> Of course, in all but Iceland, citizens in these countries generally don’t have access to guns.
As a Kiwi I'm surprised to hear that. Perhaps the author is speaking of some parallel New Zealand, but in the one I inhabit it's not especially hard to own a shotgun or rifle: get a license, buy your firearm.
Pistols, high-capacity semi-automatic rifles, automatic weapons are very hard or impossible to own, but guns themselves are not uncommon.
In the UK, it can take >6 months for the police to issue a firearm certificate. Not because of any lengthy checks.. but because they are inefficient and have large backlogs.
interesting treatment in London, shooting 'clay pigeons' for sport is a past-time of the monied in these parts, I wonder if the fast track city licences are mostly for bankers weekend jollies?
Got it in one :) A noob investment banker who is going shooting in the country with a well-heeled client is the motivator, and you also need to understand that the "City of London" is not the London that you are thinking of. The former is a weird holdover from ancient times that is centuries older than the city of London that you visit on vacation. It has its own special laws, and for a long time it had its own police force.
> but because they are inefficient and have large backlogs.
This seems to be true of many things. When I worked in the UK I never ended up with the national health number that you're supposed to get, because I was based in the Black Country and there's essentially an infinite backlog (as in, at my address they were no longer taking applications).
A friend applied from the address of his workplace near the City, and had one within a few weeks.
Much the same in Norway. Getting a licence for a handgun is pretty hard; maintaining it even more so; under no circumstances can a civilian carry a handgun in public.
However, everybody and his dog owns a shotgun or a rifle to go hunting; it's just so that we mostly use them for hunting rather than for self defense or committing crimes...
Well, you can still pick up an AR-15 online in NZ if you have a valid firearms license, difference is the police are going to know you have one, and will do a background check as well as have an interview with you.
In the US if you buy a firearm online from a retailer or distributor it is required that it be shipped to a Federal Firearm Licensee, who will perform a NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) check prior to the transfer.
Though not required, many private sellers will only ship firearms to an FFL so that the transfer is documented (in what is called a "bound book") and the private seller knows the buyer can legally purchase the firearm.
New Zealand does not have gun show or private sale exemptions, and the firearms license always required. If you lose it, you can kiss your firearms goodbye.
The US does not have a gun show exception. All dealers must do the same background check and paperwork that they do in stores, and the dealers will also do this for any individual buyer & seller who ask.
Some private sellers (a minority, in my experience) don't insist on having a dealer do the transfer, but that has nothing to do with where the sake takes place.
We have access to guns, the difference is that to own one (at least in Norway) you have to have a purpose for it and "protection" is not one of them. If you look at the statistics, Norway and Sweden are number 10 and 9 respectively when it comes to the number of guns pr person.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c...)
To own a pistol for instance, you need to be an active member of a gun club for 6 months before buying one, and then you need to keep it at the gun club for 6 months before bringing it home.
At home you are only allowed to store it in a locked cabinet without ammo and the only time you are allowed to transport it is to and from the gun range.
In the US you have the expectation that a gun will provide "protection", i.e. you can buy a gun with the purpose of harming others. I think this is the biggest difference.
It's a remarkable stretch to conceptualize self-defense as "[a] purpose of harming others", especially in light of the fact that most in the US who obtain firearms for that purpose don't bother with the formalities around doing so lawfully.
In the UK we have had guns progressively removed with successive laws slowly disarming the public such that now the only easy thing to get is an air rifle or air pistol. But what is interesting is you can see in the crime and homicide stats how much impact these individual laws have had and how much the homicide rate with guns has changed over 70 years or so.
The shorter answer is that disarming hasn't change the homicide rate with guns at all. That has remained steady and inline with violent crime and crime in general, the amount the populace is armed didn't have any impact. We are told it has but the statistics alas don't lie and we have stats for this going back quite a way. There should be clear and present dips after gun control laws or changes in trajectory but they just aren't there.
Here in Norway, a police officer is most likely to be shot by...
...a fellow police officer.
Police were unarmed until quite recently (however, they did have firearms available should need arise, also compulsory training and certification at fixed intervals)
When our DoJ decided to arm police due to some perceived terror threat, the number of accidental discharges (unsurprisingly) skyrocketed.
The terror never materialised, but several officers today limp after quite literally shooting themselves in the foot.
No, it actually happened four years later, presumably due to a concrete threat of islamic extremist terrorist attacks, the details of which were never disclosed to the public. To no one's surprise, the decision, which was touted as temporary in the political debate that ensued, is still in effect.
See the whole premise that someone can call up some government official and go "booga booga" and actually get a real change in policy while citizens fight for years to be heard really makes me think there's a bit more to the narrative ...
It's almost like governments repressing their people is like a little kid looking for an excuse to eat candy.
Well it didn't help that the Progress Party, the right wing populists, was in government for the first time ever, and got their boy in the minister of justice chair.
I think (mind, think) it was repealed a few weeks ago, and that Norwegian police is now unarmed unless there's a very specific threat they're responding to.
When they were armed, it probably didn't help that they were issued Glocks - on which the safety catch... ...isn't.
(The Glock is seemingly designed around the idea that it would be a bigger problem if you intended to fire and the gun didn't than the other way around; hence the abundance of accidental discharges.
You can't compare Norway -- the oil rich Saudi Arabia of Europe -- to a country the US. Crime doesn't just pop up out of a vacuum. When you've got millions of people getting wrapped up in violent cliques\gangs that are going to be armed to the teeth irregardless of gun regulation (most use stolen weapons) you don't want to go into those environments armed like the French bicycle police.
> The US is remarkably violent compared to Europe.
Has been heretofore, at any rate. Given the effect of mass immigration on the relative homogeneity of European cultures, and the effect on levels of violence of heterogeneity among incompatible cultures, it'll be interesting to see how things play out over the next few decades.
In Finland the police are always armed and always(?) have been. Yet, iirc, they discharged their weapons a total of 6 times in 2014. They also carry pepper spray, batons and tasers and are trained to use the appropriate amount of force in any given situation after trying to de-escalate instead of just shooting first. If they have to shoot, they go for the legs.
There's the old-testament revenge style of conflict resolution, and the new-testament style of conflict resolution. The new ones works better, that's why almost everyone uses it.
Even in the UK and in Norway police officers are allowed to carry gun's but they rarely do, and rarely have to. There are special forces who are called when wide-reaching bullet forces are needed, and even then deadly force is rarely needed to take out an attacker.
Third civilized countries have the principle of consequence of lawlessness. If a police officer oversteps his powers he has to face the consequences, otherwise he will continue to abuse his powers. A very simple but powerful principle, which is esp. needed for those who have state-granted special powers.
Forth, civilized countries invest a lot into marketing of police powers. TV broadcasts crime investigations and police dramas all the time, round the clock, where police is presented to serve the people, so they are presented in a positive light. This might be useful to cover up police abuse, but is in fact more useful as a positive role model to the enforcers. Officers stepping out of line are clearly overstepping their line. Whilst in the US the lone cop hero taking down the suspect with a well-aimed shot is the patriotic hero, saving the community from crime and violence. Marketing is different there, the state powers don't invest in these kind of TV dramas.
Yet it's worth noting that in the UK these types of incidents are exceedingly rare. Total shootings resulting in death in England and Wales since 1990 stands at 60 - most of whom were actual armed criminals.
If worrying about being killed by UK police you should be more worried about them running you over with a car - they kill far more that way.
I don't know what the commentator is referring to. But, there's a wide-spread belief in the UK that arming the police is a bad idea - since it leads to issues. There has been an increase in the number of 'armed police' with the perceived increase in terror: but there's no much support for widely arming the police. I think that's likely to be a key difference in how the police are perceived in the UK and the USA.
To put "not much support" in perspective, during a survey almost 80% of serving police said they opposed being routinely armed on duty, and over 95% opposed being armed both on and off duty. Not even the police themselves have any appetite for escalating the use of firearms in routine duty.
Any evidence of this at all? Aren't UK officers that carry those kind of weapons specifically trained to use them?
>> "in London there is no shortage of cops wandering around with AR15s and MP7s"
Where? In airports maybe but it is very rare to see them on the streets. I don't know what area of London you're in but I can't remember the last time I saw one besides at a large public event.
I have seen a few with AR15s near South Kensington Station.
Got really scared since in my head they could just point it towards me and press a button to end my life in a really painful way.
There are embassies in the area, but Kensington Palace is nowhere near the South Kensington station. The borough of Kensington & Chelsea is a somewhat elongated rectangle with the palace on the northern end at Hyde Park and the south end at the Thames.
My daughter's school is right near there so I am familiar with their presence. The reason you see them around is the nearby Lycée Français Charles De Gaulle and a few embassies like Yemen, Venezuela, etc. They are not there often, and usually only when there is terrorist activity in France.
Where? In airports maybe but it is very rare to see
them on the streets.
Depends how often you go past things that have guards. For example Winfield House [1], American embassy [2], Israeli embassy [3] and places like that. Sometimes in the larger train stations too.
Armed guards seem most visible outside second-rank attack targets; places like Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace usually have oodles of unarmed police, presumably to deal with all the tourists. Presumably there are armed police somewhere nearby, although I couldn't see any on Street View.
It is also less than three blocks from the barracks of the foot guard and of the horse guard barracks. An event at the palace would draw at least a company of well-armed and well-trained soldiers in minutes.
I think it is mostly for show, or to "reassure the public". You would think that a deliberate surprise attack would require many more armed officers in defensible positions. Not a few isolated individuals mingling with the public.
I saw a couple of them with MP7's in Farringdon station at 8am in the morning with all those rush hour commuters about. What is discouncerting about that scenario is that at no time could any officer ever fire a weapon in those circumstances, the station is absolutely jammed with 1000s of civilians and any would be terrorist would have a screen of 10's of them in the way of any shot. There is simply no way those weapons could ever be used without a massive loss of innocent life.
It felt more like a show of force by the government against the populace not as protecting us, the police were the actual threat that morning and a credible one.
> Even in the UK and in Norway police officers are allowed to carry gun's but they rarely do, and rarely have to.
Not sure about Norway, but in the case of UK and Ireland most police officers are not allowed anywhere near firearms.
If an incident takes place that requires armed officers a senior policeman authorises the use of armed unit. Every force has access to them, and training is as much about de-escalation and negotiation as shooting. They are drawn from regular police and undergo significant extra regular training.
Wikipedia tells me roughly 6,000 of something like 140,000 UK police are authorised to carry firearms.
That's wrong. UK airports are protected by whichever constabulary the airport geographically falls under, though the London Greater Metropolitan Area and Belfast are slightly different with dedicated units.
The Aviation Security Operational Command Unit (SO18) is a Specialist Operations unit of London's Metropolitan Police Service. The unit is responsible for providing law enforcement and security for both Heathrow and London City airports.[1] London's other airports, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton are policed by Sussex, Essex and the Bedfordshire Police respectively, as they are not located in the Metropolitan Police District.
Thanks for the correction, I was sure that Heathrow went under MOD in the past 10-15 years, especially since most of the AR officer I've seen at Heathrow were wearing the MODP badges (not literally, but cap and shoulder strap :)) but it could've been just localized reinforcement, I think the last time I've noticed a serious number of armed police at heathrow was in the weeks after the xmas day bomber.
> Every force has access to them, and training is as much about de-escalation and negotiation as shooting.
Or just plain non-shooting solutions to the problem. When a person having some sort of psychotic break started smashing up a local games shop with a weapon, the local police made sure the staff were out, let the offender tire himself out breaking things, and then used pepper spray before arresting him.
I would be very surprised if the equivalent scenario in the US didn't involve shots being fired.
Its definitely not acceptable in the UK to save more of a shops property by murdering someone, that is a sure fire route to jail for life for a police officer and rightly so.
The answer is the insurance company. Property isn't worth more than a human life but I know in the USA they do have the premise of defending your property lethally, we don't have that in our culture we don't believe in capital punishment regardless of the crime. Shooting a man for property damage is a conviction and sentence to death by a police officer, that is not OK this isn't Judge Dread.
Police Service of Northern Ireland [1] officers routinely carry guns, but I don't understand the culture where a sidearm is drawn and pointed at a driver from the start in a routine broken tail light/uninsured driver type stop. That would probably make the news in NI.
They usually do not draw a weapon on a routine stop. The stops with weapons drawn are usually when they have some reason to suspect that they are dealing with an actual criminal.
As for why they might pull their sidearm in such a case, just ponder the following statistics.
United States: 112 guns per 100 residents.
United Kingdom: 6.6 guns per 100 residents.
The United States has around 5% of the world's population, but 30-50% of the world's civilian owned guns. The gun homicide rate in the US is about 60 times that of the UK.
Other countries have high percentages of guns in their populace but without the homicide rates. The USA has a homicide issue and a large chunk of it is done with guns, but its not a universal trait that countries with guns have lots of homicide. Its not unique to the USA but its not correlated on a world level.
I've been seeing this logic quite a bit this week and I don't agree with it.
For one, the numbers I've seen for per-capita are around 88% (2014, I think), not 112%.
However, the number of gun owners is estimated from anywhere between 12-33%. So no, number of guns in the country can't be used as a rationale for the probability that an officer will encounter a gun in a stop. Gun owners are a minority.
> but is in fact more useful as a positive role model to the enforcers.
Very interesting detail. You should watch german TV crime fighter heroes disrespect privacy protection laws like if it was a competition. They make Gene Hunt look like a schoolgirl.
True. We also got negative role police models like the popular strongman of the decade Alan Delon, Goetz George or now Till Schweiger. Germans really love their bad guys also.
And you are right. Not the strongman is the problem, the real problem is the normal guy disrespecting the law, not involving any violence. Like disrespecting privacy laws.
True. We also got negative role police models like the popular strongman of the decade Alan Delon, Goetz George or now Till Schweiger. Germans really love their bad guys also.
And you are right. Not the strongman is the problem, the real problem is the normal guy disrespecting the law, not involving any violence. Like disrespecting privacy laws.
So now that there's over 300 million guns in the hands of American citizens, what are they supposed to do? We are where we are, this article doesn't help shit.
For starters train US police in gradual escalation rather than have them use a gun by default.
E.g. one big difference between US and UK police irrespective of weapons is that US police seem far quicker to rush into a situation to end it instantly, while UK police will only do that in extreme cases (e.g. someone is actually being harmed right now). Otherwise, police will secure a perimeter and get people away if necessary, ensure they have overwhelming force, and only then approach the suspect.
There was the case a while ago where some axe-wielding idiot was shot in the US after attacking a police officer. Only said police officer was only in range because they'd pointlessly rushed in to try to arrest him without trying to de-escalate from a safe distance first. When that situation had first been created, it was probably the right decision to shoot, but that situation wouldn't have existed if police weren't acting recklessly in the first case.
If UK police were in the same situation, the two initial responders would likely have gotten people away, kept their distance, and waited to have a dozen or so colleagues in place and kept trying to de-escalate the situation as long as possible before intervening.
The more police are careful about escalation, the less reason criminals will have to risk escalation as well.
Quote: "In one of these countries, Iceland, it’s legal for citizens to carry guns—and roughly a third choose to do so."
Absolute bullshit. I lived in Iceland for 4 years and still have a place there, and hundreds of Icelandic friends. Not once have I ever heard about anybody carrying a gun - unless out hunting.
Same in Norway - the number of guns per capita is very high. But they're mostly hunting rifles, and they're generally (or you'll be breaking the law) locked down and inoperable except when people are actually out hunting.
yes, be very weary of gun statistics, they tend to lump together hunting rifles and human killing devices. Given that many hunters are after small mammals and birds, many of those rifles are not really practical for criminality.
The short answer is that they stop not having guns when they face someone similarly armed.
But this is not the most interesting question to ask. In the US, a disarmed police force would probably just carry privately, while on the job.
A much more interesting question is why so many armed police forces in the world get by with a level of violence not so much different from their non-carrying peers. The U.S. traditionally condemns many nonviolent police activities (like searching, or requesting ID, which theoretically does not even exist there) as oppressive, anti-freedom, unamerican. Other countries do not have this cultural expectation, that the police should never interfere with the life of non-criminals. Thise countries therefore have a wide, nuanced range of police/citizen interaction that only involves guns as the very last level of escalation. If culture (and/or law, but I think that culture is much more important here) only acknowledges police authority stemming from a pointed gun, officers will find excuses to point guns.
But the biggest reason for US police gun violence must be the high general level of gun violence. It seems very natural that when criminals are trigger-happy, the police force adapts by lowering their thresholds accordingly. Inevitably, this will also fatally affect law abiding citizens. I haven't checked the numbers, but maybe, in relation to total gun deaths (instead of in relation to total population), American police are not even as terrible as they seem?
Personally I think one of the main reasons US police don't hesitate to use deadly force is that they are not held accountable for it. In the UK it s a big deal when an officer uses his weapon, there are investigations etc. In the US, as we've seen in the last couple of years, there can be start to finish video evidence of an officer using deadly force completely unnecessarily and he/she gets away with it. If you start prosecuting officers for using deadly force without proper cause I'm sure use of it would drop pretty dramatically.
>> If you start prosecuting officers for using deadly force without proper cause I'm sure use of it would drop pretty dramatically.
Or yet more reasonable: police would not care to act. Why act if you can destroy your life and nobody protects you? The proper cause is very subjective and nowadays biased against police officers.
And replaced by whom? We have enough trouble recruiting police officers as it is; it's a thankless, dangerous, ill-compensated, and often literally terrible job.
Add to that the increasingly common perception that, in exchange for doing your best to protect and preserve your community and your society, you're liable to be thrown under the bus by everyone from your own chain of command to the national legislature and executive for purely political reasons - and is it any wonder that more and more police officers are losing their willingness to risk themselves for a society which, from their point of view, no longer has their back but rather looks for any excuse to plant a knife in it?
So basically, what you have is a broken system that neither the police nor the general public are happy about: the police because they worry they will be treated unjustly if they need to exercise deadly force, and the general public because they worry the police might kill them for minor traffic violations.
No, it's a lot worse than that. Twelve percent of the general public, and that heavily concentrated in the Old South states plus a few conurbations almost entirely east of the Mississippi. Too, that twelve percent gives rise to a disproportionately large fraction of violent crime in the United States. These facts together have an amazingly wide range of deleterious effects.
The problem is not the lack of prosecution in the US. There are in fact countless attempts to prosecute officers for deadly force. The problem is that the bar for determining justified vs unjustified is low in the US. This bar makes it extremely, if not almost impossible except in very rare cases, to prosecute an officer for deadly force. There were two Supreme Court rulings that created the bar that we see today. First is Tennessee vs. Garner and the second is Graham vs. Conner.
The US has bigger issues that are at the root of police shootings in my opinion. These issues stem from extreme poverty, lack of jobs, disenfranchisement laws for convicted criminals, a lack of responsibility or taking responsibility for actions, and a growing distrust of the police that is so large community members would rather not report any crime. As an example, there is an article this morning in the DC news[1] calling for the police department to be completely eliminated and allow citizens to enforce the laws. I don't even know where to begin with that idea and I know it will never happen, but to have so much distrust that you call for eliminating the entire department shows a bigger problem.
How do you fix it? That's a good question. I am huge proponent of community policing. Taking officers out of cars and putting them on foot in the communities. But unfortunately community policing creates another set of problems in the US. There are limited police resources and therefore those resources logically are deployed to areas that most need them. Right or wrong, these areas tend to be poor communities or inner city areas where minority populations are larger. In turn community policing is often viewed as targeting.
I am not going to sit here and deny that "profiling" does not occur and that there have not been extreme instances of "targeting". It is easy for me as a white male to be numb to the day-to-day problems that minorities face. But these terms, in my opinion, have become overused and the media has no problem turning "community policing" into acts of "targeting" solely for profit.
Instead of focusing on these isolated shootings (and they are isolated compared to the amount of policing that occurs daily) we, as a society, need to focus on solving the bigger issues. You start addressing the poverty, the education system, disenfranchisement laws, and working to build families instead of tearing them apart, only then will we see reduced incidents of officer involved shootings.
There are in fact countless attempts to prosecute officers for deadly force. The problem is that the bar for determining justified vs unjustified is low in the US
To be fair, the GP talked about accountability of the officers. If 99% of the officers are prosecuted, acquitted, and they keep their jobs, in effect they are not held to account.
I understand what you are saying, but it doesn't make sense. If the officer is prosecuted and found not guilty then why shouldn't he be able to keep his job? This country would be a bigger mess if we said that every person who is arrested, prosecuted, and found not guilty should still be treated as if they were guilty, should lose their job, and ultimately punished.
What you are really trying to address is the difference between criminal law and department policy. It is completely possible to violate department policy and not break the law. It is also possible to break the law and not department policy. Unfortunately when it comes to use of force, many department policies follow the line of the law.
Is this right or should it be different? That's a tough answer. Where do you draw the line? Do you say that every officer who fires his gun is automatically subject to termination? Do you create public panels that investigate every officer involved use of force? I can see a benefit to that, and actually think that if implemented correctly, could go a long way to resolving some of these issues. However, that too has to be handled delicately as it stands to create a lynch mob effect. You also need to ensure that the people on the panel understand the existing laws as they stand. If someone is found not guilty, you don't blame the system, you blame the law and work to change the law, not the system.
There is also a difference between being criminally liable and civilly liable. Just like there is a difference between something being morally wrong and being criminally wrong.
I'd strip the police departments of the powers to just charge the taxpayers for money in settlements and make them purchase malpractice insurance, just like every other professional. Insurance underwriters would bring department policies nationwide up to a single uniform standard. I'd hope this skin in the game + increased investment in officer training would effect changes.
Not sure what you refer to "charge the taxpayers for money in settlements"?
Also, with the insurance, many departments themselves are insured. I think what you mean is to have the individual officer have to provide their own coverage in the form of a deduction on their paycheck. While it puts a financial stake in the officer to prevent, it also now creates a whole new problem and does not solve the underlying problem.
First, if an officer is insured, it has the potential to create one of two scenarios. Scenario one is they take no action because they are afraid their "insurance rates" will go up. Similar to the way people avoid going to the doctor. Scenario two is you get the other extreme where the officer now says I'm all in if I don't have to worry about paying for my brutality.
More importantly though, everyone keeps focusing on the police brutality issue. I'm not denying there is a problem in isolated incidents. However, the solution isn't attacking the departments or officers themselves. You want to work for change, start focusing on the bigger issues at hand. Fighting crime in the neighborhoods, working to find solutions for poverty, creating jobs, changing disenfranchisement laws, encouraging the building of families instead of the tearing them apart, and finally getting people to take responsibility for their actions.
We could wake up tomorrow with new laws that eliminate police brutality, but the unfortunate truth is that those laws wouldn't change any of the above or work to stop racism in this country.
I'm not following you. I've had the police stop me plenty of times in order to ask for my ID and search me. The reasons were bullshit, and as a white kid, it gave me a little taste of what my black friends have to deal with on a regular basis. It is quite oppressive-feeling, to know you've done nothing wrong while having a cop saying and acting otherwise. That said, I do think you have a point, in that police departments can get disconnected from the communities they serve by becoming too focused on "getting bad guys". I'm a big fan of community-based policing as a result:
To build on that a bit, I also had a number of police encounters when I was younger (a few justified and others that were obvious fishing expeditions). I haven't been stopped or asked for ID in many years, but frequently ponder how various scenarios would play out if I exercised my rights with nothing to hide today. I ask myself at what point standing up for myself becomes a liability.
The answer is that I would have to try to read the personality and mood of the officer because many see lawful refusal to display ID or consent to search as evidence that I have something to hide. I base this on personal experience from having sheriffs assert that they smelled marijuana in a car that I'd borrowed from a family member who didn't partake years after I'd stopped smoking (thus, there was no lingering scent and they were waiting for me to make a mistake to reveal some amount of guilt). One of the officers clearly seemed annoyed that I would not consent to a warrantles search and threatened to arrest me and impound my vehicle in order to conduct a search. I called his bluff and was released, but only after ten minutes of attempts to scare me into submission. Officers with the same attitude may also confuse or ignore the limits of their legal authority, as seen when a guy was arrested for burning a flag last week. Others seem genuinely unaware that they cannot require ID at random. In these situations, it's a roll of the dice and a potential night in jail if you won't roll over for them.
US police don't just shoot offenders with guns, they shoot offenders with knives and offenders with cell phones.
UK police don't magically become armed when facing someone with a knife - specialist officers (with rigorous recruitment and training) will be called, but regular officers deal with it until the armed police arrive.
There are a few Youtube videos of the different approaches. UK officers tend to take a de-escalation approach, and to do what they can to protect members of the public. US officers appear to shoot first. They may think they're protecting the public, but they frequently shoot innocent bystanders. (From what we know -- bizarrely the US doesn't count how many people get shot by US police.)
Obviously this is an outlier, but I think we'd do a disservice to ourselves if we don't acknowledge the fact that sometimes the UK is as bad as the USA.
Yes, we need to constantly guard against police use of force, and we need to make sure that police who kill people are robustly investigated and prosecuted where needed.
But even if we assume that every killing by a police officer in the UK is an unlawful killing we'd still only be dealing with 55 deaths in the past 24 years, vs the US's 59 deaths in 24 days.
You're being charitable, clearly. It's probably the same motives that produce other bizarre circumstances, like the CDC being barred from researching gun violence and the puzzling amounts of US manufactured weapons ending up in the Mexican drug (civil?) war.
> It seems very natural that when criminals are trigger-happy
What exactly is the level of danger faced by a police officer when confronting a suspect who may or may not be armed with a gun or another weapon? Is that a level that justifies officers being trigger-happy?
Rather seems to be missing the point. In Australia, police carry guns. Unfortunately, there are police shootings but they are very rare and when it does occur there is a full and thorough investigation done. I don't think I've ever heard of a case in the last 15 years of anyone in the Australian police firing a gun at someone unless they were literally in imminent danger of serious violence from the one they were shooting at.
As an Australian citizen, whilst the police here aren't perfect, I also believe they aren't as trigger happy because, quite frankly, we don't carry guns on our person in Australia. This means that when police make a routine stop because of a broken tail-light they aren't as likely to feel like their life is in danger, and this almost certainly means they hesitate to fire their weapon unless they are really in danger. They are also aware that if they do discharge their weapon then there is a full investigation done. The investigations are quite thorough and actually normally very fair, but no police officer wants to be investigated really and all police officers know what a serious thing it is to fire their sidearm.
I don't expect any citizens of the U.S. to agree with me. But it occurs to me that as more people carry increasingly powerful weapons, the police have had to upgrade their own weaponry, body armour and tactics in response. From my vantage point here in Australia, it puzzles me why this isn't obvious: the more people who carry guns, the less likely law enforcement will try to negotiate and use minimal force.
From my perspective, America's gun culture is bizarre.
While deadly police incidents seem less common in Australia, don't kid yourself that our police always get it right.
They could do with better de-escalation training to deal with situations in critical environments like crowds [1] or when dealing with mentally ill people [2].
I think anyone carry a deadly weapon, civilian or government officer should bear extra responsibility to safeguard the safety of all people around them.
I didn't, and I agree that they need to improve. They always need to improve, but I have to agree with the coroner on the Tyler Cassidy shooting - I'm not entirely sure what else they could have done. But, they do get it wrong - especially, it seems for some reason, in Victoria.
The incidence of police shooting across our entire population is by far significantly less than in the U.S. - which is not to say that even one avoidable shooting is acceptable, only that it happens far less often.
To drive a car you need a driving license. To get a gun in the US, you just need to be a citizen. There is nothing stopping anyone from being trigger happy. You hear cases of accidental firings in the US all the time.
The article treats these police forces as something special when really the unusual case/outlier here is the US.
The US has a bit of a culture problem on this front - everyone is armed to the teeth & violence has been made acceptable via Hollywood etc. Plus there is the old "if you have a hammer everything starts looking like a nail" issue. People will resort to what they have available. And you can't really do much about it because the gun freedom crowd will howl if you take away their guns.
Probably. Me mentioning firms was meant more as a shorthand for "in popular consciousness". You don't really see that same widespread fascination with guns in other countries.
I agree that 19 weeks of training for police officer in US is very low, and that leaves officers poorly qualified for their job.
On the other hand, the attached video of how British policeman handle a man with machette is nothing but pathetic, the kind of stuff that we regulary make fun of.
As the very minimum, if the policeman does not carry a gun he should carry a taser instead. This would resolve machette man situation in seconds, and only took one policeman to do so, instead of dozen.
I think you may have missed the point of the video. It isn't to show the most time-efficient and effective use of force against someone. It's to show that gradual escalation of force is effective.
They initially keep their distance and wait for him to tire or to make a rational decision. Then they use pepper spray. Only when it becomes clear that he won't give up they slowly escalate force, resolving the issue without major injury.
Contrast that with the informal 21 foot "rule" that has been used to justify fatal action:
Wow. I'd pay MONEY to see you roll into South Chicago armed with a Taser. Most CompSci people I meet are skinny liberals from the suburbs and have NO IDEA what it's like to live in bad neighborhoods and have ridiculously naive socialist ideas they take from group-think liberalism. The matter-fact reality is we have MILLIONS of individuals in the US that have 0 mentors, are trained to from a young age that compliancy is for punk made bitches, and will kill\hurt you if you try to enforce compliancy with a taser. Good luck with that.
The real problem the US is similiar to the problems Liberia is facing with child-soldiers. You've got MILLIONS of young men with no mentors, trained from a young age to be violent, and have no career paths. Not a good combination and it's not the police who are to blame. It's a cultural\systematic issue.
I hope you know you're wasting your time here. But if you insist on continuing, you're more likely to get people to listen by concentrating on historical examples of culture clash, and preparing to counter the inevitable Whig-historical "but that can't happen any more because we're all so much betterer and smarterer now!" nonsense.
Also, dial back the personal experience stuff, ideally to zero. As a gay man with unacceptable political opinions, I can tell you that "don't erase my lived experience" only works if said experience happens to produce conclusions that agree with what your interlocutors already believe.
> the attached video of how British policeman handle a man with machette is nothing but pathetic
Members of the public were protected from harm, including officer-inflicted harm from shots fired that miss the target and hit innocent bystanders.
Officers were protected from harm, including officer-inflected harm from missed shots, and the harm that arises from killing a person.
The mentally disordered offender was subdued, and removed to a forensic unit. (A secure mental health hospital where patients usually have a criminal justice involvement in their care (note that most patients in forensic units would prefer to be in prison.))
That seems to be a pretty good outcome, compared to just shooting him (and possibly any bystanders or other officers).
> As the very minimum, if the policeman does not carry a gun he should carry a taser instead. This would resolve machette man situation in seconds, and only took one policeman to do so, instead of dozen.
Like this guy, repeatedly tasered in the middle of a still full restaurant with a bunch of other people around? Great policing.
Why do you think that expecting reasonable level of competence and effectiveness from police officers is a bad attitude? All I'm arguing here is that policemen should have enough training and enough equipment, including weapons, so that it wouldn't take 12 men to take down one guy with melee weapon. Typical two person patrol should be enough.
My point is that "take down" is not the goal. There is more than one way to defuse a threat, and as other commenters have pointed out, the strategy was effective.
"To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect."
It used to be the premise in the UK, its not anymore and hasn't been for a long time. The UK police is the army of the government deployed on UK soil, its definitely not by consent.
The main problem I see is the "free flow" of legal and ilegal guns for citizens. In Japan, a disarmed society, the amount of deaths by gunfire are almost nil. They also have a really tight gun control, which arguably it's easy since it's a "small-ish" island.
Of course there are many more reasons, and I think that America's youth thinking of "gangster's are cool" is way off. Hech, in Japan even a knife stabbing reaches all newspapers and makes a big fuss.
But doing that in USA would make the economy slightly worse and "cut their freedom": tighter border control on imports, regulating the shit that is on TV, better education, etc.
Sometimes I wonder "is America too big to get anything done for its citizens". It seems they are equally opposite views for any law. Plus lobbying means big companies will usually win over citizens.
Healthcare is insanely expensive, universities put you in endless debt, police killing more people than terrorists with guns.
Would the solution be for the states to have more power? I.e implement the policies state by state? Just the way LGBT marriage and cannabis laws are propagating?
Man, we should try that (stiff drug laws) here in the U.S. That would fix our gun problem. (Kidding, I suspect you meant deregulate drugs, problem solved.)
Assuming tasers are effective, do US police forces carry them? If they do, why is it not the first choice? If they don't carry, what's the problem with tasers?
If tasers are not effective, I'm still wondering why non-lethal weapons do not seem to be the first choice. Would all known non-lethal restraining tools be inefficient (too slow) if we assume the civilian will make use of a firearm? I mean, let's say tasers are not good enough, maybe pepper spray or something else can be used.
Genuinely curious and probably missing important details.
> Assuming tasers are effective, do US police forces carry them?
I remember watching the Cops documentary/show [1]. You can see cops regularly using their tasers. Actually, it's amazing to see how easily they may "tase" non violent people.
"Don't show up with a knife to a gunfight" is what most people would say, but in many occasions the opposite holds true too.
When the officers are implicitly armed it by default escalates the situation.
That said the US always had a problem with "gun violence" and even some level of "utter lawlessness", the wild west, the prohibition era, and now the more modern gang violence.
You think of 1930's you think of tommy guns, you think of bonnie and clyde you think of the hails of bullets shot at them by the FBI, somehow the US has been always that extreme.
I don't know if that's actually was the case or that turn of the century popular culture is too American centric especially due to hollywood, but at least to me that always seemed the case.
My history may be faulty, but i seem to recall that the designer of the Tommy Gun meant it for military use during WW1, but could not get army attention before the war was over.
To recoup costs he then started selling it to the general public.
Mix that with the prohibition, and things escalated quickly.
It was fairly controversial when the Australian Government recently decided to have submachine gun-armed Federal Police provide security at our national Parliament House. It was rationalised by claims of terrorist threats, of course.
To an Australian, it's very weird to see submachine guns at all, let alone around our national buildings.
(Another thing to consider about different attitudes: There's a bunch of interesting politicisation about the terms "Police Force" vs. "Police Service" in some jurisdictions around the world, to the point that, in general, conservatives prefer "force", progressives prefer "service".)
Is this correct? I lived in Australia last year and frequently saw police with firearms. I'm guessing it varies from state to state, but isn't a sidearm predominantly standard issue?
Yes, state cops on the beat have pistols. The special AFP officers who guard parliament house (who replaced private security contractors) have submachine guns.
I think lots of people here have made excellent points about the UK etc., so I would like to add something else, which is the representation of gun usage in the media. Let's compare a show like Flashpoint with, say, NCIS Los Angeles.
A Canadian series, Flashpoint shows you in its very first episode a SWAT situation (that's what the show is about) in which one team member acts as a sniper and kills a man who is holding somebody hostage. The first thing you see is that, as the sniper emerges from the building he was positioned on, his gun is taken away and he is led away by internal investigation to be interviewed. In the same episode, a proper investigation is launched, all team members are questioned and a judge ultimately has to decide whether the killing was warranted or not. The usual approach in all of the episodes is a gradual escalation from negotiation to non-lethal to lethal methods, highlighting specifically that the least amount of violence possible is always to be preferred.
In NCIS Los Angeles, between the four main investigators, they probably shoot on average one or two people per episode, and nothing ever seems to come of it. Not just do the characters not seem to mind or care, but nobody else seems to be concerned either. If an investigation ever happens, it happens as a plot device or conspiracy, not as a routine investigation of law enforcement conduct or the lawfulness of a police killing.
Of course, all of these events are fictional, but they nevertheless show a very different approach to gun usage as well as general escalation/deescalation strategies employed. Furthermore, they have an impact on how people conceive of law enforcement, setting expectations but also showing examples. Is every show like NCIS Los Angeles? Certainly not, and not every Canadian show is like Flashpoint, either. However, I do think that these shows emblemise very different understandings of law enforcement and what is appropriate conduct as well as what constitutes reasonable violence.
> Another week, another police shooting in the United States. So far this year, 569 people have be killed by US police, according to The Guardian’s count. Police brutality is a horrific normality and, in more ways than one, black men being shot by police has become the modern-day equivalent of lynching.
This is greatly exaggerated. It makes it sound like black men are being gunned down by police left and right, usually without justification, and it makes it sound like the majority of people shot by police are black.
Black men are being shot at a higher rate than other groups (except for Native Americans), but they are only about 1/4 of the police shootings. Here are numbers as of a few days ago:
Number shot in 2016:
• 10 Asian/Pacific Islanders
• 13 Native Americans
• 40 Other/Unknown
• 88 Hispanic/Latino
• 136 Black
• 279 White
Here are the rates per one million group population:
• 0.56 Asian/Pacific Islander
• 1.41 White
• 1.59 Hispanic/Latino
• 3.23 Black
• 3.4 Native American
To try to get a better idea of what is actually going on, I used a random number generator to pick 10 entries from the list of 2016 police killings at http://www.killedbypolice.net/ and looked at each and classified it as either "Justified" or "Not Justified".
KilledByPolice.net tries to keep a running list of all police killings in the US, and for each they give race/ethnicity, gender, age, state, and links to the news report on the killing and to the KilledByPolice Facebook post on the killing (which usually duplicates that news link, but also includes followup news stories).
Here were the 10 that I looked at, my summary of the facts as gleaned from the news reports, and my verdict as to whether it was justified or not justified.
Keep in mind that this was only a sample of ten. I'd be curious to see other people's sampling results (or even better, the results of someone with the time and interest to go through them all and classify them as justified or not).
The numbering in this list matches the numbering at KilledByPolice.net.
#94, black male. He was fleeing from an arrest attempt, slipped and fell, and a gun that had been concealed fell out. The officer told him not to reach for the gun. The suspect reached for the gun, and was shot. (It later turned out the gun was just a BB gun, but the officer did not know that). My verdict: Justified.
#110, white female. She was the wife of a reserve office. He was cleaning his gun in their home and it accidentally fired, shooting her. My verdict: Not Justified (although also not criminal).
#263, white male. Former officer, fell on hard times and turned to robbery. Killed 2 people during a robbery, and then was killed by police who arrived in response to that. My verdict: Justified.
#272, white male. Suspect was driving/parking suspiciously. Officer talked to him, then headed back to patrol car. Suspect started shooting at the officer, officer shot back. My verdict: Justified.
#328, latino male. Burglar, with knife holding a hostage when police arrived and shot him. My verdict: Justified.
#398, black male. Armed robber, shot at officers several times and hit one. They shot back. My verdict: Justified.
#446, white male. Man walking down the center of the street, bare chested, complaining of chest pains. Police and paramedics arrived to help and/or take him to the hospital. Man became combative and police handcuffed him. He then went into medical distress. CPR was given, but he dies on the scene. I'm unsure how to score this ...
The 2nd amendment applies to police officers as well as non-police officers, so even if their job did not demand they carry, they would be allowed to carry.
Asking this question shows one significant way that people do not understand our 2nd amendment freedom. I use 'how people' rather than 'the author' because this is the 2nd time in 24 hours that I've seen this topic raised.
137 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadAs a Kiwi I'm surprised to hear that. Perhaps the author is speaking of some parallel New Zealand, but in the one I inhabit it's not especially hard to own a shotgun or rifle: get a license, buy your firearm.
Pistols, high-capacity semi-automatic rifles, automatic weapons are very hard or impossible to own, but guns themselves are not uncommon.
But.. City of London averages 3-4 days... https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/inspirewp/live/wp-content/up...
To put it differently: City is one of 33 regions of London (the other 32 are boroughs; City is not a borough), and one of the very smallest.
> and for a long time it had its own police force
It still does: https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/
This seems to be true of many things. When I worked in the UK I never ended up with the national health number that you're supposed to get, because I was based in the Black Country and there's essentially an infinite backlog (as in, at my address they were no longer taking applications).
A friend applied from the address of his workplace near the City, and had one within a few weeks.
However, everybody and his dog owns a shotgun or a rifle to go hunting; it's just so that we mostly use them for hunting rather than for self defense or committing crimes...
In the US if you buy a firearm online from a retailer or distributor it is required that it be shipped to a Federal Firearm Licensee, who will perform a NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) check prior to the transfer.
Though not required, many private sellers will only ship firearms to an FFL so that the transfer is documented (in what is called a "bound book") and the private seller knows the buyer can legally purchase the firearm.
Some private sellers (a minority, in my experience) don't insist on having a dealer do the transfer, but that has nothing to do with where the sake takes place.
To own a pistol for instance, you need to be an active member of a gun club for 6 months before buying one, and then you need to keep it at the gun club for 6 months before bringing it home. At home you are only allowed to store it in a locked cabinet without ammo and the only time you are allowed to transport it is to and from the gun range.
In the US you have the expectation that a gun will provide "protection", i.e. you can buy a gun with the purpose of harming others. I think this is the biggest difference.
The shorter answer is that disarming hasn't change the homicide rate with guns at all. That has remained steady and inline with violent crime and crime in general, the amount the populace is armed didn't have any impact. We are told it has but the statistics alas don't lie and we have stats for this going back quite a way. There should be clear and present dips after gun control laws or changes in trajectory but they just aren't there.
...a fellow police officer.
Police were unarmed until quite recently (however, they did have firearms available should need arise, also compulsory training and certification at fixed intervals)
When our DoJ decided to arm police due to some perceived terror threat, the number of accidental discharges (unsurprisingly) skyrocketed.
The terror never materialised, but several officers today limp after quite literally shooting themselves in the foot.
It's almost like governments repressing their people is like a little kid looking for an excuse to eat candy.
Best i can tell it ended in February. But since then it has been up to the individual districts to consider armed patrols based on events abroad.
[1] https://www.politi.no/nyhet_15749.xml
When they were armed, it probably didn't help that they were issued Glocks - on which the safety catch... ...isn't.
(The Glock is seemingly designed around the idea that it would be a bigger problem if you intended to fire and the gun didn't than the other way around; hence the abundance of accidental discharges.
[1] low relative the US. The US is remarkably violent compared to Europe.
Has been heretofore, at any rate. Given the effect of mass immigration on the relative homogeneity of European cultures, and the effect on levels of violence of heterogeneity among incompatible cultures, it'll be interesting to see how things play out over the next few decades.
I have zero issue with them being armed.
Even in the UK and in Norway police officers are allowed to carry gun's but they rarely do, and rarely have to. There are special forces who are called when wide-reaching bullet forces are needed, and even then deadly force is rarely needed to take out an attacker.
Third civilized countries have the principle of consequence of lawlessness. If a police officer oversteps his powers he has to face the consequences, otherwise he will continue to abuse his powers. A very simple but powerful principle, which is esp. needed for those who have state-granted special powers.
Forth, civilized countries invest a lot into marketing of police powers. TV broadcasts crime investigations and police dramas all the time, round the clock, where police is presented to serve the people, so they are presented in a positive light. This might be useful to cover up police abuse, but is in fact more useful as a positive role model to the enforcers. Officers stepping out of line are clearly overstepping their line. Whilst in the US the lone cop hero taking down the suspect with a well-aimed shot is the patriotic hero, saving the community from crime and violence. Marketing is different there, the state powers don't invest in these kind of TV dramas.
In the UK, police officers have to be specially licensed to carry guns. There aren't that many licensed officers.
What makes you say that? As I understand it, the training is pretty rigorous.
If worrying about being killed by UK police you should be more worried about them running you over with a car - they kill far more that way.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1429898/Police-vote-a...
Absolutely - hence the relatively small number of highly-trained firearms officers.
Any evidence of this at all? Aren't UK officers that carry those kind of weapons specifically trained to use them?
>> "in London there is no shortage of cops wandering around with AR15s and MP7s"
Where? In airports maybe but it is very rare to see them on the streets. I don't know what area of London you're in but I can't remember the last time I saw one besides at a large public event.
Armed guards seem most visible outside second-rank attack targets; places like Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace usually have oodles of unarmed police, presumably to deal with all the tourists. Presumably there are armed police somewhere nearby, although I couldn't see any on Street View.
[1] https://goo.gl/maps/uti8AGqanMU2 [2] https://goo.gl/maps/oZK9Dcr4xQr [3] https://goo.gl/maps/o3heh5wFFoE2
Buckingham Palace has fully armed well trained soldiers. They probably don't need armed police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_Guard
It felt more like a show of force by the government against the populace not as protecting us, the police were the actual threat that morning and a credible one.
Not sure about Norway, but in the case of UK and Ireland most police officers are not allowed anywhere near firearms.
If an incident takes place that requires armed officers a senior policeman authorises the use of armed unit. Every force has access to them, and training is as much about de-escalation and negotiation as shooting. They are drawn from regular police and undergo significant extra regular training.
Wikipedia tells me roughly 6,000 of something like 140,000 UK police are authorised to carry firearms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorised_Firearms_Officer
Interesting - I would have guessed way more. The ones most visible to me (at airports) are always armed to the teeth.
That said when armed response is called for they do not show up with handguns but with MP5's and since 2009 or so with full auto M4's.
That's wrong. UK airports are protected by whichever constabulary the airport geographically falls under, though the London Greater Metropolitan Area and Belfast are slightly different with dedicated units.
The Aviation Security Operational Command Unit (SO18) is a Specialist Operations unit of London's Metropolitan Police Service. The unit is responsible for providing law enforcement and security for both Heathrow and London City airports.[1] London's other airports, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton are policed by Sussex, Essex and the Bedfordshire Police respectively, as they are not located in the Metropolitan Police District.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Security_Operationa...
Or just plain non-shooting solutions to the problem. When a person having some sort of psychotic break started smashing up a local games shop with a weapon, the local police made sure the staff were out, let the offender tire himself out breaking things, and then used pepper spray before arresting him.
I would be very surprised if the equivalent scenario in the US didn't involve shots being fired.
The answer is the insurance company. Property isn't worth more than a human life but I know in the USA they do have the premise of defending your property lethally, we don't have that in our culture we don't believe in capital punishment regardless of the crime. Shooting a man for property damage is a conviction and sentence to death by a police officer, that is not OK this isn't Judge Dread.
Point is at some point you MUST assign a dollar value to human life, and to pretend otherwise is to have inconsistent morals.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Service_of_Northern_Ire...
From all accounts so far the officer radioed he had a broad nose.
Edit - Here's a Snopes link describing the particulars of the falsehood: http://www.snopes.com/philando-castile-was-not-wanted-for-ar...
"Police who pulled over and killed Philando Castile reported they thought he might have resembled a suspect in an armed robbery case."
He was not stopped over a broken light, police _thought_ he could be armed and dangerous. (I can not judge the validity of their suspicions)
As for why they might pull their sidearm in such a case, just ponder the following statistics.
United States: 112 guns per 100 residents.
United Kingdom: 6.6 guns per 100 residents.
The United States has around 5% of the world's population, but 30-50% of the world's civilian owned guns. The gun homicide rate in the US is about 60 times that of the UK.
For one, the numbers I've seen for per-capita are around 88% (2014, I think), not 112%.
However, the number of gun owners is estimated from anywhere between 12-33%. So no, number of guns in the country can't be used as a rationale for the probability that an officer will encounter a gun in a stop. Gun owners are a minority.
Very interesting detail. You should watch german TV crime fighter heroes disrespect privacy protection laws like if it was a competition. They make Gene Hunt look like a schoolgirl.
And you are right. Not the strongman is the problem, the real problem is the normal guy disrespecting the law, not involving any violence. Like disrespecting privacy laws.
And you are right. Not the strongman is the problem, the real problem is the normal guy disrespecting the law, not involving any violence. Like disrespecting privacy laws.
However, the example of Australia shows that you can roll back guns.
E.g. one big difference between US and UK police irrespective of weapons is that US police seem far quicker to rush into a situation to end it instantly, while UK police will only do that in extreme cases (e.g. someone is actually being harmed right now). Otherwise, police will secure a perimeter and get people away if necessary, ensure they have overwhelming force, and only then approach the suspect.
There was the case a while ago where some axe-wielding idiot was shot in the US after attacking a police officer. Only said police officer was only in range because they'd pointlessly rushed in to try to arrest him without trying to de-escalate from a safe distance first. When that situation had first been created, it was probably the right decision to shoot, but that situation wouldn't have existed if police weren't acting recklessly in the first case.
If UK police were in the same situation, the two initial responders would likely have gotten people away, kept their distance, and waited to have a dozen or so colleagues in place and kept trying to de-escalate the situation as long as possible before intervening.
The more police are careful about escalation, the less reason criminals will have to risk escalation as well.
Absolute bullshit. I lived in Iceland for 4 years and still have a place there, and hundreds of Icelandic friends. Not once have I ever heard about anybody carrying a gun - unless out hunting.
But this is not the most interesting question to ask. In the US, a disarmed police force would probably just carry privately, while on the job.
A much more interesting question is why so many armed police forces in the world get by with a level of violence not so much different from their non-carrying peers. The U.S. traditionally condemns many nonviolent police activities (like searching, or requesting ID, which theoretically does not even exist there) as oppressive, anti-freedom, unamerican. Other countries do not have this cultural expectation, that the police should never interfere with the life of non-criminals. Thise countries therefore have a wide, nuanced range of police/citizen interaction that only involves guns as the very last level of escalation. If culture (and/or law, but I think that culture is much more important here) only acknowledges police authority stemming from a pointed gun, officers will find excuses to point guns.
But the biggest reason for US police gun violence must be the high general level of gun violence. It seems very natural that when criminals are trigger-happy, the police force adapts by lowering their thresholds accordingly. Inevitably, this will also fatally affect law abiding citizens. I haven't checked the numbers, but maybe, in relation to total gun deaths (instead of in relation to total population), American police are not even as terrible as they seem?
Or yet more reasonable: police would not care to act. Why act if you can destroy your life and nobody protects you? The proper cause is very subjective and nowadays biased against police officers.
Add to that the increasingly common perception that, in exchange for doing your best to protect and preserve your community and your society, you're liable to be thrown under the bus by everyone from your own chain of command to the national legislature and executive for purely political reasons - and is it any wonder that more and more police officers are losing their willingness to risk themselves for a society which, from their point of view, no longer has their back but rather looks for any excuse to plant a knife in it?
Agreed.
Though even so they still shoot more than other (smaller) countries:
http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_tim...
Quick Google, for England and Wales:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
"The Police discharged a conventional firearm in 3 incidents (down from 5 incidents in 2011-12)."
The US has bigger issues that are at the root of police shootings in my opinion. These issues stem from extreme poverty, lack of jobs, disenfranchisement laws for convicted criminals, a lack of responsibility or taking responsibility for actions, and a growing distrust of the police that is so large community members would rather not report any crime. As an example, there is an article this morning in the DC news[1] calling for the police department to be completely eliminated and allow citizens to enforce the laws. I don't even know where to begin with that idea and I know it will never happen, but to have so much distrust that you call for eliminating the entire department shows a bigger problem.
How do you fix it? That's a good question. I am huge proponent of community policing. Taking officers out of cars and putting them on foot in the communities. But unfortunately community policing creates another set of problems in the US. There are limited police resources and therefore those resources logically are deployed to areas that most need them. Right or wrong, these areas tend to be poor communities or inner city areas where minority populations are larger. In turn community policing is often viewed as targeting.
I am not going to sit here and deny that "profiling" does not occur and that there have not been extreme instances of "targeting". It is easy for me as a white male to be numb to the day-to-day problems that minorities face. But these terms, in my opinion, have become overused and the media has no problem turning "community policing" into acts of "targeting" solely for profit.
Instead of focusing on these isolated shootings (and they are isolated compared to the amount of policing that occurs daily) we, as a society, need to focus on solving the bigger issues. You start addressing the poverty, the education system, disenfranchisement laws, and working to build families instead of tearing them apart, only then will we see reduced incidents of officer involved shootings.
[1] http://wjla.com/news/local/black-lives-matter-dc-speaks-out-...
To be fair, the GP talked about accountability of the officers. If 99% of the officers are prosecuted, acquitted, and they keep their jobs, in effect they are not held to account.
What you are really trying to address is the difference between criminal law and department policy. It is completely possible to violate department policy and not break the law. It is also possible to break the law and not department policy. Unfortunately when it comes to use of force, many department policies follow the line of the law.
Is this right or should it be different? That's a tough answer. Where do you draw the line? Do you say that every officer who fires his gun is automatically subject to termination? Do you create public panels that investigate every officer involved use of force? I can see a benefit to that, and actually think that if implemented correctly, could go a long way to resolving some of these issues. However, that too has to be handled delicately as it stands to create a lynch mob effect. You also need to ensure that the people on the panel understand the existing laws as they stand. If someone is found not guilty, you don't blame the system, you blame the law and work to change the law, not the system.
There is also a difference between being criminally liable and civilly liable. Just like there is a difference between something being morally wrong and being criminally wrong.
Also, with the insurance, many departments themselves are insured. I think what you mean is to have the individual officer have to provide their own coverage in the form of a deduction on their paycheck. While it puts a financial stake in the officer to prevent, it also now creates a whole new problem and does not solve the underlying problem.
First, if an officer is insured, it has the potential to create one of two scenarios. Scenario one is they take no action because they are afraid their "insurance rates" will go up. Similar to the way people avoid going to the doctor. Scenario two is you get the other extreme where the officer now says I'm all in if I don't have to worry about paying for my brutality.
More importantly though, everyone keeps focusing on the police brutality issue. I'm not denying there is a problem in isolated incidents. However, the solution isn't attacking the departments or officers themselves. You want to work for change, start focusing on the bigger issues at hand. Fighting crime in the neighborhoods, working to find solutions for poverty, creating jobs, changing disenfranchisement laws, encouraging the building of families instead of the tearing them apart, and finally getting people to take responsibility for their actions.
We could wake up tomorrow with new laws that eliminate police brutality, but the unfortunate truth is that those laws wouldn't change any of the above or work to stop racism in this country.
[edit: fix typos]
http://www.lincoln.ne.gov/city/police/cbp.htm
The answer is that I would have to try to read the personality and mood of the officer because many see lawful refusal to display ID or consent to search as evidence that I have something to hide. I base this on personal experience from having sheriffs assert that they smelled marijuana in a car that I'd borrowed from a family member who didn't partake years after I'd stopped smoking (thus, there was no lingering scent and they were waiting for me to make a mistake to reveal some amount of guilt). One of the officers clearly seemed annoyed that I would not consent to a warrantles search and threatened to arrest me and impound my vehicle in order to conduct a search. I called his bluff and was released, but only after ten minutes of attempts to scare me into submission. Officers with the same attitude may also confuse or ignore the limits of their legal authority, as seen when a guy was arrested for burning a flag last week. Others seem genuinely unaware that they cannot require ID at random. In these situations, it's a roll of the dice and a potential night in jail if you won't roll over for them.
UK police don't magically become armed when facing someone with a knife - specialist officers (with rigorous recruitment and training) will be called, but regular officers deal with it until the armed police arrive.
There are a few Youtube videos of the different approaches. UK officers tend to take a de-escalation approach, and to do what they can to protect members of the public. US officers appear to shoot first. They may think they're protecting the public, but they frequently shoot innocent bystanders. (From what we know -- bizarrely the US doesn't count how many people get shot by US police.)
And sometimes police in the UK shoot you if you're just carrying a table-leg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Stanley
Obviously this is an outlier, but I think we'd do a disservice to ourselves if we don't acknowledge the fact that sometimes the UK is as bad as the USA.
But even if we assume that every killing by a police officer in the UK is an unlawful killing we'd still only be dealing with 55 deaths in the past 24 years, vs the US's 59 deaths in 24 days.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
You're being charitable, clearly. It's probably the same motives that produce other bizarre circumstances, like the CDC being barred from researching gun violence and the puzzling amounts of US manufactured weapons ending up in the Mexican drug (civil?) war.
What exactly is the level of danger faced by a police officer when confronting a suspect who may or may not be armed with a gun or another weapon? Is that a level that justifies officers being trigger-happy?
As an Australian citizen, whilst the police here aren't perfect, I also believe they aren't as trigger happy because, quite frankly, we don't carry guns on our person in Australia. This means that when police make a routine stop because of a broken tail-light they aren't as likely to feel like their life is in danger, and this almost certainly means they hesitate to fire their weapon unless they are really in danger. They are also aware that if they do discharge their weapon then there is a full investigation done. The investigations are quite thorough and actually normally very fair, but no police officer wants to be investigated really and all police officers know what a serious thing it is to fire their sidearm.
I don't expect any citizens of the U.S. to agree with me. But it occurs to me that as more people carry increasingly powerful weapons, the police have had to upgrade their own weaponry, body armour and tactics in response. From my vantage point here in Australia, it puzzles me why this isn't obvious: the more people who carry guns, the less likely law enforcement will try to negotiate and use minimal force.
From my perspective, America's gun culture is bizarre.
They could do with better de-escalation training to deal with situations in critical environments like crowds [1] or when dealing with mentally ill people [2].
I think anyone carry a deadly weapon, civilian or government officer should bear extra responsibility to safeguard the safety of all people around them.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-09/four-injured-as-police...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Tyler_Cassidy
The incidence of police shooting across our entire population is by far significantly less than in the U.S. - which is not to say that even one avoidable shooting is acceptable, only that it happens far less often.
The US has a bit of a culture problem on this front - everyone is armed to the teeth & violence has been made acceptable via Hollywood etc. Plus there is the old "if you have a hammer everything starts looking like a nail" issue. People will resort to what they have available. And you can't really do much about it because the gun freedom crowd will howl if you take away their guns.
I guess people will just have to keep dying.
Pretty sure Hollywood films are just as popular in all the countries mentioned in the article.
On the other hand, the attached video of how British policeman handle a man with machette is nothing but pathetic, the kind of stuff that we regulary make fun of.
As the very minimum, if the policeman does not carry a gun he should carry a taser instead. This would resolve machette man situation in seconds, and only took one policeman to do so, instead of dozen.
http://content.met.police.uk/Article/FAQs/1400015961061/1400...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/dec/22/how-da...
I think you may have missed the point of the video. It isn't to show the most time-efficient and effective use of force against someone. It's to show that gradual escalation of force is effective.
They initially keep their distance and wait for him to tire or to make a rational decision. Then they use pepper spray. Only when it becomes clear that he won't give up they slowly escalate force, resolving the issue without major injury.
Contrast that with the informal 21 foot "rule" that has been used to justify fatal action:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Laquan_McDonald
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/12/mario-woods-...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2639772/Suicidal-tee...
The real problem the US is similiar to the problems Liberia is facing with child-soldiers. You've got MILLIONS of young men with no mentors, trained from a young age to be violent, and have no career paths. Not a good combination and it's not the police who are to blame. It's a cultural\systematic issue.
Also, dial back the personal experience stuff, ideally to zero. As a gay man with unacceptable political opinions, I can tell you that "don't erase my lived experience" only works if said experience happens to produce conclusions that agree with what your interlocutors already believe.
Members of the public were protected from harm, including officer-inflicted harm from shots fired that miss the target and hit innocent bystanders.
Officers were protected from harm, including officer-inflected harm from missed shots, and the harm that arises from killing a person.
The mentally disordered offender was subdued, and removed to a forensic unit. (A secure mental health hospital where patients usually have a criminal justice involvement in their care (note that most patients in forensic units would prefer to be in prison.))
That seems to be a pretty good outcome, compared to just shooting him (and possibly any bystanders or other officers).
> As the very minimum, if the policeman does not carry a gun he should carry a taser instead. This would resolve machette man situation in seconds, and only took one policeman to do so, instead of dozen.
Like this guy, repeatedly tasered in the middle of a still full restaurant with a bunch of other people around? Great policing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O-QEsv0ZEg
Incidentally, this attitude is a perfect illustration why violence is so prevalent in US society.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policing-by-conse...
"To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect."
Of course there are many more reasons, and I think that America's youth thinking of "gangster's are cool" is way off. Hech, in Japan even a knife stabbing reaches all newspapers and makes a big fuss.
But doing that in USA would make the economy slightly worse and "cut their freedom": tighter border control on imports, regulating the shit that is on TV, better education, etc.
Healthcare is insanely expensive, universities put you in endless debt, police killing more people than terrorists with guns.
Would the solution be for the states to have more power? I.e implement the policies state by state? Just the way LGBT marriage and cannabis laws are propagating?
Regulate drugs, organized crime might shift to a different product or scope. It's way too simple to say that it will "solve" the problem.
If tasers are not effective, I'm still wondering why non-lethal weapons do not seem to be the first choice. Would all known non-lethal restraining tools be inefficient (too slow) if we assume the civilian will make use of a firearm? I mean, let's say tasers are not good enough, maybe pepper spray or something else can be used.
Genuinely curious and probably missing important details.
I remember watching the Cops documentary/show [1]. You can see cops regularly using their tasers. Actually, it's amazing to see how easily they may "tase" non violent people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cops_(TV_series)
To recoup costs he then started selling it to the general public.
Mix that with the prohibition, and things escalated quickly.
To an Australian, it's very weird to see submachine guns at all, let alone around our national buildings.
(Another thing to consider about different attitudes: There's a bunch of interesting politicisation about the terms "Police Force" vs. "Police Service" in some jurisdictions around the world, to the point that, in general, conservatives prefer "force", progressives prefer "service".)
A Canadian series, Flashpoint shows you in its very first episode a SWAT situation (that's what the show is about) in which one team member acts as a sniper and kills a man who is holding somebody hostage. The first thing you see is that, as the sniper emerges from the building he was positioned on, his gun is taken away and he is led away by internal investigation to be interviewed. In the same episode, a proper investigation is launched, all team members are questioned and a judge ultimately has to decide whether the killing was warranted or not. The usual approach in all of the episodes is a gradual escalation from negotiation to non-lethal to lethal methods, highlighting specifically that the least amount of violence possible is always to be preferred.
In NCIS Los Angeles, between the four main investigators, they probably shoot on average one or two people per episode, and nothing ever seems to come of it. Not just do the characters not seem to mind or care, but nobody else seems to be concerned either. If an investigation ever happens, it happens as a plot device or conspiracy, not as a routine investigation of law enforcement conduct or the lawfulness of a police killing.
Of course, all of these events are fictional, but they nevertheless show a very different approach to gun usage as well as general escalation/deescalation strategies employed. Furthermore, they have an impact on how people conceive of law enforcement, setting expectations but also showing examples. Is every show like NCIS Los Angeles? Certainly not, and not every Canadian show is like Flashpoint, either. However, I do think that these shows emblemise very different understandings of law enforcement and what is appropriate conduct as well as what constitutes reasonable violence.
This is greatly exaggerated. It makes it sound like black men are being gunned down by police left and right, usually without justification, and it makes it sound like the majority of people shot by police are black.
Black men are being shot at a higher rate than other groups (except for Native Americans), but they are only about 1/4 of the police shootings. Here are numbers as of a few days ago:
Number shot in 2016:
Here are the rates per one million group population: Source: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...To try to get a better idea of what is actually going on, I used a random number generator to pick 10 entries from the list of 2016 police killings at http://www.killedbypolice.net/ and looked at each and classified it as either "Justified" or "Not Justified".
KilledByPolice.net tries to keep a running list of all police killings in the US, and for each they give race/ethnicity, gender, age, state, and links to the news report on the killing and to the KilledByPolice Facebook post on the killing (which usually duplicates that news link, but also includes followup news stories).
Here were the 10 that I looked at, my summary of the facts as gleaned from the news reports, and my verdict as to whether it was justified or not justified.
Keep in mind that this was only a sample of ten. I'd be curious to see other people's sampling results (or even better, the results of someone with the time and interest to go through them all and classify them as justified or not).
The numbering in this list matches the numbering at KilledByPolice.net.
#94, black male. He was fleeing from an arrest attempt, slipped and fell, and a gun that had been concealed fell out. The officer told him not to reach for the gun. The suspect reached for the gun, and was shot. (It later turned out the gun was just a BB gun, but the officer did not know that). My verdict: Justified.
#110, white female. She was the wife of a reserve office. He was cleaning his gun in their home and it accidentally fired, shooting her. My verdict: Not Justified (although also not criminal).
#263, white male. Former officer, fell on hard times and turned to robbery. Killed 2 people during a robbery, and then was killed by police who arrived in response to that. My verdict: Justified.
#272, white male. Suspect was driving/parking suspiciously. Officer talked to him, then headed back to patrol car. Suspect started shooting at the officer, officer shot back. My verdict: Justified.
#328, latino male. Burglar, with knife holding a hostage when police arrived and shot him. My verdict: Justified.
#398, black male. Armed robber, shot at officers several times and hit one. They shot back. My verdict: Justified.
#446, white male. Man walking down the center of the street, bare chested, complaining of chest pains. Police and paramedics arrived to help and/or take him to the hospital. Man became combative and police handcuffed him. He then went into medical distress. CPR was given, but he dies on the scene. I'm unsure how to score this ...
Asking this question shows one significant way that people do not understand our 2nd amendment freedom. I use 'how people' rather than 'the author' because this is the 2nd time in 24 hours that I've seen this topic raised.