> really, in almost all cases in the US, "assault officers", and we should separate the two concepts, stop hiring new assault officers, and start hiring a new class of less-armed police officers
The reason that cops are so nasty in the us is because there are so many guns. It's a different environment than other Western countries, and calls for different police tactics.
Unless guns are removed from the equation somebody is going to die. Either use a heavy handed police force, and civilians will die, or use a police force with a lighter touch and police will die.
1. use expendable police materiel to scout out the situation of a dispatch in advance of sending in any actual police bodies (e.g. police drones with fancy optics.)
2. send people in heavily armored rather than heavily armed. If you can make your SWAT team immune to bullets (such as by, say, encasing them in an Armoured Personnel Carrier), then they're not going to be feeling threatened and shooting anyone.
#1 is pretty universally useful. You can figure out who has guns and who doesn't.
#2 is more situational, because our best solution for heavy armor right now—APCs—have no good way of entering your tenth-floor apartment. This is why I'm constantly checking up on the progress of military robots and powered armor: the more invincible you can make something, the less it needs to actually kill anybody to do its job. The ideal here is a combination of robot-police and human-in-exosuit police that don't even need guns, because nothing they are sent to deal with is ever really that dangerous to them.
>>2. send people in heavily armored rather than heavily armed. If you can make your SWAT team immune to bullets (such as by, say, encasing them in an Armoured Personnel Carrier), then they're not going to be feeling threatened and shooting anyone.
It's way easier to figure out ways to pierce armor than it is to develop it. Green-tipped ammunition is more than good enough to pierce all common and easily-worn body armor today.
Besides, if you send people in heavily armored, they are going to feel threatened by nature and will be more trigger happy.
The motorcyclist has a gun in his pocket, and shoots the cop without warning.
How will your proposed solutions are going to do anything in that situation?
Sorry to rant, but this attitude of an amateur thinking they know better than all the professionals who have been doing their job for many years, and can propose quick fixes that will solve everything, is ridiculous.
I have a real hard time caring about cops' fears in such a scenario. Innocent until proven guilty is a time-honored maxim of the U.S. justice system, and a cop deciding to kill you completely invalidates that.
Is being a cop scary? Hell yeah and I feel bad for those folks, but if you don't want to constantly be in fear of your life, get another job.
Put cops who murder innocent civilians in jail. End of story. This shouldn't even be a debate in the U.S.
EDIT: Since I had the goal posts moved on me, I want to make it explicitly clear that a cop should be allowed to kill in self-defense, just like any other lawful citizen.
The thing about guns is that there's basically no moment that exists between "in fear for your life" and "dead." Either you shoot the other person while you think they're pulling out a gun (i.e. kill in purported self-defense), or you {get shot and die, nothing happens}. There's no moment, with guns involved, where you can know that someone is trying to kill you, without already being dead.
You've just created a pure strawman. Cops should never lose their rights! I am not making such an argument, and I don't see how you got there from my points. I would never argue such a claim.
The cases I'm talking about are not self-defense. They are like the story above. If A murders B, and A is a cop, then A should go to jail regardless of the fear A had in that situation. But this is not what happens in the United States. Cops don't go to jail for shooting perfectly innocent people because the cop can claim they were afraid for their life and thought that B had a gun.
If I'm a civilian, that defense doesn't fly. But if you're a cop, then it does work. That is a flaw in our justice system that needs to be corrected because a perfectly innocent man can be killed by the state and no repercussions are felt.
The state should never be able to kill an innocent man. If they are shooting at you, they aren't innocent. But if you think they have a gun (especially in an open-carry state like Kansas or Texas) then they are innocent and should not be killed.
EDIT: I am saddened by the downvotes. Does the state have the right to kill innocent people if those people own a gun? Doesn't the second amendment protect against this? I simply do not see the legitimate argument for allowing such behavior. This just seems like rabid tribalism for police.
I don't think I understand what scenario you're talking about. If you're talking about the scenario I posted a video of, I think you are completely off base.
If you're talking a cop straight-up murdering someone, and it getting covered up, then, of course, that's wrong.
I think there is a lot of gray area between these two scenarios, however. I also think if there was a ban on guns that would solve most of it.
The scenario at hand in the OP, where a cop murders a completely innocent man through mistake. I agree that a ban on guns would likely solve the problem in the video that you posted.
My point was that your video seemed out of place since the actual issue is that cops in the U.S. are held to a different standard for murder. If cops were held to the same standard, then they could be held accountable for their crimes and some of the public outrage would be alleviated.
If (for the sake of argument) the amount of guns in this country were significantly decreased via a ban and the police still held to a different standard, police would still be able to kill an innocent person out of fear for their life. Racial biases could also cause a cop to be more fearful in a situation and still kill an innocent person without consequence.
I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).
> My point was that your video seemed out of place since the actual issue is that cops in the U.S. are held to a different standard for murder.
That video was part of a specific response refuting the idea that if the cops just used drones and body armor, there wouldn't be a problem anymore. I did in no way intend to imply it was a counterpoint to the main story. I don't know why it's being perceived in that way.
> I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).
Yes, but that runs into the trade-off I was talking about. Either you have a heavy handed, "shoot first, ask questions later" style police force, or one with a lighter touch. In the first scenario, more civilians are killed. In the second, more cops.
Only by banning guns can you reduce casualties on both sides.
How would take the guns out of circulation already? There are millions of them out there and a whole tribe of diehards who will never give them up, and on top of this an entire industry around it -- the amount of people that die from this problem isn't worth the political capital and sustained decision maker attention needed to push this through compared to everything else that could be done using the same limited bandwidth.
That's not true. Guns are expensive. By far most of the guns are owned by people for whom they are a relatively expensive hobby, and the more guns you own the less likely you are to commit a crime. Note that concealed weapons licensees have a lower rate of crime than police officers.
Guns are an expensive hobby. You'll want to have several different nice guns, and lots of ammo, and some targets, and a safe, and time at the range. It's easy to spend thousands a year.
If you just want a gun for self defense or murder, they are cheap. Buy a Hi-Point or a Ruger LCP for $175 and a box of 50 9mm and now you can kill more people than you'd ever have a reason to.
I think it's only fair for law abiding citizens to expect to survive an encounter with the police. If a police officer is going to bring a gun to a situation where one is not needed, then the onus should be on them to accept more risk of death than is expected of a law-abiding citizen. Generally speaking, they're paid to do a job, and that job unfortunately currently involves the risk of death in the line of duty. That risk cannot be reduced at the expense of innocent people dying needlessly 'just because' an office might be shot. There are many jobs a person can do if they're not up to the dangerous environment some police depts have to work in.
In what situations are guns not needed though? I wouldn't even dream of doing anything other than manning a booze bus in a place where people are allowed to legally carry guns if I didn't have my own one.
It doesn't seem like the choice for most American cities is between armed cops and unarmed cops. It's between armed cops and no cops. Why would anyone sign up and expose themselves to that level of risk?
Killings by officers in US: 1140
Killings by officers in England: 3
Deaths of police by shootings in US: 41
Deaths of police by shootings in England: 0 (about 1 every other year)
Population of England: 54 million
Population of USA: 325 million
England has 7% of the deaths per capita compared to the USA. I couldn't find data on Germany, but I suspect it's similar.
In general, I think the idea of having people being able to defend themselves against the government is a good idea, and people having the right to have guns was a way to achieve that. But with the amount of power the government has nowadays, I don't think it's a justification anymore.
> Millions of Europeans were murdered by their governments within living memory, with records of similar atrocities going back hundreds of years.
Once your country has been around for a bit longer, you will also have a long history with plenty of atrocities to point back at.
How many native Americans were killed during the "colonization" of the American continent? Or do these not count because they hadn't been US citizens back then?
> Once your country has been around for a bit longer,
With the sole exception of the U.K., our government has been around longer than every other representative democracy on the face of the earth. Note that France is on its fifth attempt at a republic. We won't even mention Germany here.
> Or do these not count because they hadn't been US citizens back then?
They were mostly killed by European colonists operating under European rules, just like the atrocities that the European governments perpetrated on every other continent of the world.
> With the sole exception of the U.K., our government has been around longer than every other representative democracy.
I was talking about countries, not governments, these two are not the same, even tho the parent comment would like to pretend they are.
In that regard, it's still very dishonest to compare Europe, with its often centuries-old animosities between countries in a very small space, to the short history of the USA being a thing, in which it had mostly only had to deal with Mexico and Cannada in terms of "neighbor conflicts".
> They were mostly killed by European colonists operating under European rules
That's even more dishonest, it's not like all that changed and native Americans were recognized as such, as soon as the US got founded, and everything was perfect after that.
The US has the luxury of being rather isolated, thus the vast majority of conflicts can easily be externalized, usually to a completely different continent, with barely any real consequences for the US population. It's for that very same reason that the US been involved in some kind of "war" [0] pretty much constantly in its 200+ years of existence.
It's for exactly that reason that so many US Americans have been a-okay with these armed conflicts, as the vast majority of them never hit close to home. No US American alive today does know what it's like to have militarized conflict in, or at, their countries borders. Which probably also explains, in part, the massive overreaction to 9/11.
Now you can argue not all of them are "real wars" but rather "interventions" or "anti-terror missions" or whatnot, but let's be real here: That's simply schematics to keep on selling this state of affairs to a US population which is starting to be pretty fed up with sending their kids overseas to die for often very questionable reasons.
Protection from the government was justifiable before, but now that governments have gained so much power, guns in the hands of the citizenry aren't going to stop them.
So what's the point of still letting citizens keep them?
Here's the thing: every time a questionable police shooting happens, it makes national headlines. It's something that happens every few years, not every other day. And just to be clear: that doesn't make it ok or not a problem.
Am I missing something, but do the wordings in this article not indicate that the German government considers it OK for cops to shoot a suspect that is running away?
My German isn’t very good so there’s a good chance I might be missing something.
"Defending from the Government" is a myth. As long as you don't have enough supporters you are going to lose. Remember American Civil War for example. Did the guns help South to defend their "rights"?
Now compare other restrictions on liberties those countries impose and might be causing co-linear effects. Start with immigration policies, drug trade, and bordering countries.
This is the worst argument against anything, because it only logically follows that criminals won't care about ANY laws and therefore everything should be legal.
It doesn't matter whether they care about the law or not, it's about making it harder for them to get a gun regardless, and being able to confiscate them if we catch them. It worked in Australia.
And it didn't work in Mexico, Honduras, or Nicaragua, all of which have more in common with the United States than Australia does, and all of which have a) strict gun control laws and b) breathtakingly high murder rates.
Yes but are those murders by members of crime organisations or by some random that had a mental breakdown and easy access to his or a family member's gun?
You really think that the US has more in common with countries where gangsters murder with impunity, and paramilitary police death squads conduct extrajudicial killings?
They can be deterred by an arms ban, just like how it's almost impossible to buy a kinder egg with toy inside the US. See China, Japan, and countless other gun-free societies.
However gun culture and the prevalence of gun manufacturers in the US may make it practically impossible in the near term, but it definitely is possible.
"Whether you can say we're 20 per cent better off, 80 per cent better off, is subject to debate... But the bottom line is, if [the reforms] had the effect of reducing the number of guns that are available to Australians, it is strongly correlated with the gun homicide and suicide deaths on the wane."
"Data from the Australian Institute of Criminology shows the rate of homicide victims dying from a gunshot wound has dropped since the reforms came into force, but not consistently in every year."
"ABS data indicates the rate of assault by firearm causing death has also declined since the reforms, but not in every year."
The only credible argument against gun reform that article gives is that correlation doesn't imply causation, which is of course true. However, that's not an argument against the common sense position that gun reform decreases gun deaths, but an argument against this specific type of study (which OP didn't mention at all).
The reason that cops are so nasty in the us is because there are so many guns. It's a different environment than other Western countries, and calls for different police tactics.
Unless guns are removed from the equation somebody is going to die. Either use a heavy handed police force, and civilians will die, or use a police force with a lighter touch and police will die.