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License to kill: US police killed over 1,200 people in 2023
(www.wsws.org)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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I’m too lazy to do the math but I think looking at the numbers of cars and police officers is relevant if you’re gonna compare death rates. While any person is more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a police officer, there a orders of magnitude more cars out there that we all interact with all the time. Is one out of every 700-ish cops killing somebody each year reasonable?
Is there a sense of whether the number of police killings is accurate?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enforcement-officers-in-the-us
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-statistics/
In most cases the police have no obligation to report, so the reported numbers are going to be lower than reality.
We do not know how many people police kill in the US. Police have been allowed to ignore the part of the 1994 crime bill that obliged them to report everything. The DOJ simply will not look at the situation. So, police killings, go largely unknown. Patrick Hendry, the head of the NY police union, the largest one, was once interview in an industry rag. In this interview they asked about the reporting of police killings and he said that "most" do not get reported outside of the department who employed the officer(s) involved in the killings.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-the-police-kill-each-year/
This article discusses this issue however, if you start googling inquiries about "no one knows how many people police kill in the US", or similar rephrasings of this inquiry, you will produce numerous sources discussing the matter. You will have to dig though.