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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

1500? Not true.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

And the vast majority of those were clearly justified (suspect being armed and posing an obvious threat threat.)

Police are far from perfect but they also have to deal with people on a daily basis who are quite literally the dregs of society: where "F--- you pig!" is as common as "Thank you Officer."

As far as inbuilt racial bias -- have you spent time on the streets? You tell me what the percentages are for a crime being committed among different racial and ethnic groups. If you're in Chicago you are far more likely to be shot by a male of a specific racial group than by any other. That's just a fact. Nothing racist about it.

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There is some bias in such a system, though. On the whole, for instance, white collar crime kills more people, and does more economic damage to society than street crime ever does by a significant margin. But we'll build and deploy a system to tackle street crime, not one to tackle white collar crime. That's a conscious decision on the part of our society, and part of the reason why crime is normalized in white collar circles. And it certainly does our society no favors. (For the research into the normalization of white collar crime, and its greater harm to society, I listened to the 'Explaining Social Deviance' course by Prof. Paul Root Worpe a few years ago)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardbehar/2014/12/02/attentio...

White collar crime, like fraud and insider trading, sees as much automated detection software as street crime does. But even if it did not, let's assume we focus our attention on street crime, then your reasoning is a fallacy of relative privation: Y is a worse problem than X, so attempting to solve X is bad/unimportant/makes solving Y less likely.

    > And the vast majority of
    > those were clearly justified

940?! The British police killed 4 people last year. Assuming a 10x difference in population, are there really 20x as many "justifiable" killings in the US each year?

I don't find that particularly hard to believe. There's easily 20x more firearms per capita in the US than the UK. US police are routinely armed, while UK armed police are only deployed where a firearm is believed to be involved. The abundance of firearms in the US means that police need to be ready for a potential firearms incident in every encounter with the public.

Of course, the number of unjustified deaths will likely be disproportionately higher simply because all US police have the ability to react to a situation with lethal force. Sadly, as long as guns are as abundant as they are in the US, you'll never reduce that to the same level as the UK.

> UK armed police are only deployed where a firearm is believed to be involved

That used to be true, with a few exceptions (e.g. airports). It's not the case today and increasingly firearms officers are armed on patrol routinely.

Why and when did this shift start? Was it because of the uptick in terrorism in Western Europe?

For when - it was c.2009 London started having routine armed patrols I think (it's down to local forces in theory).

Why is harder to answer. As a trend I don't think it's been directly related to terrorism. There have been no calls from the public for it and some typically quiet British grumbling at it.

The cynic in me imagines politics has played a part. Getting hold of extra budget for policing is probably difficult at the moment but guns are probably an exciting enough reason to release funds.

That said, they very much are using the latest incident in Berlin to push armed officers out onto the streets.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2440342/eleven-police-forces-t...

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