515 so far this year...

[imatfaal]

@ imatfaal, I actually think certian laws are bias/racially based and being put in a position to enforce such laws over time corrupts many otherwise good police officers.

 

This is crux of the problem with the "institutionalization" of any mindset - it becomes self-reinforcing. Because whilst what you describe is happening - we also see that lawmaking follows the acts and concerns of those who are charged with its enforcement a/o administration.

 

This is not to say that things can never be changed. In my lifetime the United States was a light of penal reform with innovative and humane treatment leading to reduced recidivism - now it is an archetype of the opposite position with increasingly harsh and dehumanising punishment and an unimaginably large prison population. Thus I hope that some act, or actor can provide the unknown and unpredictable event that will set the course back towards rehabilitation rather than retribution

[iNow]

http://www.vox.com/a/police-killings-calendar-2015

 

There were only 14 days in 2015 during which police didn’t kill someone, according to a database that tracks police killings. In total, police killed at least 1,280 people, and in July alone — the deadliest month — 145 people were killed by police. There were three days in which police killed 10 or more people.

[dimreepr]

Whilst the number of prosecutions remains so low and a conviction rate of just one in five, the average officer must start to think of themselves as untouchable and the temptation to think they’re a ‘judge dread’ doling out immediate justice, especially if they think the judiciary is being ineffective (or wasting tax payers money throwing more and more in gaol), must be high in an increasingly intolerant/right wing society.

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-idUSKCN0SK17L20151026

 

A dozen officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter this year resulting from shootings, up from an average of about five a year from 2005 to 2014, said Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminology at Ohio's Bowling Green State University. He sifted court records and media reports as part of research for the Justice Department on police crimes and arrests.

The 2015 number does not include six Baltimore officers facing trial for the death of Freddie Gray. The 25-year-old black man died in April from a spinal injury after he was arrested and bundled in a transport van. Four of the officers face murder or manslaughter charges.

None of the officers has been convicted, and over the previous decade just one in five officers charged was found guilty, said Stinson, a former police officer.

 

[imatfaal]

1138 killed in 2015

It is very worrying (what's worrying is 1138 - but...) that a quick skirt about the databases finds a discrepancy of about 8-10%. Now these databases are not concerned with legal niceties*, nor potentially fuzzy data, nor even disputable facts; yet in the richest country in the world with computing superpowers and media giant there is that sort of variance in a pretty simple metric. There is no blame association here, no legal definitions of homicide - just a simple measure; the fact that collectors can be different by 100 shows that there is still huge amounts of work to be done in quantifying this problem.

 

Just as an aside; for a country which holds its independence and liberty from government interference so highly that America insists on keeping the (in my eyes) frankly mad second amendment there sure is very little fuss about the fact that around 3 citizens a day are killed by law enforcement officers.

 

* ironically and perhaps quite sentiently my auto-correct wanted to change "legal niceties" to "legal ethnicities" - maybe the spell-check admits things that the general public are too afraid / too ashamed to admit to themselves.

 

---

 

53 killed so far in 2016

[iNow]

Liked your post. Disliked what it represents about us as a people.

[StringJunky]

Liked your post. Disliked what it represents about us as a people.

I don't tar all Americans with the same brush, it's too big. Your states are all countries trying to act as one country and having huge problems like this.