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Investigation: Police Shootings

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Investigation: Police Shootings

#21

Post by soheil »

cryptoz wrote: post #14
adam12 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this highlights how overblown the terrorist problem is.

About 30,000 Americans die in car crashes every year. That's about ~400,000 Americans killed by other Americans in their cars since the 2001 terrorist attacks. It's pretty clear that the emotional appeal is what people seem to care about ("someone wants to kill us") and it has absolutely nothing to do at all with Americans dying. Terrorism has never been a problem. The same number of people died in car accidents duri…

> it has absolutely nothing to do at all with Americans dying

I think it does, it's just that people are simply not aware of the numbers.

Re: Investigation: Police Shootings

#22

Post by archgoon »

jbattle wrote: post #15

The state by state numbers are surprising. CA has about 1/10th of the total shootings. IL has only 20, which is less than a lot of other states (NM for example). Florida and Texas seem to be the other big standouts

Why on earth would it be surprising that California, with 12% of the population of the United States, would account for 10% of the total shootings? Florida, based on it's population, would have about 61 shootings (it has 60), and Texas would be expected to have about 84 (it has 96, or about 20% more than expected).

The only surprising ones you've mentioned are Illinois (which is about half the expected rate) and New Mexico, which is about 3 times the expected.

Re: Investigation: Police Shootings

#23

Post by humanrebar »

rayiner wrote: post #3

Worth reading through these. A lot of people with mental illness shot just for holding guns or knives or "driving toward police." Recently, an au pair we know (from Germany), had a gun pulled on her because she reached into her purse to get her ID when she was pulled over. The fact that Maryland's finest are totally mental and she could get killed for doing that never occurred to her.

I don't know. Someone with severe mental illness and a knife (or a car) sounds way more dangerous than a calm person with a gun. It's hard to know whether the shooting was warranted without more details. Maybe better video records of these incidents will be helpful.

Re: Investigation: Police Shootings

#24

Post by davidw »

jbattle wrote: post #15

The state by state numbers are surprising. CA has about 1/10th of the total shootings. IL has only 20, which is less than a lot of other states (NM for example). Florida and Texas seem to be the other big standouts

You have to look at per capita numbers. North Carolina and Arkansas actually stand out as having lower numbers than some of the 'usual suspects' states they are next to. Wonder why that is.

Re: Investigation: Police Shootings

#25

Post by TallGuyShort »

rayiner wrote: post #3

Worth reading through these. A lot of people with mental illness shot just for holding guns or knives or "driving toward police." Recently, an au pair we know (from Germany), had a gun pulled on her because she reached into her purse to get her ID when she was pulled over. The fact that Maryland's finest are totally mental and she could get killed for doing that never occurred to her.

Once got pulled over while driving through a narrow alley. I had seen the police officer turning the corner behind me at an extremely dangerous speed (wheels spinning) so I assumed he was responding to an active shooting or something. I accelerated to cover the last 20 yards or so and then immediately pulled over once I was out of his way. He came up, gun drawn, thinking I had tried to escape. The reason for pulling me over in such a dangerous manner? One of the 2 lights illuminating my license plate was out.

Re: Investigation: Police Shootings

#26

Post by ghshephard »

rayiner wrote: post #3

Worth reading through these. A lot of people with mental illness shot just for holding guns or knives or "driving toward police." Recently, an au pair we know (from Germany), had a gun pulled on her because she reached into her purse to get her ID when she was pulled over. The fact that Maryland's finest are totally mental and she could get killed for doing that never occurred to her.

On the flip side, if there really is a threat, police officers have standard training which makes it clear that they have less than three seconds to react, before they are killed.

Bringing their weapon to a ready state, actually increases the time that they have to react, and lets them make more rational decisions.

Re: Investigation: Police Shootings

#27

Post by rayiner »

cryptoz wrote: post #14
adam12 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this highlights how overblown the terrorist problem is.

About 30,000 Americans die in car crashes every year. That's about ~400,000 Americans killed by other Americans in their cars since the 2001 terrorist attacks. It's pretty clear that the emotional appeal is what people seem to care about ("someone wants to kill us") and it has absolutely nothing to do at all with Americans dying. Terrorism has never been a problem. The same number of people died in car accidents duri…

What you call emotion, I call justice, and I think that matters.

Consider, without any emotion, the issue of murder versus suicide. What are the negative impacts of those acts? From the point of view of that person's friends and family and society at large, leaving aside emotion or notions of justice, the impact of the acts is the same: loss of that person, loss of their financial and emotional support. In fact, the impact on family and friends is often worse in cases of suicide because insurance policies often have an exemption for suicide.

Yet, almost nobody thinks murder should be legal while quite a few people think suicide should be legal. If we just mechanically consider "a death is a death" and count up the monetary impact of each case, we have no way to explain or justify why people feel this way.

Re: Investigation: Police Shootings

#28

Post by stevenrich »

danso wrote: post #19

FWIW (a alot, IMHO), here is the Github account for the data: https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings Seems like no big deal but with the commit history, we basically have a record and frequency count of how, in a major project by a major news organization, things get updated. Counting these incidents has always been difficult. Victims names are rarely known at the time of death, nevermind the circums…

FWIW, this is exactly why we chose to post to Github. We wanted to be as transparent as possible during a fluid process.

Re: Investigation: Police Shootings

#30

Post by tptacek »

tptacek wrote: post #2

Some notes: * The Guardian has a very similar feature, "The Counted": http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0... The Guardian's feature is better in some ways; for instance, it attempts to account for all police engagement fatalities, not just shootings. Some of the worst police abuses in the US haven't involved guns, and if you read the data carefully you learn some surprising things, like how d…

Here's the data set as a spreadsheet, which I think is more helpful (I will feel dumb if they made it available as a spreadsheet themselves):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/100kWwv7vLl0ZAbtMn7lY...

Oklahoma is pretty bad.

California is in the top 15 for both fatal shootings weighted by population and for fatal shootings of people not attacking with a deadly weapon.

Illinois, where I live, is all the way down at #44 for fatal shootings, which is surprising to me.

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