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Use-Of-Force Incidents cut in half After Body Cams Adopted
- Thread starter ZiprHead
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Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
Now for some facts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...r-under-obama-than-they-have-been-in-decades/
In the aftermath of the mass shooting of a dozen police officers in Dallas this week, some conservatives rushed to lay blame for the incident at the feet of the Obama administration.
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Data from the Officers Down Memorial Page, which tracks law enforcement officer fatalities in real time, illustrates the point. During the Reagan years, for instance, an average of 101 police officers were intentionally killed each year. Under George H.W. Bush that number fell to 90. It fell further, to 81 deaths per year, under Bill Clinton, and to 72 deaths per year under George W. Bush.
...
Under Obama, the average number of police intentionally killed each year has fallen to its lowest level yet — an average of 62 deaths annually through 2015. If you include the 2016 police officer shootings year-to-date and project it out to a full year, that average of 62 deaths doesn't change.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...n-the-job-in-states-with-more-guns/?tid=a_inl
But late last year, researchers at Harvard and elsewhere discovered an alarming fact: Police officers are much more likely to be killed in the line of duty in states with high rates of gun ownership.
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The results were shocking: line-of-duty homicide rates among police officers were more than three times higher in states with high gun ownership compared with the low gun ownership states. Between 1996 and 2010, in other words, there were 0.31 officer fatalities for every 10,000 employed officers in low gun ownership states. But there were 0.95 fatalities per 10,000 officers in the high gun ownership states.
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Thank the NRA for murder rates of police. Not BLM.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...r-under-obama-than-they-have-been-in-decades/
In the aftermath of the mass shooting of a dozen police officers in Dallas this week, some conservatives rushed to lay blame for the incident at the feet of the Obama administration.
....
Data from the Officers Down Memorial Page, which tracks law enforcement officer fatalities in real time, illustrates the point. During the Reagan years, for instance, an average of 101 police officers were intentionally killed each year. Under George H.W. Bush that number fell to 90. It fell further, to 81 deaths per year, under Bill Clinton, and to 72 deaths per year under George W. Bush.
...
Under Obama, the average number of police intentionally killed each year has fallen to its lowest level yet — an average of 62 deaths annually through 2015. If you include the 2016 police officer shootings year-to-date and project it out to a full year, that average of 62 deaths doesn't change.
---
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...n-the-job-in-states-with-more-guns/?tid=a_inl
But late last year, researchers at Harvard and elsewhere discovered an alarming fact: Police officers are much more likely to be killed in the line of duty in states with high rates of gun ownership.
....
The results were shocking: line-of-duty homicide rates among police officers were more than three times higher in states with high gun ownership compared with the low gun ownership states. Between 1996 and 2010, in other words, there were 0.31 officer fatalities for every 10,000 employed officers in low gun ownership states. But there were 0.95 fatalities per 10,000 officers in the high gun ownership states.
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Thank the NRA for murder rates of police. Not BLM.
laughing dog
Contributor
Maybe you should try counting to 2000 by halves because counting to 1000 doesn't seem to quite work for you.
Oh pleeze. That "study" compared 8 states with the lowest gun ownership rates with 23 other states with the highest gun ownership rates. Why do that? Why omit 19 states? Why arbitrarily chose just 8 low gun ownership states? So the low gun ownership states of California and Florida - which are 1st and 3rd in law enforcement homicide deaths - don't fuck up the narrative.
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302749
This is all OT, but this kneejerk blaming the NRA for everything is hysterical nonsense.
What I've noticed about these police body cams, is that they fail a lot more often than the ones worn by extreme athletes... wondering why that might be.
Body cams tend to fail in a scuffle. Without a very secure mounting that's likely to happen.
barbos
Contributor
What I've noticed about these police body cams, is that they fail a lot more often than the ones worn by extreme athletes... wondering why that might be.
Do you have supporting statistical data?
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
You have not addressed anything I wrote to you and no it is not "addressed" by what you already wrote.
Aren't most police deaths the result of them crashing their cars while not wearing seatbelts?
edited to correct my research: many, not most from 2005 to 2014.
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/causes.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
539 shot, 482 crashed cars and motorcycles.
Although this does suggest that crashing their cars is JUST AS IMPORTANT as people shooting them... as the two causes together account for almost half of all police deaths.
edited to add: also it is very sad reading that page and thinking of all the families and lives shattered.
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
What about suicide and eating too many donuts? Also those who are secretly killed by other cops but it's made to look like they were killed in the line of duty because they were about to tell everyone how various police were working for the Costa crime family?
Donuts may be covered under "Job-Related Illness" of which there were almost 200 in this time frame.
They don't mention suicide, but that might be covered in the same category.
T.G.G. Moogly
Traditional Atheist
Is it just me or doesn't this work both ways? IOW if I'm an asshole out to cause trouble, uniformed or not, I'm less likely to act it out if I know I'm being recorded. It's good to have cameras and pictures of what happened. Maybe everyone should have to wear these things.
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
No, it's not just you. Psychological studies show that when people think they are being recorded they behave more in-line with how they are expected to. There is no reason why that should not be applicable to both civilians and police. The next question may be how much of the reduction in "use of force" and "police complaints" is attributable to each category of person.
ronburgundy
Contributor
Aren't most police deaths the result of them crashing their cars while not wearing seatbelts?
edited to correct my research: many, not most from 2005 to 2014.
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/causes.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
539 shot, 482 crashed cars and motorcycles.
Although this does suggest that crashing their cars is JUST AS IMPORTANT as people shooting them... as the two causes together account for almost half of all police deaths.
edited to add: also it is very sad reading that page and thinking of all the families and lives shattered.
Again, you are falsely equating actual fatal outcomes with "dangers", which don't result in actual fatalities if their causes are non-random and the person is able to and does take precautions. Tons of unpredictable random factors come into play with auto accidents (though, some are due to the increased dangers of pursuing criminals). In contrast, the deaths by being shot are more predicable and preventable and cops are able thwart the vast majority of attempts by others to harm them. If a cop, arrests and armed suspect willing to use lethal violence to avoid capture, but the cop avoids harm because they presume the suspect would harm them if they get the chance and the cop executes numerous procedures to protect themselves, does that mean that the cop didn't need to worry because they were never in any danger?
Also, cab drivers are the only non-military profession with a higher rate than cops of being shot doing one's job. The point is that the serious harm done to cops by the intentional criminal acts of others is far far greater than for nearly all other people, except those in the profession of cab driver. And for non-lethal assaults, cops are probably to most attacked, even more than cab drivers. Over 10% of cops are assaulted every year. Most cops will get assaulted for doing the job more than once in their career. I can't find numbers for cab drivers but that seems way too high for them. Also, there is a big difference in why and how cops vs. cab drivers get shot. Cab drivers fail to thwart most of the attempts to shoot them. They are shot mostly by thieves posing as normal passengers that the drivers are not treating as possibly armed and dangerous. Thus, the number of drivers shot does more closely match the number of situations they encounter where someone would shoot them if they aren't careful.
Cops are shot by people they are viewing as criminal suspects that are often armed and dangerous and who the cops approach with caution yet sometimes get shot anyway. That means the number of times cops get shot does not at all match and is a tiny fraction of the number of situations they are in that getting shot is plausible if they don't prevent it. In sum, the relative rate of getting shot between cab drivers and cops does not remotely match the relative number of situations where they could plausibly get shot if they don't prevent it. This mismatch is due to the fact that cab drivers are only shot when armed criminals choose to seek out cab drivers rather than other victims, whereas a central feature of cops' job is to seek out and interact with the most dangerous, violent, and armed people in society including all the people that rob or kill cab drivers or anyone else. A far far greater % of the people cops deal with are violent criminals, thus putting them in greater danger for being criminally attacked. The fact that cops' job is also to prevent these criminals from being successful in any such attempts doesn't mean those situations are not extremely dangerous.
ronburgundy
Contributor
Correct. The impact of cameras is likely to be the opposite of the anonymity of the internet. People act more in accord with rules of decency with being watched, and less when acting in secrecy or without being able to be identified, such as online. That is why online, people are more likely to be intellectually dishonest, and violate every principle of rational argument, dismissing logic as "a rant" in order to deny obvious facts such as the extreme danger that being a patrol cop entails and how such dangers are prevented from leading to constant harm to cops only because cops presume, prepare for, and react quickly to such dangers.
Aren't most police deaths the result of them crashing their cars while not wearing seatbelts?
edited to correct my research: many, not most from 2005 to 2014.
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/causes.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
539 shot, 482 crashed cars and motorcycles.
Although this does suggest that crashing their cars is JUST AS IMPORTANT as people shooting them... as the two causes together account for almost half of all police deaths.
edited to add: also it is very sad reading that page and thinking of all the families and lives shattered.
Again, you are falsely equating actual fatal outcomes with "dangers", which don't result in actual fatalities if their causes are non-random and the person is able to and does take precautions.
It may be a complex equation, but not a false one, IMHO.
For one thing, Cabbies do take precautions. They attempt to hold less cash, they attempt to not go places that are dangerous, they put up barriers in their cars and they use radios. It's not as good as shooting a couple of innocent people from time to time to send a message, but it is not completely bereft of effort.
In addition, there is the pretty clear (now) fact that some cops will escalate a situation.
So it is not black and white (if you'll pardon the triple pun (pause here until you get all three)).
I do feel great outrage over cops getting shot, by the way. It makes it kind of hard to debate this. But it's not clear that the number of killed civilians is justified by the real dangers that cops face, nor that the number of cop deaths will skyrocket if the number of civilian deaths plummets.
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
In New Jersey, when they adopted dash board cameras for all police traffic stops, false claims of police brutality or inappropiate police behavior dropped dramatically. Cameras are a tool that works both ways.
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
Your "rant" is a bit one-sided as usual. It's also a simple fact that like all people, some cops are dicks, some make mistakes. Shit happens. Without more information, we don't know much beyond this.