Police fatal shootings average almost 1,000 past 4 years.

The police across the USA have shot and killed almost 1,000 in each of the past 4 years.
2018--998 shot and killed,2017--987shot and killed,2016--963 shot and killed,2015--995 shot and killed.
54% of those shot and killed were armed with a gun,4% were unarmed.
45% killed were white,23% were black,16% were Hispanic,5% were female,the remaining 11% were not defined.
25% of those shot and killed were determined to have been in some form of mental distress at the time of the incident.

 

And you think it is to high? Or to low? Don't think criminals should be shot?

 

*hands 10 and 2 on steering wheel*

Evening officer, I am carrying a legal concealed handgun, my permit is in my glove box, please advise me on how to proceed.

The magic words.

 

How many lives of good Americans have been saved because those criminals are no longer on the streets?

Just one saved life makes it worth it.

 

That's only twice the rate of murders in Chicago alone.

 

I'll be straight with you ! I've seen some of the police shootings on social media , your cops shoot lots of people for no reasons, It's still the wild west really . They shoot people for running away for crying out loud ...and that's the game of cat of mouse .

 

Sorry sparky but shooting almost 1,000 to save one life is not worth it.Particularly those shot who have serious mental problems.

 

Tim!5856.Illinois is not even in the top twenty states for murders using firearms per 100,000 per capita of population.The top 20 are all pretty much RED states.

 

I wonder how many cops shot suspects in the UK?

 

Which ones do you think you will see on social media? It will not be those where it was justified which far outweighs those which were not justified.

 

I wouldn't place all the blame on police.
The more laws, the more opportunities there are for these things to happen.

 

For a huge country like America with so much gun violence that's amazingly few.

 

And the vast majority were armed and threatening if not actually shooting at the cops or someone else at the time, so what's your point?

 

That doesn’t mean it’s never necessary for police officers to shoot them to defend themselves or others. You quote raw figures (albeit unreferenced) but you’ve said nothing about whether those shootings were deemed necessary and appropriate to the individual circumstances they occurred. There are indeed individual examples of unnecessary shootings by police but that doesn’t account for the hundreds of cases you refer to or the countless thousands of incidents where police officers are faced with violent armed individuals but resolve the situation without using deadly force.

Mental health is indeed a major issue but it isn’t one that can be resolved by a beat officer faced with a violent incident. By that point, the individual involved will have been failed countless times already, with the steps that could prevent them reaching that extreme never taken. I’d argue that the police officers who end up shooting them to stop them hurting or killing others are as much victims of those systemic and societal failures as the victim themselves.

 

Yes, US cops kill way too many people compared to other countries. Compare those 1000/year to the 2/year of France, Germany, UK etc.

Now if the left would only stop with their thoroughly debunked race baiting, and start the actual debate on police training, and how to disable and/or block potential threats (e.g a suspect reaching for something that may or may not be a gun) without killing, that would be a big step forward.

 

Americans in general kill more people than people in many other countries. Why would you expect police officers to automatically skip that trend? You have a lot more citizens carrying deadly weapons and generally a lot more armed police officers (and other LEOs for that matter) therefore a lot more encounters between police officers and armed suspects. More shootings (in both directions) is an inevitable consequence of that reality.

There are defiantly cases which demonstrate weaknesses in some training and procedures (though you can get that in the other countries too) but you still can’t take the raw numbers on their own and reach any kind of definitive conclusion. It’s a much more complex picture than that.

 

So by your own numbers, no more than 40 unarmed people per year are actually shot by police. And no indication whether or not they were engaged in an activity that might have caused harm to someone else without having been armed, such as aiming a car at a police officer or choking a child. Mighty small numbers considering the 10 million plus arrests made every year.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191261/number-of-arrests-for-all-offenses-in-the-us-since-1990/

 

Even if you normalize by homicide count the US is way, way worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

US : 17250 homicides/year
France : 875 homicides/year

So there are about 20 times more homicides per year in the US than there are in France.

There are, however, 500 times more police killings in the US than there are in France.

So even normalized by homicide rate and by population, the US has 25 times more police killings than your typical European country (same for UK, Germany etc).

 

If you and I are facing each other and you are a threat to my life that's too bad for you, mental problem or not.

 

Over 99% are ”good kills”.

 

I agree, I was just raising the more commonly armed society as a factor in that. In general I was pointing out that there isn’t going to be a singular factor involved and simply blaming police officers and their training alone is flawed. European police don’t kill fewer people because they’re better trained in managing armed suspects (probably the opposite on average), it’s just that they face many, many fewer armed (or potentially armed) suspect overall.

 

The police have around a million encounters with the general public a day. Most of those are confrontational. The chances of getting killed by the police in one of those encounters is about one in three hundred sixty five thousand. A black man is at a much higher risk of getting shot by another black man than that.

 

Saturday I went to our local Air Force Base Exchange and bought a new thirty eight special revolver. A great p;rice, $209.99. I love the feel and sound of a quality revolver. They just have a feel and sound that a semi automatic cannot match. This one does not match up in quality, but it fires accurately and reliably. This was probably the first time I had fired a revolver since Vietnam over fifty years ago.

 

A good start.