I was doing some reading about current affairs, and I stumbled across a number of different sources suggesting that in the United States the police kill its citizens something like 70 times as often as other first-world countries.
Of course the US is bigger than most other countries, so I looked around further in order to put it into a fairer perspective. Turns out US police only kill their citizens at about 18 times the per capita rate of America's third closest 'competitor' (Denmark), and a mere 8.5 times the rate of their closest competitor (Canada), from the countries I could find information for:
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Still I couldn't believe that American cops are even that violent against the people they are supposed to protect and serve. Maybe American citizens are, for some reason, just a lot more violent than other developed countries, and the cops need to be correspondingly forceful back at them? In fact the US does have higher rates of violent crime, but even that comparison doesn't bring America down in line with most other countries - the rate of fatal police shootings is still 4.6 times higher than Denmark, 3 times higher than Canada:
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Seems like almost every time there is a fatal shooting, the immediate response is "He had a gun" or "He was reaching for a gun" or "I thought he had a gun" or "Someone told me he had a gun." So obviously, that was the next thing I looked at. According to Wikipedia, America's gun prevalence sits at over 100 guns per 100 citizens; besides Serbia (75) and Yemen (55), no other country has more than 37 guns per hundred citizens. Surprisingly or not,
that comparison does bring the US figures closer down to the others:
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Spreadsheet/working
Sources:
Why American Cops Kill So Many Compared To European Cops
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries
Police in the US Kill Citizens at Over 70 Times the Rate of Other First-World Nations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country