You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a Terrorist | Hacker News Reader

You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a Terrorist

cato.org

265 pointscryoshon190 comments

And you are five times more likely to be killed at a railroad crossing then by a police officer.[1]

Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism , and while you will be hard pressed to find someone with a bigger animus towards the current USCJS then I, I think we should all be on the lookout for hyperbole, no matter what underlying meme it may be promoting.

[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a3...

[EDIT] The original stats used for this analysis have been changed and edited as different versions of the OP have been posted.

I understand what you mean but it is not just the absolute level of the thread, it is also our reaction to the thread. We have sacrificed freedoms, hundreds of thousand of lives and trillions of dollars to mitigate the terrorism thread.

5 years ago this wouldn't have made it to the front page, let alone have so many comments defending it as intellectually honest.

Notice how no one ever laments how "HN is turning into Reddit"?

There used to be a statement specifically about saying this in the HN guidelines.

No one says this anymore because the full Reddit-ification of HN happened a while ago.

It isn't hyperbole that US cops are far more violent and unstable than the cops of other developed countries. Look at how many people Germany kills per year. Now look at how many people China kills per year. Now look at the US...

Does Germany have an equivalent to South Chicago or North St. Louis? Because we've got one of those in just about every major U.S. city. It seems relevant.

Maybe the question you should ask yourselves, is why you have those. Why are inequalities so high in your country ?

It's an interesting question. I think there are two things which are in play, at least:

Guns are readily available and we have "a right to guns" so police have to presume civilians of any kind are potentially armed.

Second, we are not the only country with wealth disparity, nor the one with the largest, but... We sell people on the idea that everyone can achieve the dream of living a middle class lifestyle. When people see this opportunity unrealized they feel someone must be actively working against the promise. In some cases there is some truth to that, in other cases it's wishful thinking, but in the end, and on the whole thankfully people don't just assign their station in life to divine assignment and do feel disenfranchised, unlike other places where people might just accept their "fate" as predetermined, to great extent.

So lack of opportunity by itself don't create strife. It's lack of opportunity coupled with a dissonant promise unrealized that creates strife in our cities.

I agree, but if the cops in the US are put in a naturally more violent environment, then it is unfair to solely call out their policing tactics as the cause for the violence, when the underlying problem is much deeper.

Obviously! I'm only pointing out that the police are operating in this environment, as it exists today, too.

Compare the US to the EU, not any of the countries within it.

* the war we wage on drugs

* the war that drugs and alcohol wage on the impoverished

* a large population that came out of the slave class and the long-lasting effects of poor integration

* poor education spending and allocation

Even if we put all our resources into fixing these issues, we're talking several years. You can't use that discussion as a talking point to deflect the violent realities that police in those environments face.

Something about this argument bothers me. It allows criminals to be victims of "the system". In certain areas the economic machinery has certainly sputtered out, but this question seems loaded to imply that some fat cat banker or politician pushed a button that instantly sucked the jobs out of an otherwise flourishing area. This argument is just a way to inject a well trodden political viewpoint into what might have otherwise been an interesting discussion.

Nope, the question is indeed inviting to a political discussion, but is not suggesting any answer. It is you that attribute that intention to the parent comment; I guess to avoid an otherwise interesting political discussion

>"Maybe the question you should ask yourselves, is why you have those. Why are inequalities so high in your country ?"

In my experience, anything that follows "Maybe the question you should ask yourself" is usually a statement not a question.

Inequality is the cool thing to be frustrated with right now, especially with an election year coming up. Yes there is lots of inequality, yes it sucks, yes it's unfair. As far as blaming every social problem on the 1% or .1% that is where I'm ready to jump off the bandwagon.

An interesting discussion would be something like "why did Detroit get left in the dust as globalization took off and what incentives could be used to help the next rust belt city from collapsing into an economic black hole?", or "what affect would offering more attractive small business loans to impoverished areas have?"

An uninteresting discussion would be "If it wasn't for inequality we wouldn't have so many problems, our system sucks".

Germany has a ton of migrant labor, mostly from Turkey.

Yes, it seems relevant as an effect of the government approach to its citizens, which includes (but is not limited to) the (compared to other developed nations) ultraviolent American policing.

I understand that that's a feeling that you have, but I don't think there's any evidence for your claim

I love watching European cop shows where the lead detective goes into the house where he suspects he will find the killer, and pulls out his flashlight.

Police forces don't operate in a vacuum, they are composed of the citizens of the places in which they serve. Police, like prisons, should be viewed as a reflection of society.

If Americans are going to be serious about eliminating police brutality and killing, they need to take a hard look at their own culture of guns, violence, and racism.

Germans don't cross an empty street against the light, hardly comparable.

Brits do and our police shootings count is pretty low as well.

This extensively documented site (http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2013.html) suggests that 768 people were killed by police in 2013, compared to the 784 people murdered by trains. If my math is correct, 784/768 is not five. Additionally, that site's statistics are only for may-december, so the actual number is probably around 50% higher.

"in 2013": It might be an outlier. We had an abnormally large group of terrorism-related deaths in 2001, but on average it's less, and the same type of thing may be in effect here. That year may have been bad for deaths by police, and better for train safety, than average.

The authorities can already track the location and speed of all people with smartphones.

The location and speed of all trains is also known.

The solution to prevent crashes is thus obvious. Hit the car before the crash with a drone-fired missile.

"The location and speed of all trains is also known."

Just need an app that alerts you to oncoming trains.

Or pay attention to the gates and lights?

You got one inbuilt. It's logic goes something like

    if myself.is_near(train_tracks) and (myself.can_see(train) or myself.can_hear(train)):
        myself.risk_of_oncoming_train = True

risk_of_oncoming_train is a boolean? Sounds more like something that would be representing a chance, so I would be expecting something like a floating point number.

I was thinking that being hit by a train is a situation that I want a 0 probability of. So personally if the probability is non-zero I would immediately act to reduce it to zero. Hence a boolean does the job for me.

Apparently this doesn't work as well as you'd think. I just read a depressing article about the number of people that pose for photos on train tracks, when celebrating big life changes like marriage or graduation, and then get hit by trains.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/taking-ph...

An app would be a further distraction and would perhaps be detriment to what you want to achieve.

yeah, an app for the car.

It seemed obvious to me that your comment was a joke. Please continue this style of humor despite the other comments.

I was, of course, using the "155" number that the OP used in his analysis, so we are both correct.

over 10,000 died in alcohol-related crashes in 2013

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812102.pdf

This isn't the same thing - in the cases of terrorist caused and police caused deaths, there were human beings who acted to intentionally kill someone else. In the case of railroad crossings, there isn't such intentionality.

Many railroad crossing deaths are presumably suicides. Some police deaths might be, but that is probably rare.

Agreed, I worded my statement as "intentionally kill someone else" in consideration of that - largely because the train engineers don't get a choice in the matter of railroad crossing incidents.

For purposes of deciding where money and resources are best spent, I don't think it makes any difference whether there was someone with intent to harm or not.

You can spend money to construct safer railway crossings, you can spend money to hire more cops or NSA operatives, you can spend money to educate cops, or you can make rule that all cars must have safety devices that stop them if they intend to cross railway when a train is coming, which will make cars more expensive, and so on and so on.

Never the less to prioritize these, statistics are important.

Railroad crossing deaths don't involve willful acts backed by billions in government funding.

> Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism

It isn't. Depending on whose numbers you use, the statistic is either actually true or sufficiently close that disputing the difference is pedantry.

The reason the headline is shocking is that people expect there to be relatively few police shootings yet, if the GWoT rhetoric is to be believed, rather a serious problem with terrorism. The fact that the problem of police shootings is larger than the problem of terrorism is a strong, concise, true statement that somewhere along the lines we have our priorities inverted.

In particular, it implies that "fighting terrorism" with more and stronger law enforcement is highly counterproductive.

>It isn't. Depending on whose numbers you use, the statistic is either actually true or sufficiently close that disputing the difference is pedantry.

Sensationalism in this case is saying that 0.00003% > 0.0000009% and expecting people to care. Both scenarios are so absurdly rare as to be disregarded, even if many people are more afraid of terrorists than the police and statistics say it should be the other way around.

The following is also true [0]:

"More likely to trip down stairs and die than be killed by a shark!"

Well.. I'm not about to avoid taking the stairs. Nor am I going to stop being afraid of shark attacks. I know they are both rare and often rarely fatal, at least here in the US [1], but that doesn't mean I'll be less scared of them.

[0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_attack

Some words.

Again, it does matter: when to reduce the 0.000000009 the government is increasing the already many times larger 0.000003, it does matter.

> Both scenarios are so absurdly rare as to be disregarded

That's the point. The comparison is interesting because it puts the GWoT in the correct context. It's something to point to when some absurd overreaction to terrorism is proposed -- the police are literally more likely to kill you than the terrorists. Spending less money militarizing the police will make us more safe.

Even if the difference in safety is negligible, it takes the safety argument off the table. And the safety argument is the only thing justifying the civil liberties violations and the billions of tax dollars they're wasting.

> > Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism

> It isn't.

> [...] In particular, it implies that "fighting terrorism" with more and stronger law enforcement is highly counterproductive.

If police's only job was to fight terrorism, you would be right.

Another interesting fact, you're also 8x more likely to be killed by a police officer than by furniture.

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/youre-8-times-more-l...

"Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism"

As is almost every terrosit related article in the media.

I like numbers, but this one might work better if they put some context:

"You're 50% more likely to be killed by lightning than by a terrorist." or "You're six times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a bumblebee."

Or the somber "You're 150 times more likely to be killed by a motor vehicle than a terrorist." (The War on Vehicles should apparently be funded to the tune of $150T a year, if I understand the value of American lives properly.)

If something on the order of the 9/11 attacks happened every other day, we'd still lose more Americans to heart disease.

I can't see the war on heart disease winning an election though.

Which is an utter shame.

lol there you go. Let's spend 1500T a year on that.

It has been 5,161 days since 9/11. Every other day would be 2,580 9/11 sized attacks.

The entire country would be in ruins. There would be no more cities, and the economy would have ground to a halt. We would all be living in a post apocalyptic nightmare, with knock on effects leading to far more deaths than the direct numbers from the attacks.

This is why I hate these comparisons to heart disease and whatnot.

You are correct that, beyond a point, the effects are substantially nonlinear. Of course, our reactions would also not be static.

My point was not prediction of specific outcomes, but rather to illustrate the tremendous disparity between the two scales - even in a year when we lost an order of magnitude more people to terrorism than is typical.

(You are also correct that there are substantial effects beyond the direct loss of life - but that is true with heart disease as well.)

"The entire country would be in ruins. There would be no more cities"

This is still exaggerating the scale.

If we say 3000 9/11 sized-attacks and 3000 dead in 9/11, that's 9 million people. In that time, our population grew by 50 million.

If we say the 9/11 attacks destroyed 10 million square feet of office space, that's 30 billion - about twice what we added between 2003 and 2012 (per http://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/reports/2012/build...), so plausibly about what we've added total in that time.

There may be "no more cities", but it would be due to a response of radical decentralization (probably not a bad move, in that situation) not because the cities were physically destroyed.

Your comment essentially demonstrates why setting public policy based on relative death counts is profoundly silly.

How many Americans had the Nazis killed when we invaded N. Africa? Surely a tiny, tiny fraction of the number who had died in coal mine accidents that year. So?

I'm just going to let this stand with no comment. It's perfect.

...wait a second

"[...]one should ask why police officers are such a significant source of danger."

The statements are based on data from 2011. 155 people were killed by police officers in US, total population was about 311.7 million back then.

That's roughly 0,00005% and we don't even know the circumstances in which they got killed.

Saying you're 8 times more likely to [insert extremely unlikely event] than [insert exceptionally unlikely event] might be true but it's pure sensationalism.

Indeed it is sensationalism. And it highlights the fact that we're expending far too much effort and money on handwavy "solutions" to handwavy "terrorism."

They don't see it that way. Obviously our efforts have been so fruitful that terrorism has been wiped out.

of course. and we can't stop now- it's working! how convenient for them.

> Obviously our efforts have been so fruitful that terrorism has been wiped out.

If that's the perception, maybe we need to direct the same effort to the now more serious problem of police shootings of citizens, so those can be wiped out to the same low level as the terrorism threat has been reduced to.

or maybe some of the effort we put into fighting terrorism is effective.

It's hard to say, generally it doesn't appear to be the case but there's a possibility this information is secret to the public. But take the NSA for example, it has been looked into a lot by government (e.g. congress) itself behind closed doors and it seems to be pretty useless so far.

> The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) also issued a report in which it stated, “we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which [bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act] made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”

from: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/top-5-claims-defenders...

The NSA is a whole lot more than just the bulk collection program.

I feel it is important to point out that police-related deaths are voluntarily reported by each department.

The true number of deaths is very likely much higher.

155? This article has another problem then.

Although the FBI tracks police shootings, reporting is voluntary.. so they're grossly underreported. The washingtonpost did an analysis earlier this year attempting to get a more complete number...

we're on track to surpass 1000 police shootings this year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shootin...

How many of those victims were people with prior violent felony convictions? How many of those shootings were in self defense? We can parse data all day long but people don't normally just get randomly shot by a cop. Chris Rock has a good bit on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2plo4FOgIU

> Saying you're 8 times more likely to [insert extremely unlikely event] than [insert exceptionally unlikely event] might be true but it's pure sensationalism.

Both counterterrorism and dealing with public agency violations of rights (including fatal ones by police) are within the scope of concerns addressed by the Federal government generally (and the FBI specifically). Understanding the relative danger of those threats is a reasonable part of evaluating the proper allocation of resources, and evaluating actual and proposed government policy. They are not unrelated rare threats for which the relative risk is immaterial and pure sensationalism to report or discuss.

The problem is the people are going to look at this the wrong way. Its not that you should be scared of police; its that you shouldn't be scared of terrorists.

True, but who do people interact with and see much more? The cops are visible and aggressive whereas terrorists are abstract.

Oh, you should be very scared of the police. They have complete power over you, your life, and your property any time you interact with them, even if you do nothing to invite the interaction. If they choose to invade your home, confiscate your cash, or shoot you dead because you didn't respond to their commands fast enough, or slow enough, or deferentially enough, you have no power to respond.

You have no power to respond on the spot, but you certainly have power to respond later through the court system.

Doesn't do you any good if you're dead or impoverished as a result of your civil asset forfeiture, or things of that nature.

Just because some people are able to get justice when their rights are violated, it doesn't automatically mean that the system works. It just means that some people are able to get justice.

Yeah, but you have no power to make sure that bad actors get fired and charged.

They can fuck with you. You can beat the charge, but not the ride. They will not get comeuppance for sending people on rides.

Not if you're dead.

You MAY have power to respond later, assuming the police officer has not killed you, but that right is of little use unless you can prove that the police officer is lying about what happened, since the court will always believe their testimony over yours. Meanwhile, you are likely to have been injured, impoverished, and/or imprisoned; the best you can hope for is that the "justice" system will agree to stop punishing you. The officer will face no consequences regardless of the outcome.

Some "power" that is.

This is exactly it.

9/11 was an extraordinary terrorist event: it killed more people than the previous decade of terrorist attacks worldwide. An attack on the scale of 9/11 is simply impossible in the current security climate.

And "ordinary" terrorist attacks are simply too isolated to ever be a realistic threat to any one person. Even in Israel, where terror attacks are commonplace, the number of civilian deaths is very small relative to the population. Or to put it differently, more people died on 9/11 than have died from terrorism in the entire history of the modern state of Israel.

You're more likely to win the lottery while being struck by lightning than you are to be killed by a terrorist.

It is unlikely that anyone has won the lottery while being struck by lightning. Keep your examples sensible.

Well, the likelihood of being killed by a terrorist is closer to whatever near-zero percentage of this ridiculous example than it is to being killed by a police officer.

The FBI counted 460 deaths at the hands of police officers in 2014 -- and reporting is voluntary, so over half of the nation's police departments aren't included in that number. Unofficial numbers from citizen watchdog groups are closer to 1,000 people nationwide in 2014, and those numbers have reportedly spiked in 2015.

>9/11 was an extraordinary terrorist event: it killed more people than the previous decade of terrorist attacks worldwide

Obviously you mean their "terrorist" attacks on us. Clearly, more people have been killed by either sides "terrorist" attacks. When we drop bombs on 3rd world villages, or fund armies to do it for us, those villages consider it a "terrorist" attack, regardless of whether "we" refer to it differently in the press - protection of interests, operation freedom, operation democracy spreading.

Please don't be so closed minded that only "they" are terrorists and "we" are the good guys, everytime without fail. The use terror tactics has been a part and parcel of our militaries since the time the military was created.

We are all as bad as each other

Actually you should be scared of the police.

I'm scared of police and I'm basically a WASP. If I were black or latino, I'd be even more scared. Civil asset forfeiture, drug dogs that always indicate presence of drugs, camera/drone tracking of movements of people, illegal phone searches, militarized police departments with special forces type weapons and vehicles, etc. I'm a former US Marine and the police are basically becoming a domestic occupying military force, similar to what I saw in Afghanistan. I'm more scared of police than terrorists because it's statistically way more likely that I'll die, be injured or be defrauded by a member of the police/legal/civil industrial complex.

I'm sure there are plenty of people scared of terrorists for the same statistically unlikely reasons. It doesn't make that fear necessarily a net positive on society.

And you are statistically more likely to be killed by a black man than you are by an actual policeman. I agree with chrisBob in that you shouldn't worry about the dangers of policemen in the same way you shouldnt worry about the dangers of black people, even if it's statistically "true". It's simply a bad way to look at it.

There is a lot of police brutality news lately in the media so I suspect a lot of availability bias is going on. Things like shark attacks, airline crashes and terrorism tend to get a lot of mental coverage because it sells. And it tends to get a lot of people worried despite their actual nominal probabilities in the grand scheme of things.

Police have lots of ways to ruin your life than just killing you (which they can also do with impunity) -- plenty of people have plenty of reasons to fear/dislike the police.

Whether or not you actually get killed by police, there's still plenty to fear from a paramilitary organization.

I think that's an over simplification of the issue. And I strongly disagree that I'm more likely to be killed by a black man unless that black man is wearing a badge.

Do you have a statistical source for this assertion?

> There is a lot of police brutality news lately in the media so I suspect a lot of availability bias is going on

Sure. The actual rarity is why it has been hard to convince people that reform is needed. The majority will simply not be affected, so anything they're made aware of is easy to pass off as happening to "others".

But regardless of how much it happens, if justice were being achieved then we would expect any case we do become aware of to end with the victims being made whole after the fact. Not just for spectacle cases where someone dies, but in all cases, even if someone is simply arrested yet never sentenced - "You can beat the wrap but you can't beat the ride" is antithetical to due process.

Such compensation not happening routinely is a fundamental problem with the justice system, and I am glad the issue is finally getting attention.

Correct - More people die in hospitals then anywhere else. So should you be scared of going to the hospital?

>So should you be scared of going to the hospital?

Ludicrous. Hospitals are where the sick and dying go for treatment. Police are there to Protect and Serve. Terrorists try to kill you. Why do the former do more damage than the latter?

I agree that the headline is sensationalist, but if you don't think we've got a real police problem, your head is in the sand. Fortunately, the solution isn't that difficult (body cams), and is essentially around the corner.

It's important to remember that there is a downside to bodycams. #1) It turns all cops into walking surveillance machines. #2) We don't know yet how much violence it deters, or whether it makes the police more likely to be prosecuted when they commit illegal acts. Initial studies seem promising that it is helpful in some ways, but we don't know how helpful yet.

Personally, I think disarming the police would have a lot more effect than body cams.

> It turns all cops into walking surveillance machines

Cops already function as defacto surveillance machines. The bodycam doesn't capture any more than the cop does with his/her own eyes and the cop has the authority to act based on that alone, the bodycam is at least an impartial representation of the cop's (or citizen's) allegations.

Yeah, a cop is like a body cam that can lie, has imperfect memory and if used in court can only testify against you.

However, the problem with technology is the scale. You can't systematically collect everything a cop sees in a database; with a camera, you can.

Police are there to Protect and Serve.

Only the state: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-278.ZS.html

"Hospital Errors are the Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S." Add strains of super-bacteria that thrive there and I'd say that's a yes.

http://www.hospitalsafetyscore.org/newsroom/display/hospital...

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” — George Orwell

Billions of dollars of yearly agency budgets are justified with terrorist scare narratives. Saying that we shouldn't be scared of terrorists is a good beginning. I just wonder if anybody will listen.

the narrative will change back to the red scare shortly as Russia grows. Then the "terrorists" will be our friends. Our war against the terrorists will be forgotten and so on and so on....

You can also significantly adjust your odds of being killed by police by choosing behavior unlikely to attract lethal force.

The core issue with terrorism is you have no such choice, the terrorist making the decision to kill people doing absolutely nothing to warrant lethal force.

ETA: I didn't say "make your odds 0%", I said "significantly adjust". Sure you could be shot for no reason, and a few are, but nearly all killings by police occur precisely because the decedent was knowingly perpetrating a crime for which lethal force was a not-unreasonable response. If you choose to not do something which police would reasonably kill you for, you will significantly reduce the odds of being killed by police.

The lead statistic would be more useful if we divide the odds between, say, those with vs without criminal records.

> You can also significantly adjust your odds of being killed by police by choosing behavior unlikely to attract lethal force.

Well this is the part that it's dispute, particularly regarding people of color.

People of color have the same ability to not conduct criminal activities or resist arrest or attack police officers as everyone else. Yet, why does a higher percentage choose to do so? Why is South Chicago less safe than the Appalachian per capita?

Tell this to the mentally ill, whose first encounter with anyone trying to get them help usually involves police with guns who have a tendency to shoot them.

You have a choice of not living near a large population center which draws more potential terrorist attacks.

Or you could significantly adjust your odds by being black, hispanic or poor.

This is where that quote comes from: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...

"You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack"

"400,000 Americans have been shot and killed since 9/11;"

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/27/polic...

Since we're fucking around with numbers can someone figure out the probability of being killed by another American than a terrorist?

Raw annual odds of being murdered in USA (presumably by another citizen): 0.0045%

A frank discussion of where our national priorities are versus where they should be would include the data point in the article.

We spend trillions killing Muslims across the ocean for the privilege of "safety" at home, where we are killed by the police in greater frequency than the Muslims ever did.

We are also killed more frequently by illegal aliens. Let's put our troops on the border rather than Afghanistan.

You're eight times more likely to be a terrorist if you get shot by a police officer.

Unfortunately funny but containing a kernel of truth.

In my country, police tries to make killings look less bad by ascribing as many crimes as possible to "gang killings" ("ajuste de cuentas" in Spanish). In one case I knew of, a guy was killed when he resisted robbery, and the police told the press he must have been involved in something !!

IMO the word 'Terrorist' is a hopelessly useless propaganda word used to incite fear of the bogeymen in the population.

It also lumps all sorts of people together, from credible conceptual revolutionary ideas to psychotic mono religious zealots. Slight digression from the point Cato is making but the headline inevitably falls into the sensationalist trap for this reason...

...and twice as likely to commit suicide, than be killed by anybody.

So this is the problem with statistics; these statistics apply to the average person. But there is no such thing as an average "real person". For instance MY chances of suicide are zero; and the chances of me being killed by a terrorist are far below the average person because of where I live and where I spend my time; the same goes for being killed by a police officer. This applies to MOST people for at least the "being killed by a police officer category". I think we all know the subset of society that is most prone to being shot by police officers: those that are breaking the law.

Agree in principle. But the chance that each of us will die by suicide is not actually zero. Its more closely related to the chance we will experience debilitating depression. Its a disease issue; no one is immune.

It would be nice to assume that were true, but is it actually the case? And what laws were the breaking? Perhaps more interesting is how close the second category comes in terms of frequency: what's the probability for a black man with a mental health issue?

> So this is the problem with statistics

That's not a problem with statistics, it's a problem with using particular statistics to talk about a non-particular group. If you'd adjusted for people who don't break the law, people like you, who get shot on accident by a police officer, the statistics would be perfectly fine to compare to the threat of you dying at the hands of police vs terrorists. There's no problem with statistics in the way you describe them, just with bad statistics just like there's a problem with bad anything (math, engineering, policy etc)

I don't really fear police (white 30 year old with no accent) because I know it's fairly rare that some thing bad will happen to me with them.

I also don't fear terrorists who are even less likely to harm me, or the monsters under my bed.

You are also less likely to hide in the bushes to ambush someone who annoyed you, more likely to get out of the middle of the street when the cop yells at you to do that, and to not be selling loose cigarettes in public.

I'm a coward, not a saint. Nor am I very "progressive" (yuck) so I'm not trying to be apologetic to minorities. But I've done things that get black folks killed that white folks get warnings for.

And that's the problem. No one should get killed (or jail!) for selling cigs off the street

It depends on the value of "You". Even if we are talking only of USA and not any other country, you don't have the same probability of being killed by a police officer if you are a white person living in a rich area than if you are a black drug dealer in downtown Detroit. And although terrorist might be more "random" in selecting their victims, you probably are more prone to being killed by a terrorist if you live in a big city than if you are in a small village.

So my point is this comparison, stated like this, is useful only to those that want to confirm their beliefs on "police brutality".

Do we know what the ratio is between persons actually engaged in criminal activity killed by police officers (in the US), and innocent citizens? I realise it would be hard to have much confidence in any such statistics, but the point is if I visit the US and I have no criminal intent, my personal risk of getting killed by an officer is certainly not zero, but I expect it would be low compared to the risk for persons who do have such intent. Conversely, my risk of being a victim of terrorism has no significant correlation to my intent.

It definitely is not a good reputation to police officers. Some articles would even say 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist is even underestimated. It's awful thinking that there may be police violence and killings that's grossly under reported.

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/u-s-citizens-58-times-kille...

And we are even more likely to be killed by each other (homicides, vehicle accidents) and ourselves (suicides, vehicle accidents). Honestly I take issue with the statistic. Many criminals are shot and killed by the police for good reasons. I would like to see the statistic for the likelihood of being killed when not in the commission of a crime or unlawfully resisting arrest. This is just sensationalizing the issue.

If police forces were required to report all killings, then we could know that statistic. But they aren't, so we can't.

Cyber-terrorism is the new terrorism is the new communism is the new facism and so on. The military industrial complex works to serve itself, and it will invent or even create and support enemies if those enemies can be used against the public to push a bigger budget. (See Operation Gladio A and B)

The thing to realize though is that the threat is from hard to find potentially non-nationstate actors, and the threat is somewhat real, but it is hard to detect and creates a constant state of fear... which is great if you want to capitalize on that fear. To a certain extent it worked for a better good by bringing tons of money into America which along with the UK and Israel is one of the top arms suppliers to the world. (a great intro book on this subject is the updated The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade.)

My problem is that this model of fear and money has been taken to the extreme is now eroding freedoms at home, and bankrupting us. Many republicans will rant and rave about the budget, but if you ask about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse (WFA) in DoD/Pentagon they hardly ever admit such WFA exists (even though everyone actually familiar with it knows how excessive it is, especially at the Pentagon.)

The other problem is that secretly, unbeknownst to you or the general public, in the smokey closed door places in the Beltway, the strategic thinkers have been saying we are returning to a neo-cold war, and to the tripolar world, and thats the real reason for our expansionism... used a measure of containment against our future enemies, (Russia and China) in the upcoming resource wars. Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria/Somalia/Georgia/Ukraine/The Stans, all make sense if you look at it from this perspective. Don't get me started on the petroldollar and world finance schemes.

I don't know enough to quite disagree with that justification, but my problem is that if that's the real reason, the public deserves to know, but our reps and the military brass have all just held that close to their chest and we are hemorrhaging money that gets wasted and it all ends up in VA and NY, and our constitution is being undermined, while our media is captured and corruption is rampant in all three branches of government, and the surveillance state grows so the intel agencies are more and more powerful against their own people and less and less useful abroad...

All this spells disaster in my opinion.

1. American cops are armed to the teeth because the perps carry guns. I'm not saying that we should repeal the second amendment, but because the perps are more likely to be armed, the environment is far more dangerous for cops in the US than just about any developed country.

2. It used to be prior to Tennessee v. Gardner (1985), a cop or citizen could shoot a fleeing felon for just about any reason. Now they have to have make the decision that letting the felon flee is more dangerous to society than taking a human life. This has gotten a few police officers jailed recently.

> You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a Terrorist

I hate to say this and defend those people but that statistical observation is due to the fact that security, intelligence and law enforcement officers are doing their job in foiling most of the terrorist plots and averting disasters.*

However, if terrorists were given free rein, the casualties number on their side would much much higher just like what's occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria.

*: Not counting false-flags or stand-down operations.

If that were true, we'd be seeing non bullshit terrorist convictions. I'm not a big fan of paying for snake oil.

To what factor would you attribute this observation if you are not buying the law enforcement competence theory?

From the top of my head, the Garland Texas terrorist attach was foiled due to the officers competence who shot down the two terrorist who were about to go on a rampage a la Charlie Hebdo at the center.

That's just one example to support my argument

What you fear and what kills you.... I think this[0] is relevant.

I believe people whose counter argument is to compare death by police officer to other causes of deaths are missing the point.

[0] http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/FEAR.jpg

Note: US only.

Indeed, cops here don't even have guns, he'd have to beat me to death

Haha agreed. But where we live other comparisons probably apply, things like obesity or traffic ought to be feared much more than terrorism.

Internationally it still boggles my mind why there's so much attention for things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. Remember bring our girls home? All the way to the whitehouse. Since the kidnapping of the 219 girls, about 300 thousand have died of aids. There's this fetish with terrorism as a threat to human livelihood I don't understand. Obviously those were 219 too many kidnapped girls, but I don't understand why we focus so much attention on things that relatively affect us in the least, if 200k people died of terrorist attacks in a single country per year, year after year, you'd expect it to be headlines in the press every single day until it's over.

I guess the only thing we have to fear is not just fear itself but the fearful themselves who are driving the madness in this country because of their fear of what is essentially a ghost (terrorism). So much for JFK's America. Today's America is filled with fearful cowards, just like the people in charge the past fifteen or so years always wanted.

Tangentially related, but I'm a little bit surprised to see something like this coming from CATO. Traditionally, a focus on police abuse and statistics like these have been the purview of the American left, while CATO is a conservative think tank.

It's very heartening to see this problem addressed by the other side of the aisle.

Cato has been good on these issues since forever. I picked up my instinctive knee jerk support of civil liberties from them when I was a wee little thing.

Eight times epsilon being...

I don't think this headline means what Cato wants it to mean; as it stands, what it's saying is that you simply aren't going to be killed by a police officer.

It doesn't make more sense as a resource allocation argument either, since Cato opposes the "war on terror".

Being a middle income white person not involved in crime, I suspect my risk for being killed by the police is below average. As I live in London and travel on public transport my risk for being killed by a terrorist is above average.

Poor comparison -- you are drawing a comparison between averages that are on different orders of magnitude. Being "below average" in one case and "above average" in another case doesn't make suddenly make them equivalent.

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

More than half of the police shootings this year were of white males.

I am actually very surprised it's only 8x, considering how infrequent I and other Americans encounter terrorists.

CATO isn't known for its honestly. What a terrible headline and comparison.

But the latter does far more damage to the state.

bummer

This is ignoring black swan events. There is no chance that police officers will kill 10 million people tomorrow, but there is a non-zero chance that terrorists will.

There is a non zero chance a police officer will kill 10 million people tomorrow.

Well that would make him a terrorist. There is a zero chance it would happen from routine police activity.

If you’re talking about really low probability deaths then you need to consider really unusual cases.

Fires gun at fleeing suspect, bullet hits _ -> deaths. Now, how does _ end up with 10 million deaths?

Well, the US Air Force for example has accidently dropped nuclear warheads on several occasions. They are designed to be really tough, but there is probably a non-zero chance a bullet could end up setting a defective one off.

Of course reality can be far stranger than fiction so I am unlikely to think of the most likely risk.

PS: The odds of terrorists being able to kill 10 million people tomorrow is so low it's really not worth considering.

But it's far, far higher chance that terrorists would kill 10 million tomorrow than police. All it takes is for a terrorist group to get their hands on nukes.

If your comparing something with 1 chance in 10^50 vs. 1 chance in 10^55 then sure the first is more likely. It's still not worth considering.

First, getting a nuke while hard is not enough. Killing 10 million people takes either a really big nuke in just the right spot, or a large number of nukes.

Second, having a nuke is not enough you need to be able to correctly detonate on command which it which is harder than you might think.

Third, you need to transport it to a useful location as there not stored in the middle of city's.

Fourth, you need to decide using them is more useful than threating to use them.

Fifth, if your comparing them to US police then they need to target the US.

So, no it takes far more than picking one up to kill 10 million people.

PS: Simply killing lots of people is not that useful to a terrorist organization. Making nukes less useful than you might think.

the chance that a nation state would kill 10 million more tomorrow is several orders of magnitude more probable.

China, US, India, Pakistan, Russia.....

No, there isn't such a chance. The only WMDs with the ability to kill tens of thousands are nukes. Terrorists only have nukes on TV, the kind with big countdown displays on them. It's the difference between a black swan and the fantasy of a black swan. The is no real-world hypothesis of how such a black swan happens.

That's why black powder bombs are the highest technology terrorists actually use, because it is the most effective thing they actually can use.

EDIT Before you hypothesize about "stolen nukes" know that it is impossible to move a nuke undetected: http://www.rense.com/general16/nucla.htm

Terrorists and WMDs is fiction. And sometimes fiction is propaganda.

It is possible terrorists could gain access to nukes. You don't know this for sure.

Yes, anyone could know this to a high certainty. It is incredibly difficult to handle and move nuclear materials undetected. It is in fact impossible for non-state actors to deliver nuclear bombs.

This is why every discussion of "nuclear terrorism" also includes "dirty bombs" because otherwise there would be no such topic as "nuclear terrorism."

It may be extremely unlikely, to the point of being negligible, that terrorists could develop, construct and deliver a nuclear device independently. However it may be possible for them to steal one. They'd find it hard to deliver it to a target, but if the theft went undetected (bear in mind that when the USSR disolved there was no definitive inventory of all their nuclear devices and there are still discrepancies in the records) it's certainly not impossible.

There are other ways to kill tens of thousands of people other than nukes.

Weaponized viruses is one. Other indirect ways such as triggering a large scale war, economic warfare, etc.

Another popular-meme way is knocking out the power grid. Take out enough of it and rapid recovery becomes very difficult, soon disrupting & stopping commerce, water, food, gas, etc distribution which some 99% of the US population critically relies on. That often postulated as prompting mass looting & starvation, which one could reasonably assume terminates 3% of the population.

No, there isn't. It is incredibly difficult to make effective chem/bioweapons. Aum tried sarin gas and they would have killed more people with a $10 bomb.

Wars are caused by over-estimating the terrorist threat.

"Terrorists only have nukes on TV"

You sure about that? There's a reason the US gives Pakistan billions in "aid".

What on earth would make you say there is no (zero) chance police officers will kill 10 million people tomorrow? There is most certainly a chance. It is likely a very, very small chance, but it is still a non-zero chance.

It's a zero chance unless those police officers are also terrorists. Like I said in another comment, there is a zero chance it would happen from routine police activity.

Now you're just playing semantics. There is still some chance it could happen during routine police activity, if that's the game you want to play.

Well perhaps from quantum mechanics there's also a chance that the moon is made out of cheese, but it's not really worth thinking about. The chance that police will kill 10 million people from routine activity is like that. It's not realistic.

Let's assume it is non-zero, but negligible.

Would you say that chance has increased, decreased or remained the same over the last 30 years?

That's completely silly. Yes tail events are important to consider. But major terrorist attack are already events on part of the tail.

All of the successful attacks around the world in the last 15 years probably could have been far more deadly if the terrorists only goal was death count. That's probably not what they're optimizing for, this is framing everything from the victim's point of view. Terrorists can be awful, but they still have motivations and are somewhat rational actors.

I'd be happy to change my view with evidence otherwise, but terrorists are still somewhat "rational actors" with goals that seem horribly irrational to most people. Killing 10 million people in a terrorist attack probably wouldn't serve their long-term goal (even terrorists worry about PR) and would be an incredibly difficult / expensive undertaking.

It also ignores that the probability can change over time. Past frequency is not always a good predictor for future probability.

Dodges the issue entirely. Police kill people in a non-black swan fashion anyway, because their flaws are systemic. We can actually fix the flaws that the cops have.

Terrorists are working as intended, not killing millions of people here but instead squabbling over dirt in a destabilized wasteland while the Russians explode them.

Well there is a chance terrorists will kill millions of people here and it just hasn't happened yet. So the total chance of being killed by a terrorist, if you had more information, might be higher than being killed by an officer.

There is a non-zero chance that an asteroid will slam into the Earth next month, ending life as we know it. There is a non-zero chance that the LHC will create a black hole that will swallow us all. Etc.

Hmm, 10 million people is roughly a third of the population of Canada. AFAIK, nothing in recorded history ever killed that many people in a single day. (To give some perspective, the atomic bombs in WWII "only" killed in the range of a hundred thousand people)

If you look at a major terrorist attack death toll, you'll probably find that it's within one order of magnitude of, say, a major riot death toll.

I don't think that this is true. The worst terrorist attacks look to be about an order of magnitude worse than the worst riots.

Looks like I was wrong: riots were worse. Quick google search:

http://www.sickchirpse.com/top-10-most-devastating-terrorist...

http://listverse.com/2014/02/07/10-deadliest-riots-in-histor...

According to those, worst terrorist attack was 9/11, with ~6k deaths in a single day. Most of the riots in the riot list had larger death tolls (ranging from anywhere between ~7k in a single day, to over 1M over a period of time).

Some are arguing that the former case isn't 0% due to extreme fluke events, but they ignore that there are people in the latter case actively trying, right now, to make that chance 100%.

If we are going to sing that song: if somebody is going to kill 10 million people tomorrow is, necessarily, somebody with nuclear or biological weapons.

As a non-American I would feel a lot safe if you just dismantle yours.

American has used nuclear weapons twice in history. Fearing American nukes is ridiculous and not based on any rational thought.

In my opinion, fearing nukes, in general, is pretty rational.

Fear can't be rational. It's definitional. The fear is justifiable in some sense, of course, as we still allow people to feel whatever they want (if not express it)

A counterpoint is that the US is the only country in the world ever to use nuclear weapons. (I don't think that this actually makes the US more likely to use them again.)

1. Last time I checked, 2 > 0.

2. Actually, 2 > 1 also. If the goal was to demonstrate unsurmountable military power and Hiroshima had already happened, what's the point of Nagasaki?

3. Given the past record of violations to international treaties, it can be argued that if the Russians had not developed the capability to retaliate in kind, N >> 2 by now.

Define "you". By "you" do you mean criminals and others who are evading, resisting or shooting at cops? Or do you mean the majority of law-abiding citizens without issues that involve the police coming after you?

I'm in the latter. So is my whole family, friends and, afaik, co-workers. So do I think that 8x number applies to any of us? No.

We need to sacrifice some of our freedoms to increase our security from the cops.

That's exactly what is happening with putting cameras on cops and their cars.

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