have the same psychological impact as a gun and they have limited range. You're welcome to use them, but I wouldn't put my or any officer's body on the line just to prevent the attacker from harm.
Statistics give clues, and strongly suggest the method is quite effective at saving non-machete-wielding lives.
> It's ridiculous that it takes six or seven officers so long to neutralize the threat, which may not even have been a real threat.
I think what you're implying here is that it's ridiculous to spend a few hours of a few officers work day to save a life.
Better to kill someone, at least it's over quickly and doesn't need as much... salary?
> They'll better be good at keeping him occupied with trivia questions until the properly equipped force shows up.
The point of the video is that, indeed, they are effective at keeping someone occupied until the properly equipped force shows up, and that it is possible to do that without just killing people when they are freaking out.
It is hardly just trivia questions. If you were paying attention to the video, the positioning of the cars and officers was intentional, to contain the situation while de-escalating it.
> I think what you're implying here is that it's ridiculous to spend a few hours of a few officers work day to save a life.
No, it's ridiculous to keep a threat going for so long. Remember that it is a threat? For how long exactly should these officers be expected to have a machete wielded at their face?
> Better to kill someone, at least it's over quickly and doesn't need as much... salary?
That's not how it would work in a standoff like this. First, you present the gun. That might change the perpetrator's mind. Then, you fire a warning shot. That might change the perpetrator's mind. Then, you shoot at the legs. If that doesn't change the perpetrator's mind, it's going to seriously impede their ability to cause harm.
If the perpetrator chooses to initiate an assault, all bets are off. They're getting shot, but also injury to others is likely going to be prevented.
> The point of the video is that, indeed, they are effective at keeping someone occupied until the properly equipped force shows up, and that it is possible to do that without just killing people when they are freaking out.
How do you know that this was effective? Show me a situation with an attacker actually ready to initiate an assault. The situation couldn't have been brought under control. For example:
We do know, if you'd care to find out, because homicide and suicide rates are significantly lower in the UK and other countries without armed police than the US.
A domestic is a perfect example of a situation where coming in with guns will get people killed.
> We do know, if you'd care to find out, because homicide and suicide rates are significantly lower in the UK and other countries without armed police than the US.
That's not how you know anything. First of all, the vast majority of countries around the world have armed police, so there's very few samples to work with.
Of course you'll have trouble finding any country with a high homicide rate where the police isn't armed, but you can easily find countries where homicides are extremely rare and police are still armed, for example Japan.
Suicide is mostly cultural. Korea, a country with extremely low crime rates has a very high suicide rate. In the Philippines, police are literally executing suspects in the streets, yet the suicide rate is very low. In Syria, a war torn country, suicide is even lower than that.
The rules about who gets engaged and for what seem to vary. The most astonishing thing is the number of black people who've been killed for maybe having something that looked like a gun, then a bunch of armed protestors occupy a government building during the "war on terror" without so much as a single teargas round being fired against them?
Criminals should fear justice.
The police is NOT the judge and jury. The police responsibility is to bring someone, alive, in front of a judge, with proof of wrongdoing.
It is called separation of duties.
> Criminals SHOULD fear the police, they are the ones committing crimes
There are crimes and crimes. We are talking here about a man being deliberately, painfully and slowly executed for 9 minutes, in front of a crowd, whereas crying for his life...
...for the crime of trying to scam 20 dollars!
Is this the value of your life if you are a jobless black man in US?. $20?
Its certainly also never the police's role to decide who is guilty. For all those police knew, at the time of arrest, it was Mr. Floyd who was the victim of a false accusation.
But my thesis is that the criminals are heavily armed because they know that the police are violent. If the police were less violent, the criminals may see less need to arm themselves.
In the US a criminal needs to be ready to defend themselves to the death in any interaction with the police. In the UK, they don't.
I'm not sure if that's a valid point... i was always under the impression, that most of the violence in "violent cities" is due to violent gang, and that gang members are armed because they have to deal with other criminals/gangs (eg. if you sell drugs, to protect yourself and your drugs from being stolen, or to have "leverage" when racketeering, fighthing for "teritory", etc).
So why are police carrying guns outside of these violent cities?
Why does a police officer in a nice suburban area who attends things like noisy parties... carry a lethal firearm? That's absolutely crazy to me, and should be to everyone else.
Because if something does happen there, they use the gun for their protection. Same as in Germany (where the police is also armed). And pretty much every other country, even very peaceful ones, except probably UK.
> Because if something does happen there, they use the gun for their protection.
But this is (literally) overkill in my opinion. You could justify a flamethrower by saying 'they'd use it for their protection'. Most community police officers do not need to carry lethal weapons as they do not need that level of protection. They're patrolling communities, not war zones.
Also, regular people using guns for crimes is also probably way, way higher than Germany and Japan.
It's not that surprising IMO for a country where there are so many guns for the police to encounter more hostile situations that require utilizing their gun for theirs and others protection.
Guns are a weapon that quickly escalates any situation to life or death.
I heard in philosophy there was a discussion that the definition of a state was "violence monopoly", because from that everything else like law, currency-model and more is attained.
It was a long time ago so I probably butchered the description, but I thought it was profound.
The definition of the state as the "monopoly on violence" only works if you think that states inherently have the right to their power. America, on the other hand, believes that the government gets its power from the people and the people have the right to take away that power if it is misused. In effect, Americans have contractually given the state the essential powers of violence but still keep the means to take that power back. That's why Americans have had the right to firearms before the United States even existed.
> The definition of the state as the "monopoly on violence" only works if you think that states inherently have the right to their power.
Not at all. The idea is that the state has a mandate from its citizens to exercise violence (within due limits) to enforce the decisions of the citizens. It's a monopoly because citizens don't have the right to use violence against each other, and even if they do the state is guaranteed to be able to respond with enough force to make it stop.
> In effect, Americans have contractually given the state the essential powers of violence but still keep the means to take that power back.
This justification to arms ownership always strikes me as delusional. Whatever the amount of weapons in circulation there is absolutely no way American citizens could fight their own police and their own army.
Of course, but that's a last resort. You cannot ask someone who is in risk of imminent harm not to defend him/herself, although that should be the minimum use of force needed to fend off the danger (in the US as usual the law is less strict, in Europe you can shoot to defend your life but if it's proven that in that exact moment your life wasn't in danger you'll be charged).
> Please tell me the last time America won a war against a militia or insurrection embedded in the civilian population.
A clear case must be in 1865, when the Union won the civil war- at the cost of between 600k and 1 million dead. But there's of endless instances of the US police or national guard using force to repress protests, uprising and terrorism- as it is normal. It's hard to say whether these movements could have been more widespread if they hadn't been repressed through intelligence and use of force.
But can you point out an example of when a militia or an insurrection won against the US police or national guard?
> if you think that states inherently have the right to their power.
Why would I think that?
I'm saying that from the violence monopoly everything else is upheld by a first principle approach. If the state is overthrown the violence monopoly is either upheld by a new group, or you have no governing state.
Do you think people have the right to use violence for self defense? If so, who can people defend themselves from? Who can't they defend themselves from?
Wrong. The rate of gun ownership is not the primary predictor of the murder rate in America. I live in a state where over two thirds of people own guns, but the murder rate (and police killing rate) is very low.
The comment you are replying to is asserting that the prevalence of guns mean that guns are more likely to appear/be used in a violent crime, not that they increase violent crime. Your "wrong" is not justified by your evidence.
You can have a high amount of gun ownership and low gun related crimes. But the countries hailed for high gun ownership and low gun crime like Switzerland have some hefty gun control. You can’t buy guns without going through hunting training, getting certified and then they keep registration which links your hunting rifle directly to you. You also can’t buy stuff that’s meant to kill humans and it’s illegal not to lock your weapons securely away when you aren’t hunting.
So criminals actually don’t have easy access to guns in these countries, and post terrorism our secret police forces and Europol tracks guns rather well, typically leading to arrests before anyone get to use their guns.
> You can’t buy guns without going through hunting training, getting certified and then they keep registration which links your hunting rifle directly to you
In Switzerland, it's very easy[0] to acquire a weapons, the requirements are:
- you must be at least 18 years old,
- you must not be subject to a deputyship or a supervision order,
- you must not give any cause to assume that you could harm yourself or anyone else with the weapon,
- you must not have a criminal record for violent or dangerous offences or repeated felonies or misdemeanours.
> But the countries hailed for high gun ownership and low gun crime like Switzerland have some hefty gun control.
Middle of Nowheretown USA (and Canada for that matter) tends to have astronomically high gun ownership rates and astronomically low "gun crime" or any violent crime other than domestic violence and people who are known to each other engaging in fisticuffs over preexisting disputes. I don't think it's the mandatory class you need to pretend not to sleep though and bureaucratic red tape that's keeping people from shooting each other. It's the lack of a society and economy (victim supply) capable of sustaining a "large enough to show up in the statistics" number of career violent criminals that keeps violent crime and therefore gun crime low in both places.
EU has almost twice the population of USA and it has several countries with high gun ownership and no border control between these countries and the rest of the EU (Schengen Zone to be exact, but it doesn't matter here).
The crazy high crime, murder and incarceration rates in USA aren't caused by population size. They are caused by inequalities inherent in American system.
If a whole class of your society can't hope for their kids to get a white collar job, and have to fear losing their house if they ever get seriously ill - that's not a stable basis for a peaceful society.
You seem to be reading an implied meaning I wasn't intending into my comment. My point, which you seem to be agreeing with while somehow also disagreeing at the same time is that it's not the ease of access to firearms that's driving violence, it's other societal factors. Nowhere did I say anything about overall population being a driver of violence.
I really hate how I find myself having to go to greater and greater lengths to disclaim my words around here to not have them twisted or stretched to imply something.
US murder and incarceration rates are more or less solely caused by the war on drugs. Once you remove people who are involved in the manufacture, transportation and sale of illicit substances from the crime stats the place looks a lot like the better parts of western Europe.
Yes, wealth equality, social mobility and healthcare have a hell of a lot of room for improvement but they are not the driver of violence in the US. Forcing a multi-billion dollar industry to exist outside the law is what is driving violence.
I disagree with the part about population size being a factor, so that's what I responded to. I also admit I misread you comment a little (sorry, not a native speaker and I wass reading it on a coffee break at work).
> US murder and incarceration rates are more or less solely caused by the war on drugs
That's what you would expect if drug trade is the most profitable crime, no matter if drugs are the reason these people went into crime in the first place. If you can't afford your expected lifestyle within the system you go outside the system. Once there you choose the crime with the highest profit per risk factor.
There's plenty of countries that penalize drug ownership that have order of magnitude less crime than USA.
My state has basically no gun control. You can buy an AR-15 with no background check from a third party and not get it registered. No registration necessary for open carrying rifles or pistols. We still have one of the lowest crime rates in America. I fail to see the correlation between gun control and gun crime in America.
Poverty, education, inequality, institutional problems are much more likely to be correlated with crime, so it's not exactly that surprising. Now of course the problem is that what should the states/regions/counties/cities do that have gun violence. Eg. if I remember correctly Chicago/Illinois tried various forms of gun control, but it made an impact next to nothing because it was pretty easy to just get guns from out of city/state.
If you look at the rate per 10 Million people, we're right in-between Mexico and Bangladesh with 28.4
Germany is 1.3, UK is 0.5, Japan is 0.2
That tells me there's a problem that isn't solved by breaking the numbers into two columns of justified and non-justified.