Wednesday, March 4, 2015

US Cops Kill Lots More People Than You Think

An average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country’s most authoritative crime statistics every year for almost a decade, according to a report released on Tuesday.

The first-ever attempt by US record-keepers to estimate the number of uncounted “law enforcement homicides” exposed previous official tallies as capturing less than half of the real picture. The new estimate – an average of 928 people killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI data – amounted to a more glaring admission than ever before of the government’s failure to track how many people police kill.

The revelation called into particular question the FBI practice of publishing annual totals of “justifiable homicides by law enforcement” – tallies that are widely cited in the media and elsewhere as the most accurate official count of police homicides.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/04/police-killed-people-fbi-data-justifiable-homicides

And US cops kill up to 100 times more people per year than in other capitalist countries:

By contrast, in England, also a capitalist country with a long history of racism, police reportedly fired guns three times in all of 2013, with zero reported fatalities. Police do not carry guns on patrol in England.

From 2010 through 2014, there were five fatal police shootings in England, which has a population of about 52 million. By contrast, Albuquerque, N.M., with a population 1 percent of England’s, had 26 fatal police shootings in that same time period!

In 2011, the FBI reported 404 “justifiable homicides” by U.S. police. Based on the data collected by KilledByPolice for 2013 and 2014, the real number of police killings for 2011 was likely over 1,000. There were two reported police killings in England, meaning that the rate of killing by U.S. police was about 100 times that of English cops in 2011.

The same year, German police, who do carry guns, reportedly killed six people. Germany, another racist, capitalist country with large numbers of oppressed minorities, has a population about one-quarter that of the U.S. So on a per capita basis, U.S. police were 40 times as likely to kill as German cops.

Canada, another multi-national state with about 12 percent the population of the U.S., also reported six fatal police shootings in 2011, meaning that U.S. cops were 20 times as likely to kill as their Canadian counterparts.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-cops-kill-at-100-times-the-rate-of-other-capitalist-countries/5423183

You think maybe there's something wrong here?

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