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Comment by recyclelater | Hacker News Reader

There are roughly 350 million people in this country. It’s surprising the number of people killed by police isn’t higher. Everyone contextualizes police shootings as if they all happen in their local city, so the numbers seem large.

I want this number as small as possible while not over correcting so much that we have other negative consequences (violent crime increases).

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Per capita we are (edit: #33) in the world and are an absolute leader among developed countries [0]

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...

We're #7 by count, not per-capita. Per-capita we're #33 (scroll down to the chart sorted by "per 10m").

Though our per capita rate is still absurd compared to other developed countries. The next comparable country is Canada at 9.7, 1/3 as high.

You’re right!

Yes but you have to discount ubiquitous firearm ownership. You can argue that is problematic pretty successfully but I don’t fault police officers (as a whole, obviously individual bad actors, again we have 350mm people here and 1mm police) having to shoot armed and dangerous individuals.

What is your concrete evidence that this is what drives the excess police shooting rates in the US?

Factor in only unarmed shootings and it’s tiny. The rest are mostly armed and dangerous people actively involved in violence. That it a shocking high number of suicide by cop.

You can watch a thousand videos if you care to and it’s eye opening. I made it a habit of watching the body cam footage of shootings in the news and it’s almost always clearly justified, though I do understand that there is a minority viewpoint that doesn’t consider any deadly shooting justified, even if it’s of an armed individual engaged in a crime.

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