Reports the LA Times. This came about after a very bad shooting. Twenty-eight people have been shot to death by Albuquerque police over the last five years, a per capita rate eight times that of New York.
What can we learn from them? I know. Nothing. Because this is America. Exceptionalism and all that. I’m not saying we could go to this model overnight, damnit! But we could still learn from it. We could learn a lot from other countries, if we got around to looking. If we start looking at police…
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Right or wrong, American policing are taught to shoot center mass. And only center mass. The goal is not to kill, though the outcome of center-mass shot is usually death. The goal is to shoot to stop or incapacitate the threat. Once the there is no threat (which often happens before the suspect is killed),…
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The national average, the rate of people killed by police (as they define it, which is pretty loose, but OK) is 0.36 per 100,000. This is over the past 23 months. That’s roughly 1,135 killed per year. This is based on these data from May 2013 to April 2014. I believe it’s similar to (but…
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This is the second paragraph of an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates: When Walter Scott fled from the North Charleston police, he was not merely fleeing Thomas Slager, he was attempting to flee incarceration. He was doing this because we have decided that the criminal-justice system is the best tool for dealing with men who can’t,…
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[See my previous posts 1 and 2 and about NYC.] It’s not unreasonable to believe — even when one knows the vast majority of police-involved shootings to be justified — that three police-involved homicides per day is perhaps two too many. Can the number of police-involved killings be reduced without placing officer’s lives in danger?…
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Uh, it’s his own gun. But headline aside (writers don’t write the headline), I like to think I make some good points in this CNN piece about Robert Bates, the Tulsa County “reserve deputy” who thought his gun was a Taser and shot and killed a criminal.
A 73-year old man, Robert C. Bates, liked to play cops and robbers. He thought he was going to get to Tase a bad guy. But instead of holding his Taser, Bob was holding his personal gun. Bang. You’re dead. Oops. Bates wasn’t a real cop. He was a “reserve deputy sheriff,” which isn’t necessarily…
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[See parts 1 and 3 and NYC] Using the data from killedbypolice.net, I looked at the race of those killed by police. Though before I give you these numbers, ask yourself this question: what percent of those whom cops kill do you think are white, black, and hispanic. Forgive the callousness, but we’re talking numbers.…
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Two years ago a somewhat shadowy person or group began compiling all media accounts of people killed by police. It’s at killedbypolice.net. Best I can tell, he/she/it/they do a pretty good job. According to the site: “Corporate news reports of people killed by nonmilitary law enforcement officers, whether in the line of duty or not,…
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