ronburgundy
Contributor
The police in those countries are more "civilized" because the populace that they police are more "civilized" in terms of willingness to use lethal force against others, as evidenced by their homicide and overall firearm-related crime rates that are a fraction of the US.
US criminals are many times more likely to be armed with a gun, so that accounts for much of the difference in death rates of suspects being apprehended.
For example, the gun-related homicide rate is about 50 times higher in the US than the UK. About 10% of US teenage males have carried a gun in their possession within the last 30 days, with that figure being over 25% in about 1 dozen US states . Given how such practices tend to vary widely be sub-region and are not evenly distributed in a state, that means there are likely districts where half of high school males carry a gun on a semi-regular basis.
Thus, US cops are up to 50 times more likely to encounter suspects that are either armed guns or suspected of having used a gun in a violent crime for which they are suspected, and to be shot at by suspects. That disparity is likely closer to 100 times when looking at only the districts where the majority of suspects deaths occur.
This is why US cops are more likely to carry a gun in the first place, be ready to or actually unholster their weapon when approaching suspects, and use their firearm due to a perceived firearm threat even when it is later determined the suspect had no firearm.
Do you have any evidence that the differences in death rates of suspects is well beyond what is predicted by the objectively greater lethal firearm threat that criminal suspects in the US pose?
Note, that merely a greater death rate of suspects that turn out to be unarmed is not the sufficient evidence you need. No country expects their cops to wait to be shot at to use their own fire arm. The high probability (in both relative and absolute terms) of encountering suspects with firearms combined with the higher relative probability of encountering suspects that have or are willing to use lethal force against others (a fact supported by the 20 fold homicide rate) would inherently result in more use of lethal force by cops in uncertain situations where a post-hoc investigation fails to show a lethal threat.
You need to show that US cops kill more unarmed suspects, after controlling for any impact (direct or indirect) of the objectively greater lethal threat that US suspects generally pose (not just to officers, but to other civilians).
Only that would show some kind of cultural problem in US law enforcement that wouldn't exist if other nations enforcement encountered the kind of uncivilized violent criminals that US cops encounter.
I am not doubting that some evidence of a problem exists. Just that the magnitude will be a tiny fraction of what you are inferring from invalid comparisons that don't control for objective threat.
