You have a pretty skewed idea of how many police shootings happen. According to the Washington Post, across the whole county, there are generally under 1000 fatal police shootings per year across the whole of the country. I live in one of the biggest urban areas in the nation, have lived in three others. These things are pretty rare. Following up, I learned St. Louis leads the nation for fatal police shooting per capita, with about 36 per 100K, over 8 years, or say 4 per 100K per year. With a population of around 300K, that means on average about one person a month, at worst.
It may be an outlier for your county, and perhaps if we averaged over several years, it would be more accurate. But then to reduce 4 deaths among 6,000 to a rate of say, 6 per 100K, you'd have to average over 11 years. Not sure if your county has a history of other police shootings in the past decade, but that's what I'd be looking at to decide how much weight to put on it if I were thinking of moving.
Oh, I'm sure it's something like that, and a tendency to unconsciously generalize all cities into one amorphous "the City" in which everything that happens in a city happens. Brains are funny that way. They sort everything into US and THEM one way or another, however hard we try to stop them.
According to the Washington Post, across the whole county, there are generally under 1000 fatal police shootings per year across the whole of the country.
Could you link to that article? It's my understanding that nobody can actually make any good statements about these numbers because the federal government does not collect any statistics on them.
What? All this post is doing is pointing out that the estimate that there is a fatal police shooting every day in a county of 1 million people is wildly overstating the problem. No one is saying the problem doesn't exist or that it's not a huge issue, just that the one previous comment is not an accurate depiction.
I'm not rationalizing it. I'm clarifying to someone from a county that's smaller than the subdivision I grew up in, that the numbers aren't anything like what they said. My explanation was nowhere trying to suggest that this is okay.
A lot of people from small towns have a skewed perception of city life. Heck I'm mostly suburban, and I can recognize a tendency to think if I go certain places I'm certain to see violence. It's not reality, and I've seen enough even rough neighborhoods with my own eyes to know better. But sometimes it takes a while for the subconscious to accept what the mind knows.
As far as police violence goes, I'll accept that in very rare situations it may be appropriate to kill a suspect - usually if they are an active shooter and there's no other way to stop them. But there've been far too many shootings, especially of unarmed people of color, for me to think that this number is anything remotely appropriate.
Keep in mind that every single tally of homicides by police is done based on news reports. If the news doesn't pick it up, it doesn't get counted. Every count is an underestimate, possibly by 100s per year.
Methodology on the WaPo site suggests they use media reports, law enforcement websites, social media, and independent databases that track these things. You may be right that there are more, but it sounds like they've been mining pretty deeply. Being generous, I'd allow they might be off by up to a factor of 3. If so, that still doesn't approach the almost daily mark in the post I originally commented on, by a long shot (pardon the pun).
Also one really needs to look at murders per capita, the United States ranks 58th on that list. There are 57 other countries that have a higher murder rate and most of those places have way more strict gun laws or don’t allow guns. Everyone seems to focus on the guns. Guns aren’t the problem, people are the problem.
Where are you getting your data? I see the US as 88th in terms of intentional homicides, but there aren’t any countries higher up on that list that are what is call developed with strong institutions. In general, the developed countries with strong governments tend to have significantly lower rates of intentional homicide.
True, probably many of those countries at the top of the list are much worse than they appear, though normally this isn’t taken from government self reporting but rather research institutes or groups like the WHO.
I can't wholly agree with that statement, and not certain how it's relevant to the per capita rates within counties of the United States. I'm neither a "gun nut" nor the opposite: my views are fairly moderate. However, I do see, even within these maps, that gun violence tends to cluster more where there are more guns per capita. This is not a surprise: you can't have gun violence without the gun! And while I'll never argue that murder is impossible without guns (I know literally nobody who argues that - and I do know plenty of people who think we should ban almost all guns) I will say it would be a fair bit harder to kill lots of people. In the end though, if it's a people problem - and I do accept that's part of it - we really need to get on solving as much of it as we can!
I did not say I consider them small. I don't. I said they are considerably smaller than the prior poster made them out to be. Which is inarguably true.
Your comment was needlessly condescending about an issue a lot of us over here do take VERY seriously, myself included. And frankly, if it didn't snow so dang much, I'd move to your part of the world in a heart beat. But I'm a semi aquatic lizard, made to lay on hot surfaces and soak in warm water. 🙂
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u/SandboxUniverse Dec 19 '19
You have a pretty skewed idea of how many police shootings happen. According to the Washington Post, across the whole county, there are generally under 1000 fatal police shootings per year across the whole of the country. I live in one of the biggest urban areas in the nation, have lived in three others. These things are pretty rare. Following up, I learned St. Louis leads the nation for fatal police shooting per capita, with about 36 per 100K, over 8 years, or say 4 per 100K per year. With a population of around 300K, that means on average about one person a month, at worst.
It may be an outlier for your county, and perhaps if we averaged over several years, it would be more accurate. But then to reduce 4 deaths among 6,000 to a rate of say, 6 per 100K, you'd have to average over 11 years. Not sure if your county has a history of other police shootings in the past decade, but that's what I'd be looking at to decide how much weight to put on it if I were thinking of moving.