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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

Number of people killed last year by police in England and Wales: 3. That's the highest since 2008. [1]

Why doesn't law enforcement seem to care? The government doesn't even track police shootings (one reason the Washington Post created its database) and, generally, law enforcement's reaction expresses no concern for the victims or for reducing this appalling behavior and widespread failure.

[1] http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/fatal-police-shootings

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While the police in the US are clearly more violent than those in the UK, it's also the case that there is more crime in the US, more variance in the population, and way, way, way more gun availability. So we may not have very much to learn from your simple comparison.

> So we may not have very much to learn from your simple comparison.

You mean that I didn't write a dissertation on it in an HN comment? We don't have much to learn from your simplistic dismissal of a serious issue, based on simplistic speculation about the causes. Have a nice day.

What terrible reasoning.

Wow! And England and Wales are entire countries!

Except...

They are much, much, much smaller countries, and so...

One would actually expect a much, much, much smaller number for them.

Even combined.

Whether by land area or population, they are considerably smaller.

Given the population of the UK is about a fifth of the US, your post is so ridiculous it's hard to consider it anything but a troll.

Yes, but: the population of England and Wales together is about 55 Million; the us 319 Million. So that's a ratio of 1:5.8.

There were 3 shootings vs 984, so that's a ratio of 1:328. So it's still a very valid point.

They're smaller, but not that much smaller. With a combined population of 56M to the USA's 319M, we could scale their shooting numbers by 5.7x to get something adjusted for population. So if they were as big as the USA they would have ~17 shootings to our 984.

Not that much smaller:

                   Population    Killed
                   (mid-2012)    by Police
  United States    314,102,623     984
  England & Wales   56,567,800       3
  Ratio                     6x    328x

Don't think land area makes sense. However adjusting for crime rates and demographics would make a big difference.

It'd be interesting to compare what the UK folks were armed with, including those not shot. My guess is that US cops are far more likely to face people carrying firearms of their own.

I figure if we're talking about gun laws, though, the article is probably political in nature, so I flagged it.

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