> differences in police training from Germany vs the US
To highlight this even more, Police in Germany used only 85 bullets in all of 2001 [1]. Given their population is about 4x lower than the US, the equivalent would be the Police in all of the US using only ~340 bullets for a year.
In reality, The police in the US have KILLED over 400 people this year already.
I don't think the amount of bullets used by the police in different places can be meaningfully compared without knowing the number of bullets fired at the police.
Edit: a sister comment cites numbers according to which almost 8 times as many police officers are killed in the US than in Germany per capita. Of course the real question is how many are attacked; if the police is better at gunfights than the criminals it is not a cause for alarm, rather the opposite.
Don't overlook the very likely strong coupling between the bullets fired 'at' and 'by' police and how it likely goes both ways.
People want to shoot at police because police shoot at people so often is probably just as true as the converse.
This is likely both true at the macro and micro level. That is, police behavior escalates individual situations into shootings which otherwise, with better training, could have ended peacefully.
_And_ with the culture of police quick to use force, people are more inclined to acquire weapons and use them during criminal activity.
Police positions on the usage and scale of force is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A violent, forceful police will create a violent, forceful criminal.
Which side you believe has more to do with your internal bias. Do you believe that police are violent because criminals are or do you believe criminals are violent because police are?
It's neither, though. It's a systematic problem with a systematic solution. Placing the blame isn't important, finding the solution is. You can do a little by trying to help people out of the situations where they're motivated to crime. You can do a lot by helping police nudge the outcome of interactions towards peaceful solutions.
The media whipping everyone into a frenzy over every contentious interaction doesn't help anybody.
People want to shoot at police because police shoot at
people so often is probably just as true as the converse.
Could you add some more detail on this point? I'm having difficulty thinking of a situation I could be in that would be improved by me shooting at the police?
I mean, even if they're honest good guy cops surely they'll call in backup and arrest you and make a really enthusiastic effort to put you in jail for a long time? And that's the best case - if they're bad cops it can only be worse?
Admittedly, my status as a british middle class white guy might mean I don't know what dealing with the police is like for other people.
I'm not sure what he's getting at except maybe that penalties for some crimes are so severe here in the states as to incentivize escaping apprehension by any means necessary. I'm thinking about something like drug trafficking where you can go to prison for life.
In general, though, I would agree with you that there can't be many situations in which your life would be improved if you shot at a police officer. By my observation any time someone does that it has the effect of enraging every cop in the land.
The idea is to get away. In the long term the police might be more enthusiastic to catch you – and that long term might only be 10 minutes. In the short term though, in this instant, the police are already chasing you. They have you cornered and you don't see a way out of this without surrendering.
You've seen on the news people just like you getting killed in the street by police. You've known people who have been beat bloody in the exact same situation. Even if they don't kill you in the street, you have 30 years in a harsh prison ahead of you.
You have nothing to lose.
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The idea is to teach police to keep subjects calm and try to convince them that surrendering really is the best outcome. People full of adrenaline don't always make the best decisions. Maybe they've been taking drugs, they've probably got a whole lot of stress in their lives, and possibly some mental illness as well. In a lot of places they're conditioned to think of police as the enemy, and in this situation they're really afraid.
a situation I could be in that would be improved by me
shooting at the police
Two situations:
1) a situation where you believe there's a reasonably chance the police are going to shoot you and cover it up. Shooting them keeps you alive.
2) you have committed a minor crime, for which the sentence is sufficiently harsh that you are willing to add murder to the crime to prevent being sentenced. If a cop attempts to apprehend you and you shoot him, your situation is improved in that you are not apprehended and may not have to go to jail at all. Ratios of punishments for different crimes matter as well as the absolute value.
> make a really enthusiastic effort to put you in jail
The point is that in the USA even for minor things people expect to be shot at more than anything else. If you're going to take a risk and do something really gainful, you take it for guaranteed that the cops will shoot at you and make a point to shoot first.
I'm unable to figure out what point you are trying to make with the link to the Brown shooting, unless you last read that page several months ago and are unaware of the new information that has been added since then.
Often not reporting on a problem would be exactly the right thing to do.
This is a discussion we as a society are not having, and I believe we should. We had free mass media for long enough already to know that the general population can - and far too often does - go batshit insane thanks to news stories[0]. It's not enough that the reporting itself screws availability heuristic badly, the standard practice of journalism now consists of twisting the story (sometimes even outright lying) to maximize readers' outrage.
And no, one can't say it's the responsibility of the reader to not be fooled; news-induced dysrationalia is systemic, it is predictable.
Reminds me of a thing I read today, a reply on Quora about child soldiers posted by an ex-Marine[1]. Apparently, the primary military value of children is pissing off westerners. Military groups using them let journalists photograph kids with guns, maybe even some dead ones (doesn't really matter who killed them), and wait for the outraged civilians to push against their own countries' war efforts.
[0] - why are we having this "War on Terror" again?
To be fair, far fewer people own guns in Germany than they do in the US. Police in Germany likely carry weapons to deal with knives and other close range weapons, while police in the US carry weapons to deal with long range weapons.
>
To be fair, far fewer people own guns in Germany than they do in the US.
Call it 9/10 in the US and 3/10 in Germany[1]. Note that this is number of guns, not number of people owning guns. Not sure how that changes the odds of any one person having access to a gun.
Perhaps more interesting is the number of verified homicides commited with a gun[2]: ~4/100 000 in the US, 0.2/100 000 in Germany. So one could guesstimate the odds of encountering an armed potential murderer in the US is about 4/0.02 ~ 200:1 -- or 200 times more likely for an US cop than for a German cop.
Not sure how valuable such macro-guesstimations are, really. But hey, numbers.
> police in the US carry weapons to deal with long range weapons.
I'm not so sure. Doesn't the typical US patrol officer carry a pistol, possibly with a shotgun for backup? If the aim really was to take out a single shooter (potentially in a crowd) surely something along the lines of an mp5 would make more sense?
Police in Norway has also been generally armed now, and waltz around with glocks. It strikes me as entirely useless -- the number of situations that can be defused/resolved with a somewhat poorly aimed 9mm bullet doesn't seem to justify the increase in weapons available (all you'd need to get them off a pair of cops would be a hunting rifle -- or a mob).
No, it's based on some hand-waving about "terror threats" due to us helping NATO alienate people in the Middle East. The "threats" are classified (but really dangerous, ok, trust us, wink-wink) -- and no one's tried to explain how moving the handguns from lock-boxes in the police command cars to the hips of random patrol officers are supposed to help counter these "terror threats".
I was recently at a music festival with some ~3000 people -- and a couple of police officers with handguns. I have a hard time divining a scenario where those guns are going to help. If the aim was to be able to shoot attackers, at least some snipers at an elevated vantage point with low-power ammunition might have had a chance at taking someone out without endangering the crowds too much.
On the other hand, if the crowd went mad an rioted, you can be sure that the end result would've been that someone in the crowd would've ended up in possession of those guns.
How often do police kill people who are obviously armed? Many of the police killings I've heard of were perpetrated on unarmed people. It seems disingenuous to dismiss concerns about police violence because the civilian could have been a gun owner. What matters is whether the killing could have been avoided if the police had reacted differently.
To highlight this even more, Police in Germany used only 85 bullets in all of 2001 [1]. Given their population is about 4x lower than the US, the equivalent would be the Police in all of the US using only ~340 bullets for a year.
In reality, The police in the US have KILLED over 400 people this year already.
[1] http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-onl...