Via Vox, this information and chart on death-by-cop:
A huge majority of the more than 5,600 deaths on the map are from gunshots, which is hardly surprising given that guns are so deadly compared to other tools used by police. There are also a lot of noticeable fatalities from vehicle crashes, stun guns, and asphyxiations. In some cases, people died from stab wounds, medical emergencies, and what’s called “suicide by cop,” when someone commits suicide by baiting a police officer into using deadly force.
It’s important to note that thte 5,600 number is an estimate, and a lower bound at that:
D. Brian Burghart, head of Fatal Encounters, estimates that his organization’s collection of reports from the public, media, and FBI only captures about 35 percent of total police killings.
That’s a terribly…useful information gap:
This means that it’s hard to gauge, based on this incomplete data set alone, whether these types of killings are becoming more common.
How wonderfully obscure.
Still the data that do exist speak volumes. Here’s one way to get guage the extent of the carnage:
In the same period (actually, 2001- April, 2015) US deaths-in-action in Iraq and Afghanistan total 5374. Saddam and his army, the Taliban, ISIL and all the rest have killed, at a minimum, ~two hundred fewer Americans than our domestic police.
Make of that what you will.
Image: Pieter Breughel the Younger, The Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1605-1610.
Elizabelle
NPR ATC had great interview with South Carolina prof/former cop on how police see themselves as “warriors” (ie. military with threats all around), when their actual role is “guardians”, and that the problem begins in the police academies and will take 20 years to turn around.
He says they’re shown video of all manner of dangers from the population, which is out of proportion to the actual dangers of the job.
Problem is clearly systemic. Not saying there aren’t great cops out there — there are — but the out of control, fearful for selves warriors are doing in the profession.
Here’s the NPR link to audio: http://www.npr.org/2015/04/10/398824607/police-involved-shootings-highlight-problem-with-law-enforcement-culture
Mike J
320 killed by police so far this year. Maybe some of those people really did need a killin’; We’ll never know how many until we study it, and we’ll never be able to study it until we get better stats.
Elizabelle
The Seth Stoughton interview was great, and relatively short, and made up for catching the dreadful Mara Liasson at the top of the show, telling us Hillary is not popular and more people don’t trust her. Of course, they led off with a Wayne LaPierre soundbite.
And I know that irritation belongs a thread below. But NPR redeemed itself. Yea Audie Cornish. F*ck off, Mara Liasson.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
IIRC, reporting officer-involved deaths to the Justice Department is currently voluntary. It should be mandatory, but good luck getting Republicans to sign onto something that sensible.
trollhattan
@Mike J:
Wow, that’s almost precisely one-hundred deaths per month. Mindboggling, similar to how I felt discovering gunshot deaths have surpassed traffic deaths in many states.
AMinNC
It’s interesting to me how the reactionary paradigm pushed by right-wing Republicans permeates so many aspects of our culture – be terribly, terribly afraid of everyone around you, arm yourself to the teeth, and shoot first and ask questions later. It is their preferred stance on many domestic issues (immigration; race relations; policing; war on drugs, to name a few) and foreign policy as well.
You’d think smart Democrats could move the needle by applying jujitsu – appeal to the “macho” self-image of these people by calling out their cowering posture of fear. Ask the Republicans flat out – why are you so scared of everything? There’s having an appropriate assessment of real-world threats, and then there’s bed-wetting terror of things that go bump in the night.
Time Travelin'
Quit it, cops. Thanks.
The Ancient Randonneur
The moral of the story is that our cops are better killers than the jihadists and Middle Eastern insurgents. If those various groups
could have gotten more of their people trained by American police academy personnel who knows how effective they might be by now.
I don’t want to get into an argument about the death penalty per se, but doesn’t it stand to reason that if killing a law enforcement is a special circumstance that makes a citizen subject to the death penalty, then should not a law enforcement officer convicted of murdering a citizen be a special circumstance that makes the officer subject to the same penalty?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@trollhattan:
With airbags, seat belts, and crumple zones, cars have been getting safer and safer over the last couple of decades. Guns, not so much.
Roger Moore
@AMinNC:
Calling somebody a coward is not going to win them over to your way of seeing things. I think the general idea of portraying people armed to the teeth and scared of their shadows as cowards is correct, but it needs to be done very carefully to avoid driving people away. I think the way to start this is in TV and movies. Show the real tough guys as people who aren’t afraid and who resort to violence reluctantly and only when provoked, while the doomsday prepper-types are shown as obviously ridiculous or mentally unwell.
Cacti
Which if you’re non-white, largely consists of being in proximity to a cop and having a pulse.
Scratch
I suppose the NRA would argue that the only thing that stops a bad cop with a gun is a good guy with a gun. So more guns is the answer, of course.
Roger Moore
@The Ancient Randonneur:
It’s not that they’re better killers, it’s that they’re given a lot more opportunities. The danger that’s nearby is almost always a bigger worry than one that’s far away, even if the far away one seems more dangerous.
srv
Vox link isn’t working for me.
ed. work now
boatboy_srq
The thing that makes me most sad/angry about this is that nobody knows. Even when there are statistics they rarely get the attention they deserve. If a bomb goes off in Belfast or Baghdad, the entire planet knows about it in an hour. But places like Los Angeles have a daily body count by district – no names, no details, just N dead here and N dead there – and that information never leaves the metro area (not all those were death-by-cop instances, but LA morning radio never distinguished).
@AMinNC:
SO VERY TRUE. THIS is what they teach: that the world is dangerous and if you’re going to survive you have to be on edge and fully armed all the time. My memory isn’t as long as some, but I remember when life was pretty peachy-keen – yet somehow the per-capita crime statistics were a lot worse and nobody did anything more paranoid than mind their surroundings and lock their doors. Not to mention that “be afraid of everyone around you” is all too often “be afraid of everyone blah around you”: there’s still a generous dollop of racism in that mix. One wonders whether the collective Reichwing freakout isn’t due in part to the incessant fearmongering while at the same time a representative of what they fear has been in the White House: “Blah people break into your homes, steal your car (frequently with you still inside), knife you in dark alleys – but wait, one of them’s PRESIDENT?” It certainly explains the “unconstitutional overreach’ “radically increased taxation” and other similar gripes as well as the rest of the toxic stew does: when you’re convinced POTUS is a thief and a liar because he’s one of Those People then you’re not likely to believe any of the good news coming from the WH.
@Elizabelle: I’ve given up on NPR ever since Ari Shapiro threw a tantrum over whatever “slight” he thought he received from the WH. Liasson ranks right down there for me with Roberts and Totenberg. There should be a listing of “NPR Correspondents Who Should Retire Already and Give Younger Less Jaded Talent a Chance.”
tsquared2001
@AMinNC: I despise Reagan but at least his ass had a sunny disposition. Nowadays, it is all “the world is on fire”.
Mom was a powerhouse – not afraid of shit. One day, I came home from work to find this absolutely terrified woman. Normally, Mom was a big fan of the Lifetime and Oprah movies but the batteries for the TV remote ended up dying JUST as Mom hit Fox News. She ended up stuck on that channel for the entire day and by the time I got home she was nearly hysterical. After an hour of me saying: No, that story is nonsense, no, that is Republican horseshit, fuck no, that NEVER happened for every story she had heard that day, she calmed down.
I grabbed new batteries for the remote and made sure that the channel up button skipped Fox News.
mainmata
@Elizabelle: Mara Liasson used to be a pretty straight political reporter then for some reason started commentating for Fox on the side about 10+ years ago and the quality of her reporting went straight south and became more “winger”.
Steve
I think blacks killing blacks tops all stats. Am I wrong about that?
JPL
fyi. Chris Hayes show is now covering the current problem with police involved shootings and the lack of reporting .
@Steve: who knows… I think the solution would be more guns
tsquared2001
@Steve: I think when women are killed it is at the hands of their partners.. Am I wrong about that?
Violet
@Steve:
Yes.
SATSQ.
Elizabelle
@Steve: I suspect that’s true statistically, but do we, as a society, want the police giving them such serious competition? I think not.
Villago Delenda Est
This is not the home of the brave. We’re infested with cowards who have metal penis substitutes.
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
For LA, at least, there’s the LA Time Homicide blog, which tracks every single homicide- including officer-involved shootings- in LA County. It’s simultaneously very impressive and tragic to see the toll all in one place. For example, it shows 38 officer involved homicides in the past 12 months, and 610 since the blog was started in 2000.
Roger Moore
@Steve:
Yes.
tsquared2001
@efgoldman: I could tell you that Mom was a TV fiend and that the idea of the TV being turned off during her 8 hours of being all alone and moving through the house in her wheel chair before I got home was ridiculous.
Instead, I will invite you to fuck right the fuck off.
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore: Plug here for Ghettoside by Jill Leovy, which I think might have grown out of her reporting for that blog.
Have my copy, but haven’t seriously started reading yet. Looks both heartbreaking and extremely well written.
tsquared2001
@efgoldman: Why haven’t you fucked right the fuck off already?
I thought my instructions were quite clear.
Jesus.
JPL
Although my earlier response to Steve was flippant, recently it seems that when you turn on the morning local news, there is a lead story about violence. In the olden days, the Clinton years, there were gun buy back programs There were midnight basketball programs. The NRA and Steve want to bring back the wild, wild, west.
chopper
@tsquared2001:
hoo boy, somebody had an extra bowl of Bitch Flakes today.
Zinsky
I always thought growing up, that as we advanced as a technological civilization, there would be a progressive march away from barbarism. Now I’m not so sure…
Elizabelle
@JPL: There was a lot more emphasis on community policing.
Which would also be great for keeping an eye on home-grown terrorists. Know your community. John Kerry was right about fighting terror through police work, mundane as that sounded.
Bush the Lesser phased out the Justice Department funding. We know how that’s turned out.
Elizabelle
@tsquared2001: A lot of nursing homes will not allow Fox News. It makes the residents aggressive.
I wish we could hit Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes with the mother of all elder abuse suits.
Tree With Water
Ladies and gentlemen, your 2015 republican party in a nutshell.
The Guardian is reporting:
“The highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the South Carolina county where Walter Scott was shot dead was punished with trash collection duty after his team of officers dragged a man from his truck, punched him and allowed a dog to bite him as he lay on the ground.
Al Cannon, the sheriff of Charleston County, had an assault and battery charge for hitting Timothy McManus erased from his record after completing 30 hours of litter collection and an anger management class, he said. No other officers were disciplined over the incident.
Cannon said in an interview on Friday that the experience had given him “a greater appreciation for litter”.
Elizabelle
@tsquared2001: My late mom watched MSNBC nonstop.
I think she liked the controversy and people fighting and saying nasty stuff. Truth.
I am happier with the idiot box off news; do love some old movies and other stuff on in the background.
“If it bleeds, it leads” is a cruel thing to do to our elders. There’s still a world out there they should be part of.
mark
i agree 110% this is unfathomable and grotesque. I am NOT trying to play devil’s advocate here, and I am p.s. i happen to be NOT white nor any kind of conservative nor apologist nor neoliberal nor confederate. I’m as left wing as they come. I preface this by all that because, i know what i’m about to ask would sound like an apologist. I’m just honestly curious… so i’d like to ask, if you could each re-deployment as a new person, 1) how many US soldiers total have been deployed during this time frame to get to the 5600 deaths? 2) how many us minorities are there, population numbers, vs total numbers of people in the US? and, 3) how many of those killed in the US were whites vs how many minorities?
and bonus questions: 4) how many total US police officers are there? and 5) how many estimated “enemy forces” people that caused these deaths, average per year i guess?
then, even though the total numbers are disgusting, are we talking about the same ratio killed? ten times the amount per opposing “force” numbers? etc…
I just prefer more data rather than a straight up total number and strange comparison.
Villago Delenda Est
“Cops as warriors” REALLY pisses me off as a meme. For one thing, the warrior mentality, as Elizabelle indicates right off the bat, is the wrong one for keeping the peace in a civilian setting. And as far as I am concerned, cops are civilians, no matter how much they imagine otherwise.
I used to be a warrior. These guys are NOT warriors.
JPL
@Tree With Water: so the party that preaches pro life has no value for life.
I’m shocked.
Peale
How many Iraqis did our soldiers kill? This is a horrible analogy.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Elizabelle:
As Roger pointed out, white people kill each other more often than black people do. But even you, a strong liberal, have been misled by the media into thinking it must be the other way around.
It does fascinate me that, the lower the crime rate goes, the more afraid (some) people are of being crime victims. Is it because they no longer know anyone who’s been a crime victim so the very idea seems even scarier than it really is?
scav
@mark: He included strong caveats about the quality of the data and why ot was the best available. My personal comment on data quality would have recolved around the probable spatial boas in repoerting, plus the differences inunderlying population distribution making any spatial intepretation of the map problematic. The fact that you’re oh so careful to whip out and tick all the stereotype boxes available instead, raising thing in the Cavuto form rather than simply and straightforewardly pointing out additional details about, again, an admittedly limited dataset from which only gross, rough, back of the envelope comparisons were being made, honestly makes me doubt your agenda all the same. The ‘bonus question’ tic is a huge tell as well (the smug oozes).
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@efgoldman:
I think it’s kind of unfair to criticize tsquared’s caretaking of her mother without knowing either of them. Just sayin’.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Yeah, no one around here ever makes a judgment without a complete handle on all the facts.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Omnes Omnibus:
If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?
Vanya
@Roger Moore: Actually, those stats show that on a per capita basis blacks killing blacks is the most frequent type of murder in the US, by a large margin.
Fred
@Tree With Water: It’s South Carolina Jake.
I lived there (for a while). The cop will beat the rap. The nice people will say, ‘He lost his job. Hasn’t he been punished enough?’ The majority will say, ‘Hey, he was just doing his job.’
In NC they love their ‘coloreds’. In SC there is no such charity.
Cervantes
@mark:
Same here.
Argument via “Make of that what you will” works sometimes, but not always.
@Peale:
Odd, anyway.
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I think the question was: If being subjected to Channel X is terrifying, why not turn it off? Is being terrified really better than nothing?
Cervantes
@Vanya:
Given the question that was asked, how do we justify using — or, for that matter, not using — a per capita basis?
WaterGirl
I’ve never met the commenter or the mother, but I can come up with any number of possibilities that would make being told “she should just turn it off then” feel like a slap in the face.
What if she feels unsafe when she is alone and the TV helps her feel less so? What if any change in routine throws this person off her game? Some people get stuck when something new is thrown at them; what if she was in a bad place but felt kind of paralyzed and couldn’t take action? What if she’s old and getting sick and is fearful about the future, so the fear being peddled by Fox “news” connected with fear she might feel about those things and she felt too overwhelmed to do anything at all?
If “mom, next time just turn off the TV” was an option in this situation, don’t you think that’s what he/she would have done instead of programming the remote? Also, I’m not at all sure that my TV has a physical off button that I could use if the remote was dead.
Comments like “what, there’s no off button on the TV” when someone is clearly in a bad place are about as useful as telling someone who’s terrified of dogs “it’s okay, he won’t hurt you”. People’s responses are not always logical, particularly when they are scared.
Cervantes
@WaterGirl:
Well, sure — but in the original story (“One day, I came home from work to find this absolutely terrified woman. […] she was nearly hysterical”) — in that story did you notice that the person was (apparently) feeling more unsafe with the TV stuck on Fox? Or that the change in routine had already thrown her “off her game”?
In other words, so far as we were told, the TV being stuck on Fox was extremely counter-productive — which, to me, explains how someone’s question arose.
Maybe the question could have been worded more artfully, less like (what you refer to as) a “slap in the face,” but the thing is, questions arise.
As for the answer, well, it suggests that for this person, in this situation, being “absolutely terrified” and “nearly hysterical” was not the worst thing that could have happened.
nastybrutishntall
@Tree With Water:
That’s how I read it.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Cervantes:
I think that was probably meant to be the question, but it came across as a criticism of tsquared’s caregiving skills for her elderly mother, which is the kind of thing that tends to make people upset since most caregivers already feel as though they’re not doing it right. I think it was a miscommunication and efgoldman didn’t realize how his comment came across.