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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anyone here asking this: how many people are police killing who are not 100% innocent bystanders like in this case, but still didn't need to be killed? I mean, we're all outraged because they shot "some dude in his PJs" but doesn't that imply they must be shooting 10, 100x as many folks where we'd be thinking "well, he shouldn't have had a knife in his hand" or "he shouldn't have been high"?

Where I live, small town in the middle of the US, to my knowledge the cops have killed at least two people who were no real threat to them in the past few years. If that death density is consistent across the country there must be hundreds of events like this every year.

I get the impression somehow we've been brain washed into seeing this like unlucky folks being hit by a drunk driver.

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Every year in the US cops kill ~1000 people. Of those ~50% are unarmed or armed with something other than a firearm. ~18% are unarmed.

Nationwide less than 100 cops are killed every year by some form of assault.

~25 people are executed via death penalty every year.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...

https://www.odmp.org/search/year

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-year

To add a data point to your numbers, apparently police in the us shoot at 3 times as many people as they kill [https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-s...]

> "well, he shouldn't have had a knife in his hand"

Right. German cops, for example, are trained to shoot people in the leg in that scenario. It happens quite frequently and successfully.

American cops seem like they're all on a hair trigger to kill at the slightest hint of danger, rather than as a last resort when they're truly threatened.

I remember a tidbit from the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive loading screen saying that the federal GSG-9 group only has fired shots on five missions throughout their existence. Wikipedia seems to back this up with some reportedly true information[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSG_9#Publicly_known_missions

I wonder if the GSG and other special units see the use of violence as a colossally embarassing failure.

"That tactical team couldn't even do their job right and had to resort to shooting the guy."

Gunfire means high probability of failure.

American police and military are trained to shoot for the largest target area, center of mass, as this is the least likely area to have unintentional results.

Some examples of unintentional results are: 1) Missing. 2) Hitting another person. 3) Maming, or otherwise causing grievous injury such as shooting in the leg and hitting an artery on accident when you didn't intend to kill the target.

> Some examples of unintentional results are: 1) Missing. 2) Hitting another person. 3) Maming, or otherwise causing grievous injury such as shooting in the leg and hitting an artery on accident when you didn't intend to kill the target.

And these are common in the US, because the number of uses of weapons by police is so high.

https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/05/nypd-baby-you-know-we-lov...

The probability of killing someone when you hit them in the center of mass seems a lot higher than that of accidental hits to the femoral artery.

Also, surely you've noticed that when American cops shoot someone they usually go on to cuff them but don't make any attempt to administer first aid, so that quite a few people die from bleeding out. At least if you get shot in the leg you've got some chance of stemming the blood flow, plus it's a lot easier to put a tourniquet on that.

> The probability of killing someone when you hit them in the center of mass seems a lot higher than that of accidental hits to the femoral artery.

It is, but American cops are not trained to shoot to incapacitate or warn. If they shoot it is to kill and that is why the target is the center of mass.

I've always heard American cops are trained specifically to always shoot to kill.

As others have said, police in the US are trained to shoot for center mass, and even then they don't have a great track record for accuracy. I don't have the statistics in front of me, but the book 'On Combat' describes several cases where police empty their clips and mainly hit air. Adrenaline is a bitch, but most cops also have (in)famously little actual weapons training and a more robust regimen would undoubtedly help - including but not limited to helping them not discharge their weapons in the first place.

It's only recently that there has been any tracking of how many people are killed for any reason by police. The Washington Post has a database:

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

http://killedbypolice.net/

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