Police Homicides in the United States

Finland has a national murder rate of 1.6. [1] At first that doesn't seem too bad as our murder rate is "only" about 300% higher. But that comparison by itself is quite misleading. Crime, and especially the most violent crimes including murder, are not evenly distributed in the US. They're heavily centralized into relatively small areas. So for instance these [2] are the crime data for Ferguson, Missouri where Michael Brown was killed. In the year Michael Brown was killed, their homicide rate was double the US average. It's now skyrocketed to 42.8 - 2,675% higher than Finland.

To give some context to that 42.8 the murder rate in Mexico is 16.35. In Columbia it's 26.5. As a matter of fact, in terms of nations - there are only 5 places in the world more dangerous than Ferguson, Missouri -- a town of some 20k people. I'm certainly not condoning police actions, but at the same time I think people don't really consider these situations in terms of context. Somebody, seemingly without irony, suggested we ought disarm the police. Imagine disarmed police in Mexico.. now increase the danger they face by 300%. That's what disarming police in areas like Ferguson, Missouri would be akin to.

This sort of reality is very foreign to us, who I suspect for the most part have led very privileged lives. And so we extrapolate our lives to a situation where suddenly the police are just killing people. And that would indeed be insane. It's so foreign for us to imagine how dangerous many places in the US are -- and it's these locations where the systemic police violence tends to also be heavily centralized.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[2] - http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Ferguson-Missouri.html

One of the problems is that racism is insidious. People who self identify as idealists who are not racist will still agree with cultural norms that are secondary or tertiary forms of racism.

To try to illustrate this idea:

In my twenties, after months of hearing about my husband's new best friend from work, I finally met the man. He was black. My husband and I were both white. My husband had never once mentioned that his new best friend was black, even though he talked about him constantly.

I was shocked to realize that I had assumed he was white since my husband did not mention his race. In that instant, I realized this assumption was the product of a racist culture where such details mattered and needed to be stated privately ahead of time to avoid any awkwardness or misunderstanding.

I realized that was how racism worked -- you just have certain social norms that may seem innocuous, but that reinforce the ongoing issue. Many people will not consciously question myriad social norms. People soak up social norms by being exposed to them and trying to fit in. There usually isn't lots of overt instruction on how and why we do such things.

So, first you need someone to sort this out in their own heart and mind. Second, they need to disseminate this new standard, often at enormous risk to themselves. Questioning social norms is generally dangerous business and has a history of getting people killed.

Trying to find genuinely not racist people in a generally racist culture is very challenging. Most people from such a culture who see themselves as not racist will still have ugly bad habits and mental models.

And then, when they need to decide whether to pull the trigger or not, their biases will show, not because they hate Blacks so much that they want them dead, but because they don't trust Blacks as much as Whites.

I don't believe this is a problem that will really be solved by simply punishing people more a la The beatings shall continue until morale improves. Instead, we need to improve trust and I don't how that can happen. But it certainly won't happen with our current approach to the problem space, where trust issues between the races in America seem to not even be part of the discussion.

My original comment was downvoted to the negatives and one of the first three replies is a personal attack. The US was founded on the idea of innocent until proven guilty, but the public is not willing to follow that precept for this issue. Witch hunts tend to result in finding people guilty because that is what they set out to do. It is a very serious and damning flaw in this paper, but my comment on that aspect is not PC and is reason enough to lump me in with killer cops as part of the problem.

In such an atmosphere, good luck with even having a productive discussion. And if you can't even discuss it, you are unlikely to solve it.

If my loved one was a police officer, I'd want them taking every precaution they could - so they get to come home tonight.

Can you give any examples of such measures, or evidence that the threat of violent revolution implied in the Second Amendment, versus the political power of the gun lobby and American gun culture, has ever been effective at limiting the US government or its rationale?