US POLICE KILLED 1129 PEOPLE IN 2017

The database Mapping Police Violence reports that police in the US killed 1,129 people in 2017; an average of three people every day. The number is unacceptable but not surprising--US police officers have killed more than 1,000 people every year for at least the past three years.

As has been the case for many years, the color of your skin matters a lot, with Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans being killed a far higher rates than whites, independently of whether or not they were suspected of a violent crime or were armed.

One out of 1,129

 Credit: Vimeo.com

As has also been the case for many years, the US is an extreme outlier compared to other countries. As documented by the Guardian, US police kill more people in a few days than police in other countries do in years.

Our nation's current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is doing everything he can to make this situation worse. He's ended an Obama-era federal police oversight program that had cut the police killing rate in cities with some of the worst rates of police killings. Trump too is doing his best to make things worse by repeatedly demeaning and besmirching the patriotism of the NFL players protesting police violence, along with the Black Lives Matter movement.

How about a national new year's resolution to save 500 lives by cutting the rate of police killings in half? Even if we were to accomplish that, US citizens would still be at far greater risk of being killed by their police than people in other countries, but at least it would be a start.

It can be done. Studies have shown that police departments that require officers to use all other means before shooting cut their killing rate by 25 percent, as do departments that require that all use of force be reported. Simply banning chokeholds and strangleholds cuts police killings by 22 percent.

It can be done, but not with the kind of leadership currently coming from Washington.

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You can read earlier posts on this subject here and also here.

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US POLICE KILLED THREE PEOPLE A DAY IN 2016

The international newspaper The Guardian has been tracking killings by police in the US since 2015. They've just published their findings for 2016. The numbers continue to be shocking, both in terms of racial disparities and the enormous contrast between the US and other countries.

Protest following the death of Akai Gurley, 11/20/14--Credit Wikimedia

The basics:

--Police in the US killed 1091 people in 2016, slightly down from 1,146 in 2015.

That represents a rate of 3.4 deaths per million people in the US. For perspective, that's 44 times the rate in the UK, 38 times higher than in Germany, 24 times the rate in Canada and 15 times that of France.

--If you're Black in America, your risk of being killed by police is 2.3 times as high as if you're white.

--If you're a Black man 15 to 34 years old, your risk of dying in a police encounter is 9 times that of whites and 4 times higher than a white man your age.

--If you're a Native American, you have 3.5 times the risk of being killed by police than if you're white.

--Deaths at the hands of police vary greatly state-by-state. Police in Alaska, New Mexico and Oklahoma are 3 times as likely to kill people as the national average, and 10 times more likely than police in Delaware, with just one such death in 2016 and a population just under 1,000,000.

In recent years, videotapes of shootings by police under questionable circumstances have shocked millions of people, provoked multiple demonstrations and riots, and brought the issue of police use of lethal force in the US out into the open. Although the statistics for 2016 (and earlier years) clearly show a serious racial bias in US policing, we should be equally concerned about the fact that US citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity, are far more likely to die at the hands of police than citizens of any other western nation.

You can read about some of the causes and possible cures for this ongoing epidemic in two earlier postings:

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE US--DUE PROCESS VS STREET "JUSTICE"

OFFICER-INVOLVED DEATHS IN BLACK AND WHITE

And you can read an update for the first 10 months of 2017, showing a continuation of the same deadly pattern, here.