zlacker

The majority of victims of police brutality (at least deaths by police, of course there are other forms of police brutality but killings by police is what the current conversation is about) are violent criminals. Of the ~1000 people killed by police in 2019 538 were armed with a gun, 159 with a knife, 60 with a vehicle, and 63 with another weapon. 41 were unarmed, 23 had a toy weapon, and 49 is unknown. [0] The majority of people that cops interact with overall are not violent criminals, but the majority of people subject to the type of police brutality which is overwhelmingly controlling the conversation (i.e. killings by police) are violent criminals.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/5211/us-citizens-killed-by-po...

>>metrok+(OP)
This is what they claimed. These aren't objectively verifiable facts and as people have been learning lately, they constantly lie about such things.

>>metrok+(OP)
"They have a gun", the statement, is different from "they have a gun", the fact. There's no actual oversight to these reports - the closest we have is the Washington Post performing the intensive work of collecting reports from individual police departments, but they're unable to verify the reports.

In other countries like England & Wales, when a police officer seriously injures or kills someone, there's a formal investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, an independent body at a centralised Government level with powers equivalent to a police officer for matters they investigate. They also usually provide public reports, for example, https://policeconduct.gov.uk/recommendations/police-response.... (Also note the limited use of force - two shots, one of which struck - and immediate care.) It's still not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than what the US does.

>>vertex+p7
Being unable to verify the reports does in no way make them false. There must be some actual evidence of widespread falsification of reports. Many of these killings have actual recorded evidence of the criminal shooting or drawing a firearm, such as the video a month or two back of a black man fleeing from police in a park. Currently your claim that armed suspects shot by police were not actually armed is simply a theory which has no evidence to back it up. How many of these cases do you believe are framed by the police? 20%? 40%? 80%? All of them?

All officer involved shootings are investigated, but you take issue with the investigation being internal. If an independent investigation office was created, would you accept the results if the results still were the same? What group, would you accept results from in independent office from as not compromised or part of a pro-police conspiracy? Certainly not any Trump appointed office, no matter how seemingly neutral.

>>metrok+fe
The question is what happens to the people who kill without that being the appropriate response. What happened to the police officers who killed those 41 unarmed people? Is there a detailed public report I can read about what happened, including any disciplinary or management measures that were taken? How about the others - who's ensuring that it was an appropriate and proportionate response to the danger? Can I read their report? Is there a body which makes recommendations to the police on how to ensure that <things we don't want> are less likely to happen? And the mere presence of a weapon doesn't always make it an appropriate response, especially in a country where there is a legal right to own a weapon. We're well aware than internal investigations don't work, and that external investigations only sort of work.

Also, circling back - even if the police only killed violent people, my personal experience is that their interactions with the community are pretty much always to threaten violence - except for their attempts to indoctrinate children into accepting their presence. I've seen police break ribs and knock non-violent, merely uncooperative, people unconscious, then fail to provide healthcare. They've harassed and threatened people attempting to film them, including taking details and arresting people who refuse to provide them. There was a spate where they arrested random people on my street for no stated reason, then released them just before they had to explain to a judge why they were arrested. Just because people don't die most of the time doesn't make them unaffected.

>>vertex+p7
I'm skeptical of widespread falsification of weapon possession, however I do think it deserves mention that "they had a weapon" is not synonymous with "they were doing something wrong." Certainly not in America.

No-knock night raids should probably be considered a violation of the 2nd Amendment, among other things. Kenneth Walker was well within his rights to shoot the plainclothes cops breaking into his home in the middle of the night.

>>metrok+(OP)
Given US gun culture, I would not immediately classify "has a gun/knife" as "violent criminal". And even for people who could potentially be violent, how many of those police shootings involved a suspect that had actually drawn their weapon and/or was behaving aggressively with it? And if we're talking about self-reporting by cops, I don't think we should take their assessment of the situation at their word without some sort of corroboration.

Regardless, even if the police killed some 1000 armed people during a year, so what? 1000 is certainly a tiny sub-1% fraction of total interactions. If anything, you're only supporting my assertion that the vast majority of people the police have to deal with are non-violent and can be dealt with using non-leathal force, or little to no force at all.