Thursday, August 20, 2015

Why US police are out of control...

America is clearly an outlier when it comes to police brutality. According to The Guardian’s highly useful “Counted” website, U.S. police kill more people in a typical day than police in England and Wales kill in an entire year. Where police in Stockton, California, killed three people in the first five months of 2015, police in Iceland, which has roughly the same population, have killed just one person since the modern Icelandic republic was founded in 1944.

Where the U.S. saw 97 police shootings in a single month (March 2015), Australia saw 94 over the course of two decades (1992 to 2011). And where police in Finland fired a grand total of six bullets in 2013, police in Pasco, Washington, pumped nearly three times as many last February into a 35-year-old Mexican immigrant named Antonio Zambrano-Montes whom they accused of threatening them with a rock.

What is the reason for vast discrepancy? The Black Lives Matter movement blames racism, which is certainly true as far as it goes, but potentially misleading since its suggests that racism is not a problem in countries like England and Australia, which is definitely not the case.

In a recent analysis, Alternet’s Steven Rosenfeld blamed police reliance on excessive force, an absence of supervision, and a confrontation mentality that leads urban cops to see their beats as veritable war zones. While this is certainly the case, the logic is more than a bit tautological since all Rosenfeld is saying is that police are out of control because police are out of control. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. ‘14 San Francisco cops’ gang up on homeless man ‘armed’ with crutches...
  2. You are 58 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist...
  3. Norway Police fired just two shots last year...
  4. US police killings in 2015: inside the shocking numbers in 2 minutes...
  5. US police fatally shoot more people in days than other countries do in years...
  6. 'My baby never came home'
  7. US: Fatal police shootings in 2015 approaching 400 nationwide...
  8. Police shootings: thousands dead, few prosecuted...
  9. U.S. police are killing more than all first world police forces combined...
  10. Release us: a short film on police brutality...

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