More Americans Killed By Police Than By Terrorists: With Crime Down, Why Is Police Aggression Up?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/more-americans-killed-police-terrorists-crime-down-why-police-aggression



You might not know it from watching TV news, but FBI statistics show that crime in the U.S.—including violent crime—has been trending steadily downward for years, falling 19% between 1987 and 2011. The job of being a police officer has become safer too, as the number of police killed by gunfire plunged to 33 last year, down 50% from 2012, to its lowest level since, wait for it, 1887, a time when the population was 75% lower than it is today.

So why are we seeing an ever increasing militarization of policing across the country?

Given the good news on crime, what are we to make of a report by the Justice Policy Institute, a not-for-profit justice reform group, showing that state and local spending on police has soared from $40 billion in 1982 to more than $100 billion in 2012. Adding in federal spending on law enforcement, including the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Agency and much of the Homeland Security Department budget, as well as federal grants to state and local law enforcement more than doubles that total. A lot of that money is simply pay and benefits. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the ranks of state and local law enforcement personnel alone swelled from 603,000 to 794,000 between 1992 and 2010. That’s about two-thirds as many men and women as the entire active-duty US military.

What these statistics make clear is that policing in America is ramping up even as the crime rate is falling.

To the advocates of militarized policing, this just proves that more and better-armed cops are the answer to keeping the peace. But former corrections officer Ted Kirkpatrick, like many experts in the field, warns against jumping to this conclusion: “Police will of course say crime is down because of them,” he tells WhoWhatWhy, “but they have a vested interest in saying that.”

[riversedge]

1. I think your picture explains most of it.---Militarization--both equipment and mentality.

[Democracyinkind]

2. First of all, terrible recruitment practices.

Second, the culture of immunity for criminal and otherwise unfit cops.

Third, the militarization of the police forces.

I bet there's more, but that's about what came to my mind when reading the question.

[Loudly]

3. Because of the proliferation of guns and ammunition.

In a culture where shooting first is the gold standard, you can expect an escalating level of preemptive force by those whose actual job it is to keep the peace, and who are taught that their number one priority is to go home alive at the end of their shift.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

4. This is crazy moon-logic.

"Kirkpatrick has the credentials and training to look beyond statistics and simplistic answers to the underlying social forces at work here. " - in other words, his claims are ideology-based, not evidence-based.

Of course employing more police officers brings crime down (I'm not sure what the evidence on the effects of different police tactics is). The only people denying that are the ones who view the police as adversaries for ideological reasons.

[marble falls]

5. 80% of Austin police live outside Austin. Are they rentacops or an occupuying force? They aren't....

police.

[KittyWampus]

6. Does the article prove that it's the militarization of police resulting in these deaths?

Cause I see that as two almost entirely separate issues.

One- police responding with excessive force too often
Two- providing police with military tactics and equipment

Note- I don't argue against the former or agree with the later.

[LuvNewcastle]

7. Until police are punished for their misdeeds, they'll continue to

act the way they do. They're all adults and they know the law yet they continue to break the law. I think they should be held to a higher standard of behavior, and I think they should be punished more severely than average citizens when they intentionally break the law. I feel the same about politicians. They won't change the way they act until they're forced to change.

[WatermelonRat]

8. Is "Police Aggression" actually up though?

The article itself points out that crime is actually down despite common perceptions. What if it's the same way with this? Thanks to the internet and camera phones, we're more aware of police brutality, so it seems like it's suddenly happening a lot more than in the past, which isn't necessarily the case.

[sabrina 1]

9. If al the criminals in this country were held accountable, cops, Wall St and War Criminals eg, crime

statistics would be way UP.

[justabob]

10. side question

Not to take away from the problem of militarized police forces, which is a huge problem... Before we even get to that part... Isn't that violent crime number, the one going steadily down, partially the result of different statistical classification of certain crimes? Not necessarily that they are not happening, but that they are now called something else... essentially being hidden/disguised. I only remember that was an issue in the discussion of the falling rates a few years back. I will try to find...

My point is, as others have noted, police forces point to those numbers and say, "see, our zero-tolerance (or whatever nonsense phrase) policies have resulted crimes rates going down, we need more of this..." and it is all based on statistical bullshit, not militarized tactics.