Gun prevalence and killings by police

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Mithrae
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Gun prevalence and killings by police

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Post by Mithrae »

A few years ago (shortly after the shooting of Philando Castile in front of his girlfriend and four year old daughter during a traffic stop) I collected some data and compiled some graphs on fatal shootings by police in the USA compared with other developed countries. Police killings in the USA are way out of whack compared with other countries; 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.
USFPS1.jpg
I considered the possibilities that American citizens are simply more violent for some reason than people of other countries - killing each other or maybe killing cops at much higher rates than the rest of the developed world - but while that narrows the gap somewhat there's still a pretty striking discrepancy there: The US rate of fatal police shootings per hundred murders is still 4.6 times higher than Denmark, 3 times higher than Canada.
FaPoliceSh1.png
Well then, is it just because US police are shooting so many black people? I didn't make a chart for this one, but that's not the case either. The number of black people killed by police has pretty consistently been around half the number of white people (a quarter or less of the total), whereas black people have been around a third of the total prison population and for murder specifically, over half of all homicide arrestees and historical convictions (page 62): In other words, while black people are killed by police disproportionately more than their population representation would imply, it's actually disproportionately less than the homicide and incarceration rates would imply, so that obviously can't explain the extraordinarily high rate at which American police kill American people.

So far as I found at the time (or have found since), probably the single biggest explanatory factor seems to be gun prevalence... and by implication, fear.
FaPoliceSh2.png
There's still a bit of a discrepancy there - even compared against gun prevalence, the US rate of killings by police is still almost twice that of Denmark, Portugal or the Netherlands - but that does seem to explain the lion's share of the discrepancy (and indeed, gun prevalence might go a long way towards explaining America's higher murder rate which closed some of the gap in that second graph). According to my 2016 post on the subject, "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."

As far as the subject of this sub-forum goes, obviously gun prevalence has nothing to do with the deaths of folk like George Floyd or Eric Garner. But it might have a lot to do with the killings of John Crawford III (a black man shot and killed by police in Walmart while carrying a BB gun sold by the store), Tamir Rice (a twelve year old black boy killed by police while carrying a toy gun), Philando Castile and many other victims who have died with or without an actual gun in their vicinity. If American police are trying to do their jobs in constant fear that the next person they encounter could have a gun down their slacks, of course they are going to be jumpier and more trigger-happy than police in other countries!

By implication it would seem that people who support American police should be supporting stronger gun control laws in the USA. Trying to do their jobs under such conditions of fear and stress must surely be taking a toll on the health and mental wellbeing of those police officers, even moreso for many of the officers for whom that stress has led to tragic over-reactions in the heat of the moment.

If bringing gun prevalence in the USA more in line with other developed countries helped to close that vast gulf in the rate of police killings, it could potentially reduce the numbers of black people killed by police by 80% or more... and likewise for white people. (It would probably have an even greater benefit in terms of white and especially black victims of civilian homicide, both by its likely impact on the overall homicide rate and because black people are disproportionately affected by gun violence.)

So why would any American - whether they're more inclined to chant "blue lives matter" or "black" - be opposed to stronger gun regulations?
(Indeed, is it possible that there is an element of racism - in consequence, if not intent - to opposing stronger gun control in the knowledge that black people are disproportionately affected?)



My 2016 thread on the subject (with references)
My Google docs spreadsheet (with probably the same references)

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