Police in the US use force on at least 300,000 people each year, injuring an estimated 100,000 of them, according to a groundbreaking data analysis on law enforcement encounters.
Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group that tracks killings by US police, launched a new database on Wednesday cataloging non-fatal incidents of police use of force, including stun guns, chemical sprays, K9 dog attacks, neck restraints, beanbags and baton strikes.
The database features incidents from 2017 through 2022, compiled from public records requests in every state. The findings, the group says, suggest that despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.
I wonder if we’ll ever connect the dots. The FBI released a report more than 10 years ago that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Sauce: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Supremacist_Infiltration_of_Law_Enforcement
And now we’re voting between “Literal fascist who hired cops to harm minorities” and “literal cop who harmed minorities”. And before that was “Literal fascist who hired cops to harm minorities” and “Wrote the bills to enable cops to harm minorities and protected rape victims.”
Governments don’t protect you, me, or anyone, they never give you the freedoms, only take them. Keep your wits, stay safe, and drink water.
TBF though, US use of force has been underreported and lacked nationwide statistics for most of the previous decades. If I’m not mistaken, one of the federal agencies who attempted to track it stopped giving annual reports in 2017? Idk I’m kind of fuzzy about that.
The most accurate records of how many people were killed by the police in the US are pretty much from a journalist who counted news pieces or something.
Here’s the head of the FBI in a hearing of some sort: “We can’t have an informed discussion, because we don’t have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by the police in the United States, last month, last year, or anything about the demographics.”
edit oh yeah the thing I was trying to say in the beginning of the comment comes instantly after that bit: researcher Philip Stinson accumulated over a decades worth of Google alerts on police killings
Lemme guess. 70% of those are black victims.
I am europe based. Can I ask why this is such an issue in the US?
ACAB includes European cops, by the way. Just because they’re especially bad in the USA doesn’t mean yours aren’t also trash.
Not sure which country you’re in, but how have your cops been handling environmental or climate protests? or protests in support of Palestinians?
It’s an issue in many other countries as well and there are a great many contributing factors.
- Race and “Tough on Crime” politics - Ever since the emancipation of slaves on the basis of race, there have been political figures passing discriminatory policy that allows police to pursue and harass people at their own discretion: black laws, Jim Crow era laws, forced segregation, the 1994 Crime Bill, etc.
“We have to strengthen our laws when it comes to mob violence, to make sure individuals are unequivocally dissuaded from committing violence when they’re in large groups,” Florida state Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin, a Republican, said during a hearing for an anti-riot bill that was enacted in April.
It’s clear that you can convince people to deregulate and militarize the police if you convince those people they have a greater enemy. You can see these stances and policy directions mirrored across Europe as refugees and immigration from poorer countries have increased in the last decade.
- Lack of Centralization - The FBI is in charge of investigating police departments, and sometimes you see jurisdiction overlaps which allows other agencies like the DEA, State Marshals, Sheriff’s Department, etc to investigate each other, but in general a Police Department is held to no standard but their own until things have already escalated past a point of return.
Some federal programs have tried rewarding PDs that behave well and adhere to specific training or standards, but it’s far from enforced.
Police aren’t legally accountable for their actions so long as they’re acting in the performance of their duties, and lots of departments knowingly have illegal policies on the books to maintain that immunity for their officers.
People try to sue over it, but the cases are thrown out by the local judge because there’s no standing to sue unless the illegal policy had impacted you, so a cop basically has to kill someone before the policies are modified in the smallest way possible, but the killer cop still gets off.
Additionally, police are allowed to lie in most of their interactions with the public. They have created a culture that encourages dishonesty, so perjury isn’t an ethical problem in their eyes.
Not entirely true. Cops are fired, penalized, and held legally accountable quite often. Not frequently enough but you’re stating that they are immune.
Qualified immunity protects state and local officials, including law enforcement officers, from individual liability unless the official violated a clearly established constitutional right.
Ignoring problems tends to make them rot faster. Hollywood is superficial, it’s all we got. None of the basics are taken care of, it’s why I left (e.g. wealth before health). No safety nets, desperation is easy to find. Limited opportunities if you can’t afford to do anything. It’s an unsustainable way to live, if you call that living. It’s more like surviving.
Yeah but I was referring specifically to the police attacks. Cause I hear about it regularly in the news just to see another aggression?
Any parallel between expenses and police violence?
We’ve been hiring these “police trainers” that have been telling police that their job is super dangerous and anyone can kill them at anytime if they’re not ready to kill at the drop of a hat. Then creating bullshit scenarios where grandma passes by in the street and shoots them. Like the lady in the red dress in the matrix training.
Anyways being a cop has a lower chance of getting you killed than being a pizza delivery driver, so these people are ALWAYS ON EDGE but the payoff never comes. So they behave like an immune system when nothing is happening by attacking the body.
So they’re beating innocents and abusing criminals left right and centre and there is nothing we seem to be able to do about it other than give them more militarized equipment so they can beat us better while feeling safer doing it.
