Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Fatal Police Shootings Still Declining in the US


Of unarmed suspects, anyway. Charts from Kevin Drum, based on the Washington Post's program for tracking all police shootings.

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

The decline appears to line up with the ascendancy of body cameras - would be interesting to compare data.

That said, there's still a lot of room for improvement.

One problem is that our police are some of the least / worst trained among developed nations - and that's not even accounting for the fact that our police carry firearms as standard, when many comparable police forces do not issue firearms to patrol officers at all, and only their specialized elite teams which are called in on a case-by-case basis are given guns.

Another problem is that even though numbers of fatalities are declining, the rate at which police avoid any negative consequences for such killings is not similarly declining. Other countries do a far better job of holding their police accountable for their actions. We are not doing enough to serve justice, and as a result many of the police are currently above the law.