January 9th, 2015 By Matt Agorist In case you’ve been under a rock lately, it is becoming quite clear that police in the US can and will kil...
January 9th, 2015
By Matt Agorist
In case you’ve been under a rock lately, it is becoming quite clear that police in the US can and will kill people, even unarmed people, even on video, and do so with impunity.
The tallying methods, or rather lack thereof, used by both the FBI and individual police departments to count the amount of people killed by police, have been shown to be staggeringly inaccurate.
However, this inability of the government to count the number of people it kills, has been met with multiple alternative means of calculating just how deadly the state actually is.
One of these citizen run databases, is the website www.killedbypolice.com. The site is basically a spreadsheet that lists every person killed by cops in the years 2013 and 2014. In addition to naming those killed, it also provides a link to media reports for each of the killings, age, sex and race if available.
The tally for 2014? 1,100 people killed by those sworn to protect. That is an average of three people a day.
Do not mistake this as saying that those who were killed were innocent. However, when we look at violent crime in this country, we can see that it is at an all time low.
While violence among citizens has dropped, violence against citizens carried out by police has been rising sharply.
When we look at citizens killed by police over the last two years, deaths have increased 44 percent in this short time; 763 people were killing by police in 2013.
As a comparison, the total number of US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2014 was 58.
Fewer soldiers were killed in war than citizens back home in “the land of the free” in 2014, by a large margin.
So why is that?
Is this some natural tendency of police in “free societies” to kill their citizens more, in an effort to maintain this freedom? Hardly, and hardly is the US a free country.
According to the 2014 Legatum Prosperity Index released in November, in the measure of personal freedom, the United States has fallen from 9th place in 2010 to 21st worldwide—behind such countries as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay and Costa Rica.
Other such rankings systems show the US as low as 46.
Let’s look at our immediate neighbors to the north, Canada. The total number of citizens killed by law enforcement officers in the year 2014, was 14; that is 78 times less people than the US.
If we look at the United Kingdom, 1 person was killed by police in 2014 and 0 in 2013. English police reportedly fired guns a total of three times in all of 2013, with zero reported fatalities.
From 2010 through 2014, there were four fatal police shootings in England, which has a population of about 52 million. By contrast, Albuquerque, N.M., with a population 1 percent the size of England’s, had 26 fatal police shootings in that same time period.
China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded 12 killings by law enforcement officers in 2014.
Let that sink in. Law enforcement in the US killed 92 times more people than a country with nearly 1.4 billion people.
It doesn’t stop there.
From 2013-2014, German police killed absolutely no one.
In the entire history of Iceland police, they have only killed 1 person ever. After exhausting all non-lethal methods to detain an armed man barricaded in his house who actually shot 2 police officers, police were forced to take the 59-year-old man’s life. The country of Iceland grieved for weeks after having to resort to violence.
So why are police in the US so much more likely to kill than all of these other first world countries?
READ MORE
By Matt Agorist
In case you’ve been under a rock lately, it is becoming quite clear that police in the US can and will kill people, even unarmed people, even on video, and do so with impunity.
The tallying methods, or rather lack thereof, used by both the FBI and individual police departments to count the amount of people killed by police, have been shown to be staggeringly inaccurate.
However, this inability of the government to count the number of people it kills, has been met with multiple alternative means of calculating just how deadly the state actually is.
One of these citizen run databases, is the website www.killedbypolice.com. The site is basically a spreadsheet that lists every person killed by cops in the years 2013 and 2014. In addition to naming those killed, it also provides a link to media reports for each of the killings, age, sex and race if available.
The tally for 2014? 1,100 people killed by those sworn to protect. That is an average of three people a day.
Do not mistake this as saying that those who were killed were innocent. However, when we look at violent crime in this country, we can see that it is at an all time low.
While violence among citizens has dropped, violence against citizens carried out by police has been rising sharply.
When we look at citizens killed by police over the last two years, deaths have increased 44 percent in this short time; 763 people were killing by police in 2013.
As a comparison, the total number of US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2014 was 58.
Fewer soldiers were killed in war than citizens back home in “the land of the free” in 2014, by a large margin.
So why is that?
Is this some natural tendency of police in “free societies” to kill their citizens more, in an effort to maintain this freedom? Hardly, and hardly is the US a free country.
According to the 2014 Legatum Prosperity Index released in November, in the measure of personal freedom, the United States has fallen from 9th place in 2010 to 21st worldwide—behind such countries as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay and Costa Rica.
Other such rankings systems show the US as low as 46.
Let’s look at our immediate neighbors to the north, Canada. The total number of citizens killed by law enforcement officers in the year 2014, was 14; that is 78 times less people than the US.
If we look at the United Kingdom, 1 person was killed by police in 2014 and 0 in 2013. English police reportedly fired guns a total of three times in all of 2013, with zero reported fatalities.
From 2010 through 2014, there were four fatal police shootings in England, which has a population of about 52 million. By contrast, Albuquerque, N.M., with a population 1 percent the size of England’s, had 26 fatal police shootings in that same time period.
China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded 12 killings by law enforcement officers in 2014.
Let that sink in. Law enforcement in the US killed 92 times more people than a country with nearly 1.4 billion people.
It doesn’t stop there.
From 2013-2014, German police killed absolutely no one.
In the entire history of Iceland police, they have only killed 1 person ever. After exhausting all non-lethal methods to detain an armed man barricaded in his house who actually shot 2 police officers, police were forced to take the 59-year-old man’s life. The country of Iceland grieved for weeks after having to resort to violence.
So why are police in the US so much more likely to kill than all of these other first world countries?
READ MORE
