Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

You have to keep in mind when looking at data is that the US, relative to the countries you're probably comparing it to, is very large. So you need to look at rates of events - and not quantity of events. How often did other police forces need to respond to something at all analogous to an individual pointing a rifle out the window of a hotel in populated areas and then repeatedly trying to reach behind his waist even after instructed not do so? Perhaps most importantly, violent crime in the US is much more common than other places in the developed world. So that changes the probability determination for what's probably going on in any given event.

We can look at this this on a national level where we're already in pretty bad shape with a murder rate of 4.9 [1] compared to less than 1 for most of Europe. But where things get really insane is when you start breaking it down to where these events are often happening. Crime, especially violent crime, in the US is very centralized into a number of relatively small areas. For instance these [2] are the crime data for Ferguson, Missouri where Michael Brown was killed. In the year Michael Brown was killed, their homicide rate was double the US average. It's now skyrocketed to 42.8. To give some context to that 42.8 the murder rate in Mexico is 16.35. In Columbia it's 26.5. There are actually only 5 nations with a murder rate higher than Ferguson. And you'll find that these extreme rates of violence tend correlate pretty well to areas where the reported police violence is also coming from.

So the point here is that comparing how the police function in countries with little to no reason to expect extremely dangerous scenarios (or outcomes) to countries where such expectations are perfectly justified is not really logical. Here's an interesting thought experiment. Swap the police force of [less dangerous nation] with the police force of the US. Would you expect the behavior of the US police force in the now much more safe nation to change? What of the police from the safer nation now placed in a nation where people randomly killing police is actually a thing?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[2] - http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Ferguson-Missouri.html




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: