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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Can we find out if e.g. Laquan McDonald is included in the "64%"? If not, I'd expect he was before the video came out. This is why I hesitate to consider "mitigating circumstances". Public safety officers should be judged by their effect on public safety, not by how well they cover their own asses.

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I wonder if you would feel that way if one of your loved ones was serving as an officer of the peace - would you want them dealing with dangerous situations on a daily basis people with no regard for "covering their own ass"? Would you feel that way if there were an armed intruder in your home and one of those officers had to respond to protect you? Would you want them to intervene to protect you or your family or sit in your driveway deliberating about whether they should "cover their own ass" or yours?

We don't need to excuse unwarranted police violence as a society, but it's equally unfair to outsource dealing with violent and dangerous situations to others and then glibly remove any means they have to deal with those situations without getting killed themselves.

> "covering their own ass"

I think you and jessaustin may be using different interpretations of that term, judging by their reference of the McDonald shooting. People are much more ok with police officers doing what they need to do to keep themselves and others safe at the time (your usage) than they are with officers lying about why they used deadly force after the fact to keep from getting in trouble (their usage).

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

It's not in the data set, but the correct category for McDonald is "Deadly weapon" but not "Attack in progress".

McDonald is the reason I'd like the "firearm" breakout, because "deadly weapon", "no firearm", and "no attack in progress" describes a somewhat common class of police fatalities that are probably mostly unjustified.

Yes I agree. The standard for "deadly weapon" has deteriorated to the point at which anything that any conceivably imaginative movie plot might suggest could cause a death in very particular circumstances, is thought to qualify. Yes it's possible that a two-inch penknife might be able to sever the vein of an immobilized person, given several minutes of sawing. That doesn't mean that such a tool is considered a "deadly weapon" by reasonable people, in any situation which includes police firing guns.

When you look at the Guardian data (manually, unfortunately, as that's the only way to do it), you're going to find that most of the "deadly weapon" cases involve firearms, not two-inch penknives.

Laquan McDonald's shooting happened in 2014, before we started investigating and tracking this data.

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