Edited 6/18/2015 06:45:37

Edited 6/18/2015 06:53:56

Note: Hobart, Darwin and Canberra probably aren't cities by US standards.

If you want the complete opposite, just look to New Zealand. Their entire country's police force has no guns at all and 1 taser for the whole of their country.

edit: corrected a typo

Edited 6/18/2015 17:50:04

When they were filming the hobbit, they had more guns than the entire new Zealand police force. Lol

This page is stupid,, you should not check the number of fatalities, need statistics.
You're in the third (right?) The population size in the world, you have 300 million people, what it 1000?
It does not mean that everyone who died is a harmless innocent

Error *

Edited 6/19/2015 13:36:00

The police protect you, and of course you're going to have failures

"Police officer Michael Brelo was previously accused [and acquitted] of killing Russell and Williams in 2012 after a long high-speed chase in which the pair was shot at 137 times by police. Russell's car backfired as he sped past Cleveland police headquarters, and authorities and bystanders mistook the car's sound for gunfire [both were unarmed].

After the vehicle came to a stop, prosecutors said, Brelo jumped on the hood of the car and fired 15 shots at Russell and Williams. The pair were each shot more than 20 times. It's still unclear why they initially fled." [Huff Post]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/03/michael-brelo-charged-with-assault_n_7503998.html

is this what you mean by failures and isolated lapses in duty? By the way there are several more of those isolated lapses....

so what to do, remove the police for isolated lapses in duty when the folk are doing the same thing, but much worse?

first of all, nobody considered to remove the police, rather than accuse and condemn policemen for murder and other crimes. and second do you really expect the police to act like criminals, but maybe less worse? holy shit this is really fucked up!

citation needed

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries

The fact that 1000 killings a year seems outrageously high to some people is just ridiculous to me.

If 1000 people are going to be killed in a year by police, then there is a 0.0003% chance of any single person being killed, which is a chance I'll take to have policemen keeping my country safe.

In addition to this, for a cop to actually kill you, you have to do something seriously messed up around a cop. Chances are if you cooperate with police you will never be killed by one in your lifetime.

Sure, i'm all for police killing less people, but the fact that police kill 0.0000003% of the US population each year doesn't seem like that much of a problem to me, especially since the Unites States population is growing on average around 0.7% every year.

I'm not disagreeing that our police should make more of an effort to not kill people, but I don't think a criticism of The United States police is justified.

When you have a bunch of idiots as citizens, people are gonna die.

A stupid folk needs strong hand.

Btw I mean not disrespect, someone consequently made this folk stupid who has an interest in stupid, obedient people who will accept all decisions. :/

Remember US is the biggest terrorist in the world.

How many people are killed by police that did not break any law before they were killed? Even in the example you mentioned, the two men were running from the cops. It sounds to me like if they would have been law-abiding citizens and would have simply pulled over, they would have been fine. Don't get me wrong; I think the US police force does use lethal force more than is necessary, and I think any reasonable person would say the same. But I think that if you don't break a major law, you have nothing to worry about from the police.

The biggest issue with the US police force is how people become officers. In my part of the country, the people who usually go on to become policemen are the ones who get poor grades in school, are spoiled, and would likely end up working a minimum wage or close to minimum wage job if they were not policemen. The only way to really solve the police problem in the US is to pay police more and raise the standards on getting in, so that more able citizens will want to become policemen.

I don't really agree with your first paragraph, JSA. This woman didn't do anything illegal, and still ended up getting tased for no reason. Admittedly that is a lower form of assault than shooting someone with a gun, but it is an example of a law enforcement officer assaulting a law abiding person for no reason.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/border-patrol-agents-tase-an-unarmed-woman-inside-the-us/394073/

However, I do agree wholeheartedly with your second point.

Edited 6/19/2015 18:08:24

Remember US is the biggest terrorist in the world.

If the U.S screams "Praise the Lord" and than drops planes into buildings to kill your civilians you'll have the right to say that.

As for the issue on topic: Is the U.S police excessive at times? Yes, but one must also consider what they're dealing with. Most of the time police shootings occur in major cities, and many of America's major cities are riddled with street gangs,drug dealers, and a whole assortment of other criminals who don't hesitate to murder cops. People put into a dangerous environment like that will be a lot more likely to shoot when threatened.

As many others have said: If you actually follow the laws and don't anything to attract the attention of the police you'll be fine 99% of the time.

@Eklipse, terrorism has nothing to do with screaming "Praise the Lord". It is literally the act of fighting a conflict by terrorizing a civilian population. I don't really see how drone strikes fail to meet that standard.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/living-in-terror-under-a-drone-filled-sky-in-yemen/275373/

Edited 6/19/2015 18:13:30

It is literally the act of fighting a conflict by terrorizing a civilian population. I don't really see how drone strikes fail to meet that standard.

It's not terrorism if civilians aren't the intended target. When civilians die in operations intended for a military target it's collateral damage. Collateral damage is still a very bad thing, but it's not on the same level as terrorism.

Beren, one instance of an innocent person being tased doesn't bother me. I think it is a huge mistake on the officer's part, but she was not killed, and if 1 in 300 million people (probably a few others have experienced this as well, making it more 1 in 100 million people) is tased even though they did not break a law, it is not such a big deal. The officer who tased her should be punished, of course. But it shouldn't worry the average person.

Did you watch the video? For me it wasn't so much that he tased her, it was how calmly he did it. Like he knew that nothing was going to happen to him for it, even though he knew he was being filmed. Oh, and of course no charges have been filed against him.

It honestly doesn't surprise me that he acted that way. Like I said, some policemen are idiots. I think the big issue is that no charges have been filed against him. He should be fired at the least for something like that.

The issue is that cops who do things like that are almost never charged with a crime, and very rarely even receive any reprimand. That to me is proof that we have some sort of institutional problem. I don't know precisely what the solution is, but I think we do need to at least recognize that there is a problem.