I witnessed the police beating someone resisting arrest. It was about 4-6 police officers on one small, skinny person.
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| https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20190104-1 |
Nope, it was someone who refused to leave a bar on Gandy Street in Exeter, England in 1991. The person who was being beaten was white, as were the police. The issue was that the person was resisting arrest.
This is why I say "Defund the Police" is misinformed. It is based on pretty much upon ignorance since the police will use force on someone who is resisting arrest no matter where one happens to be in the world.
The morbid exceptionalism of American police violence cannot be explained by the amount of money the U.S. spends on police, or by the number of cops it employs. The U.S. spends less on police than the European Union does, as a share of GDP. Italy has more officers per capita than any state in the U.S., according to a comparison of FBI and Eurostat databases. Greece has more officers per person than Newark, New Jersey; Baltimore; and Chicago.
But none of those places shares our epidemic of police violence. American police kill about 1,000 people every year. Adjusted for population, that body count is five times higher than that in Sweden, 30 times higher than that in Germany, and 100 times higher than that in the United Kingdom.
Many differences between the U.S. and the European Union can partly explain these gaps, including our history of systemic racism and our porous social safety net. But without the mention of guns, no explanation for America’s record of police violence is complete.
OK, the "Gun Violence Prevention" types should be upset about the guns on the street, but they are getting way ahead of where they should be in this process: especially if they are serious about cutting back on how many people patrol the streets. Getting the guns off the streets should be priority number one for the people who are going to float this crazy concept. Not to mention they should be really careful about how they frame the issue in regard to people who carry guns.
Guns are not the problem in Europe and most of the rest of the world that they are in the US.
Acquiring guns illegally in the US is not much harder. About 57% of this year’s deadly force victims to date were allegedly armed with actual, toy or replica guns. American police are primed to expect guns. The specter of gun violence may make them prone to misidentifying or magnifying threats like cellphones and screwdrivers. It may make American policing more dangerous and combat-oriented. It also fosters police cultures that emphasize bravery and aggression.But the biggest issue is the legal framework regarding the use of deadly force in self-defence in the US. Let's go beyond the enhanced castle doctrine/stand your ground laws to get to the amount of force police are allowed to use in the US and EU.
Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989), was a US Supreme Court case regarding the use of deadly force by the police. Graham can be boiled down to:
Any use of force by law enforcement officers needs to take into account "severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight."
"The 'reasonableness' of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight."
"The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation."
Bottom line is that it is constitutionally permissible for police to use deadly force when they “reasonably” perceive imminent and grave harm. There are 38 State laws regulating deadly force which are almost always as permissive as Supreme Court precedent allows. Sometimes those laws are even more permissive than the federal law in the latitude they give officers to use deadly force.
Contrast that to the European Union where the European Convention on Human Rights allows police to use only the deadly force that is “absolutely necessary.” In contrast, police in the United States are permitted if they have a “reasonable belief” that their lives are in danger. Under these differing principles, a police shooting might be lawful in the United States and not according to European standards.
Add in that European Union countries set their own regulations within the commission’s framework. Similar to the US some countries have stricter rules than others in regard to the application of that framework. Again, we see a difference between the US and EU attitudes toward the use of deadly force by the police. In Finland, for example, a cop is expected if possible to seek a superior’s approval before using deadly force. In Spain, if possible the police officer must first fire a warning shot and shoot at a non-vital part of the body before they can shoot to kill. Those examples were not meant to advocate attempting to shoot a "non-vital part of the body".
Likewise, racism alone can’t explain why non-Latino white Americans are 26 times
more likely to die by police gunfire than Germans. And racism alone doesn’t explain why states like Montana, West Virginia and Wyoming, where both perpetrators and victims of deadly force are almost always white, exhibit relatively high rates of police lethality. I would add that the Guardian feature on people killed by the police showed that (1) more whites were killed, but (2) the population most effected by police violence was native americans (10.13 to blacks at 6.66)!
One other thing which is common in European, and other non-US forces, is that they are not locally controlled. One of the reforms in Belgian Policing after 2001 was that the forces were reformed into to different national branches. Most European Police departments are accountable to a national body.
The bottom line is that simply saying "defund the police" will be a failure until there are drastic changes in US society, which I don't see happening. Those are the enactment of effective gun regulations and a change in the standard for the application of deadly force in self-defence.
Two thing that the "gun violence prevention" crowd and "Black Lives Matter" would be well advised to spend their time addressing. Otherwise, they are acting against their stated interests.
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