"In 2018, 55 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed and 51 were killed accidentally, for a total of 106 killed [in the line of duty] for the year." [1]
In the same year, at least 992 people were killed by police [2]. I believe this only counts people shot to death. Cases were death was as a result of something other than shooting, e.g. strangling death of George Floyd, is not counted in this statistics. The real number would thus be higher.
Also note that there's an official office keeping accurate records of how many police officers were killed, and yet it's up to a newspaper to even attempt to track how many people the police killed.
> My understanding is cops kill way more often than they are killed.
Well, of course. That's expected isn't it? In an imaginary scenario where police act legitimately 100% of the time there are going to be situations where they have to use lethal force. In the same imagined scenario, there would be 0 legitimate police deaths.
If you're just going for some morbid score keeping, you would need to know illegitimate civilian deaths at the hands of the police vs illegitimate police deaths, as there are certainly scenarios where it could be justified to kill either. Directly comparing raw numbers doesn't say much.
I don’t understand. Surely in the ideal world nobody would kill anyone else. I’m not sure that’s very realistic, or even relevant to what we should expect from police in the real world.
In an ideal world we wouldn't need police at all and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
In my example, I was pointing out that if we remove police corruption from the equation, police would still kill some number of civilians. Because of that fact, the parent's post doesn't make much sense.
But why would you hypothetically remove bad actions from just the police? I genuinely don’t understand. By the exact same argument, if you removed all bad actions from everyone who isn’t a police officer, then of course you’d expect police to kill more people.
In the original comment, before all the ridiculous hypothesizing, the actual world is what was being discussed.
> But why would you hypothetically remove bad actions from just the police?
Because the person I'm responding to is claiming that police kill more civilians than civilians kill police, with the implication that it's because police are corrupt.
I used a hypothetical scenario to point out that this doesn't follow, because the same would be true even if there were no police corruption.
> By the exact same argument, if you removed all bad actions from everyone who isn’t a police officer, then of course you’d expect police to kill more people.
Not clear what your point is here.
> In the original comment, before all the ridiculous hypothesizing, the actual world is what was being discussed.
Yes, some times people use thought experiments to highlight facts about the real world.
I guess it’s not clear what you mean by “police corruption.” If “removing police corruption” just means “removing the possibility of any bad action by any police officer,” then you get right back to my previous comment.
To me, “removing police corruption” would mean having a mechanism of legal accountability for police officers. It wouldn’t mean police officers wouldn’t still abuse and murder people, it would just mean that they would usually be investigated and punished for doing it.
My understanding is cops kill way more often than they are killed. But I'd love to stand corrected.
My understanding is the thin blue line is a myth. The real terrors are the cops. But again I'd love to be wrong.