Is there some independent research on the subject that you’re referring to? Note that the bar for “legally justified” is extremely low[1], so it would be nice to see some kind of audit that doesn’t rely on legal rulings.
WaPo did a whole series of articles on police shootings a few years back. Part of that was creating a database of all police fatal shootings since, unbelievably, none existed.
One of their articles looked at every fatal police shooting in 2015 and looked at the circumstances. They found 30% occurred when the victim had pointed or brandished a gun, 28% when they had fired a gun and 16% when they had attacked some other way. They identified 5% to have occurred in a manner likely to cause public controversy.
Slightly related: I saw a comment the other day by someone who had somehow managed to blame Obama for the rise in violence against minorities, with the rationalization being that “we didn’t have all of these problems until Obama was in office”.
It’s a classic case of correlation != causation. Smart phones with video cameras in them became ubiquitous during Obama’s time in office. Similarly, bodycams became more commonly used by the police. That’s the difference.
This has been happening all along, we just couldn’t prove it until now.
Also the ubiquity of auto-uploaded videos and livestreaming. Only in the last few years has virtually all video recording become online first. Before all police had to do was take a person's phone away to hide their actions.
That’s a great point. Oddly enough it works the other way too. My neighbor is a detective and told me that a young lady livestreamed herself looting Target. Shared it on Facebook.
Since they kill 1000 people a year (as cited early in the thread, didn't look it up), that would leave 400-700 controversial killings, or 1-2 per day on average...
No, because police are trained to not get into situations where they are at greater risk whenever possible (and it doesn't endanger others). Like it or not, a significant part of officer training in the US is for 'combat-like' scenarios that are active and violent, and risk management, and it's at least partially to keep the number of officer deaths down. That and they're basically allowed to shoot someone who maybe has a gun and looks like they're drawing it, which may also contribute towards the relatively low number of gun-related officer deaths. It also results in more people getting shot than need to.
And as others in the thread have said, it's actually really really hard to accurately shoot a target with a gun, and the number of non-fatal gun-related injuries probably far outweigh the fatal ones.
"The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate. “Oh, it’s a huge rush,” Franklin says. “Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.” Downing agrees. “It’s a rush. And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.” Jamie Haase, a former special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who went on multiple narcotics, money laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better. You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That’s the safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a lot of these cops are meatheads. They think this stuff is cool. And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get during a raid.”"
"Narcotics investigators had made a controlled drug buy a few hours earlier and were laying plans to raid the suspect’s home. “The drug buy was in town, not at the home,” Taylor says. “But they’d always raid the house anyway. They could never just arrest the guy on the street. They always had to kick down doors.”"
"The thing is, when law enforcement officials face suspects who present a genuine threat to officer safety, they do tend to be more creative. When the FBI finally located Whitey Bulger in 2010 after searching for him for sixteen years, the reputed mobster was suspected in nearly twenty murders and was thought to be armed with a huge arsenal of weapons. Of all the people who might meet the criteria for arrest by a SWAT team, you’d think Bulger would top the list. He was also aging, in poor physical health, and looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. If ever there was a candidate to go out in a blaze of cop-killing glory, it was Whitey Bulger. And yet instead of sending a tactical team in to tear down Bulger’s door, the FBI did some investigating and learned that Bulger rented a public storage locker. They called him up, pretending to be from the company that owned the facility, and told Bulger someone might have broken into his locker. When he went to the facility to investigate, he was arrested without incident. Why can’t investigators handle common drug offenders the same way? A big reason is a lack of resources. If your department is serving several drug warrants a day, you just aren’t going to have the personnel to come up with that sort of plan for each one. A second reason is that drug offenders simply aren’t all that likely to shoot at cops, and it’s easier to use violent tactics against people who aren’t going to fire back. It’s by no means a universal rule, but often when police do face a genuinely violent suspect like an escaped fugitive with a violent history, a suspect in a series of violent crimes, or a barricade or hostage situation, they don’t immediately storm the place. They set up a perimeter or try to figure out other ways to make the arrest safely. This again isn’t possible with drug warrants—there are just too many of them. But because drug dealers aren’t all that dangerous, it works out to raid them instead."
(all from Radley Balko's "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces")
A police officer is murdered every week on average. I imagine the numbers for those shot at is much higher, since most gunshot wounds don't result in death and most shots probably don't result in hits.
In one weekend, over a hundred people were shot in Chicago by criminals. I'm not sure you appreciate how many extremely violent, dangerous criminals there are in the US.
I hope you see the difference between people not being able to trust law enforcement and not being able to trust gangsters.
This crime is in many ways the result of the violence of the police which means other citizens are afraid to call and cooperate with the police. Exactly what you need to reduce this crime.
Similar stuff happened in Iraq. When civilians could not trust the American occupying force then militias and terrorists filled the power vacuum.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice
> An FBI review by retired agent Kimberly Crawford found that Rice's death was justified and Loehmann's "response was a reasonable one."