Just How Violent are American Police?
Hi friends,
I have been thinking about something I wrote years ago contextualizing just how uniquely violent American police really are. I had forgotten about this when I wrote last week about the Tyre Nichols killing, but I have been thinking about it quite a bit in the last few days. In case you missed it, here is what I wrote about the killing last week.
And here is the thing I wrote almost a decade ago:
In the United States the simple fact is police are too violent. In the United States there were just under 4,000 people killed by a random stranger in 2014 (the latest numbers available). That means about one in every 80,000 people will kill a random stranger. If we eliminate older and younger people, and just use the population between ages 15 and 55, about one in every 42,000 people will kill a random stranger.
Adding federal to state and local police, there are roughly 1.2 million Law Enforcement Officers in the United States. I want to be as fair to police as possible here, many of them perform a great service with little thanks, and their job is by no means easy. So, to give them the benefit of the doubt I will round these next numbers down. There is still, perplexingly, no official data on police killings; they are reported only voluntarily. The two most useful police killing trackers available are by The Washington Post, and The Guardian; I will use the Post, as it has the lower number. As I type this it sits at 668 people killed by police. Even if we assume police in this nation will not kill one more person the rest of this year (not likely, but again, I want to give police the benefit of the doubt; also, this will help compensate for justifiable homicides) than one out of every 1,674 police officers will kill a person, with that violence spread disproportionately toward black lives.
Again, I know policing is a difficult and dangerous job, but to be 25 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a stranger is simply unacceptable. It does not have to be this way; police in other developed democracies kill fewer civilians in a decade than ours do in a month.
Turns out, I got this one wrong. See, the datasource I used was really vague in its descriptions. I thought that “unknown offenders” meant the victim didn’t know the person that killed them.
Turns out that isn’t right.
“Unknown offenders” actually refers to the police not knowing who killed the victim. Now, perhaps you might be thinking “well, if the police don’t know who it was than of course it was a stranger”. But this is not necessarily the case. It could be a family member, friend, or neighbor that was clever enough to get away with it; it could be a rival gang that knew the victim well enough to want them dead, but police can’t find out who pulled the trigger—this would likely fall into the “acquaintance” classification; it could be organized crime defending turf. It could be any number of things other than a random stranger that the victim did not know. For all we know, “unknown offenders” could include police officers who kill people.
The point is that the data actually has a specific categorization for strangers. These are violent criminals who mug/rape/rob/assault random people they don’t know and kill them in the process. Turns out this number is much, much lower than unknown offenders.
I was also wrong about the number of Law Enforcement Officers. See, I had counted the number of Law Enforcement Employees, which includes civilians who more or less do office work and don’t get a badge or gun. Turns out the number of officers is also much lower. Here is the actual number of officers taken from police employee data at the FBI.
Now, the FBI’s police employee data never makes clear if this includes federal officers, but it doesn’t sound like it in the fine print. Just to be safe, go ahead and add another 130,000 or so to that number to include federal officers. Even with that the number of Law Enforcement Officers in the US hovers just under 800,000—meaning, I overshot by more than 50 percent! This being the case, the likelihood of being killed by a police officer is much higher than I had guessed before. Woops! With the better data, we’re not talking about 25 times more likely, we’re now talking hundreds of times more likely!
Thanks to the great work from the folks at Mapping Police Violence, we now have a long term dataset on the number of people killed by police. Well, with their data it turns out we can throw likelihoods out the window—police in the United States kill almost as many people as random strangers!
That’s right, police in the United States are so violent they kill almost as many people as muggers, rapists, robbers, and all other stranger-violence combined!
Look, I get that this might not be an apples to apples comparison. It is the job of the police to put themselves in dangerous situations, and many of them do this admirably. But, can you find me another country where police kill almost as many people as random violent strangers? If you can, please email me!
The violence of police in the United States is off the charts. Tyre Nichols was just the latest high profile example of this, but this is a massive systemic problem. If the general public were as violent toward strangers as police officers are we’d be looking at hundreds of thousand, or possibly millions of killings each year. We’d be pushing and protesting for action against crime probably more than any generation of Americans has for any issue in history—and rightfully so. Well then, why do we accept this from the police? This has to change. This can change. I know that because we are the only developed nation that has this problem.
Thanks for reading The Constituent. If you’d like to support the newsletter, here are a few options.
-Thanks,
