A study by the Mapping Police Violence project concludes that American police killed a record number of civilians in 2023.
The project has been tracking police killings since 2013 and says that officers killed 1,329 people last year, representing nearly a 19% increase over the 11-year span.
The Mapping Police Violence project only counted bodies. There were no records kept to indicate how many of the dead civilians were armed, or how many actually fired at police. About 25% of the reported law enforcement encounters that resulted in a civilian’s death were with mentally ill patients.
According to The Hill, the project defines police killings as “any incident where a law enforcement officer (off-duty or on-duty) applies, on a civilian, lethal force resulting in the civilian being killed.”
“We’ve seen it stay similar or even creep up a little bit at times when crime was falling or at times when crime was increasing. We saw it persist throughout a global pandemic when people were staying home for several weeks, months,” said Justin Nix, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha. “It appears to me then that the only way to get this number down significantly would be to make more significant changes to, you know, what policing means in this country.”
Wait, what? Deaths at the hands of police creep up or fall when crime rises a little or falls a little? Huh? So the only way to get the numbers of dead civilians down is to make “significant changes” to policing?
My head hurts.
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Abdul Nasser Rad, managing director of research and data at Campaign Zero, believes better data collection is needed.
Rad said racial disparities seen in previous years have also persisted at a similar rate. Black people, for example, were nearly three times more likely than white people to be killed by police. Rad noted race is one of the hardest variables to track and the race of the person killed was unknown in more than 20% of the encounters.
So, the problem could be better or worse depending on the race of the victims, 20% of which we don’t know.
Professor Nix wasn’t through trying to muddy the waters with regard to police killings.
“When you ask human beings to go out and police a country awash with guns and train them and socialize them in their heads that a gun could be lurking around any corner, this is what you get,” Nix said.
Officers are trained to think that guns are “lurking” everywhere because they are. Without such training, we’d have hundreds more dead police.
There are so many other problems with policing and law enforcement in this country, including a total lack of respect for police and the laws they enforce, that taking the cops’ guns away would seem to be the least effective means to maintain law and order and keep people safe.