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m_d_hThere are 1,000,000 police officers in the US, and on average they kill 3-4 people each day.
There are 250,000,000 adult residents in the US. 40% of them live in a house with a gun, that's about 100,000,000 adults who own guns. These 100,000,000 adults (and sometimes their children) kill on average 115 people each day with their guns.
That's approximately one person killed per 300,000 police per day, and one person killed by non-cops with guns per 800,000 gun-wielding adults per day.
Looking at those numbers, police don't kill that many more people per day than the rest of us who have guns, even though they spend their daily lives having to respond to violent and potentially violent situations.
I've thought this for a while, but I hadn't done the math: probably the biggest reason police kill so many people in the US is because so many adults in the US carry guns and use them to kill other people (or themselves) on a constant basis. About four or five people per hour are killed by non-cops with guns in the US -- any many more non-fatal shootings occur, along with many threats to shoot. Police are constantly responding to this spectacularly high societal level of deadly violence, non-deadly violence, and threatened violence, and considering this hyperviolent context, I don't think police kill people that much more often than the rest of us do.
If you gave me a gun and had me spending my career responding to domestic violence calls, I might have shot somebody by now also.
Sure, there are unjustified police killings. But given the hyperviolent context and the stress they're under, the overall level of police killings doesn't surprise me, compared to the overall level of non-cop killings. We live in a spectacularly violent country, and our police have to deal with this reality every day.
I think to fix police violence we need to get rid of the much more dangerous problem of 100,000,000 Americans carrying guns. I feel that generally on the Left we're making police the scapegoats for a hyperviolent populace. Unable to convince our neighbors to give up their beloved guns, we're focused on the much much smaller problem of police violence, especially the fraction that is White on Black.
I read and hear what Black people have to say about racist police harassment, and I generally believe them. But I also look at all the unsolved murders in DC, so many of them Black victims who live in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and I have to believe that to some extent, police are responding to the level of violence they're seeing where they work, and cracking down on the people who live in and near these hyperviolent neighborhoods, or who match the profiles of the perpetrators and victims in these neighborhoods.
These are things that today's liberals don't allow themselves to say, instead they focus on only one aspect of the problem -- police violence -- without placing it within the context of the spectacularly violent populace that these police officers are dealing with. Similarly, conservatives who reflexively support the police (Blue Lives Matter) ignore the horrible societal cost of gun rights, as well as the horrible legacy and realities of racism.
Nobody tries to look at this from an ALL OF THE ABOVE perspective: 100,000,000 adults with guns, racism, violence by police, and the much larger amount of violence perpetrated by everybody else. This is just one example of what I mean when I say that the Age of the Internet allows everybody to see only what they want to see, while making it impossible for us to solve any of our problems. Nobody wants to look at the entire picture anymore, that's too much work, and requires admitting that your political enemies have a point.
There are 250,000,000 adult residents in the US. 40% of them live in a house with a gun, that's about 100,000,000 adults who own guns. These 100,000,000 adults (and sometimes their children) kill on average 115 people each day with their guns.
That's approximately one person killed per 300,000 police per day, and one person killed by non-cops with guns per 800,000 gun-wielding adults per day.
Looking at those numbers, police don't kill that many more people per day than the rest of us who have guns, even though they spend their daily lives having to respond to violent and potentially violent situations.
I've thought this for a while, but I hadn't done the math: probably the biggest reason police kill so many people in the US is because so many adults in the US carry guns and use them to kill other people (or themselves) on a constant basis. About four or five people per hour are killed by non-cops with guns in the US -- any many more non-fatal shootings occur, along with many threats to shoot. Police are constantly responding to this spectacularly high societal level of deadly violence, non-deadly violence, and threatened violence, and considering this hyperviolent context, I don't think police kill people that much more often than the rest of us do.
If you gave me a gun and had me spending my career responding to domestic violence calls, I might have shot somebody by now also.
Sure, there are unjustified police killings. But given the hyperviolent context and the stress they're under, the overall level of police killings doesn't surprise me, compared to the overall level of non-cop killings. We live in a spectacularly violent country, and our police have to deal with this reality every day.
I think to fix police violence we need to get rid of the much more dangerous problem of 100,000,000 Americans carrying guns. I feel that generally on the Left we're making police the scapegoats for a hyperviolent populace. Unable to convince our neighbors to give up their beloved guns, we're focused on the much much smaller problem of police violence, especially the fraction that is White on Black.
I read and hear what Black people have to say about racist police harassment, and I generally believe them. But I also look at all the unsolved murders in DC, so many of them Black victims who live in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and I have to believe that to some extent, police are responding to the level of violence they're seeing where they work, and cracking down on the people who live in and near these hyperviolent neighborhoods, or who match the profiles of the perpetrators and victims in these neighborhoods.
These are things that today's liberals don't allow themselves to say, instead they focus on only one aspect of the problem -- police violence -- without placing it within the context of the spectacularly violent populace that these police officers are dealing with. Similarly, conservatives who reflexively support the police (Blue Lives Matter) ignore the horrible societal cost of gun rights, as well as the horrible legacy and realities of racism.
Nobody tries to look at this from an ALL OF THE ABOVE perspective: 100,000,000 adults with guns, racism, violence by police, and the much larger amount of violence perpetrated by everybody else. This is just one example of what I mean when I say that the Age of the Internet allows everybody to see only what they want to see, while making it impossible for us to solve any of our problems. Nobody wants to look at the entire picture anymore, that's too much work, and requires admitting that your political enemies have a point.