11mo ago

US police use force on 300,000 people a year, with numbers rising since George Floyd: ‘relentless violence’

www.theguardian.com

Police in the US use force on at least 300,000 people each year, injuring an estimated 100,000 of them, according to a groundbreaking data analysis on law enforcement encounters.

Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group that tracks killings by US police, launched a new database on Wednesday cataloging non-fatal incidents of police use of force, including stun guns, chemical sprays, K9 dog attacks, neck restraints, beanbags and baton strikes.

The database features incidents from 2017 through 2022, compiled from public records requests in every state. The findings, the group says, suggest that despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.

115 comments

Good to know they've responded to the people's critiques of policing by doubling down on the problem. I hope more people start taking seriously the idea that we don't need the police, and in fact any value they may offer society is simply not worth the violence. We could legitimately make our society function better by disbanding the police entirely
- I think the main argument against disbanding the police is that we'd have no mechanism to prevent violence from former cops. I have no expectation that their behavior will improve if we just stop paying them.
  
  Also if we get rid of the police we might as well get rid of a good chunk of the government while we're at it. One of their core functions is to pass laws and with no enforcement arm there's no point having those.
  
  Easier to throw them in jail when you strip them of qualitative immunity though.
  
  We do have a mechanism to prevent that, our right to bear arms.
- "The answer is not to defund the police! It's to fund them! Fund them!!" - Joe Biden
  And then he proceeded to give them money to buy more tear gas canisters and armored vehicles and liberals are surprise Pikachu face-ing when statistics like this come out.
  In 100 years (if the earth lasts that long) I hope people look back at police abolition the way we look back at the abolition of slavery: as an obvious step towards a more equitable society.
  
  For real. We need to deescalate things and I don't think that can start with the populace defending itself to stop defending itself. The cops are bullies. The answer isn't to lay down and wait for teacher to see we're getting beat up. We need to deal with the bullies by demonstrating that we're strong together
- Any examples of thriving modern societies without a law enforcement arm?
  
  Easy. The US does not have "law enforcement."
  The police have no duty to protect the law and they do not. They protect capital and only respond to crime after the fact.
  
  My issue with this is the notion that there are thriving modern societies. Our modern world is a complex web of torture and exploitation. The police in my country (the USA) act far more as maintainers of the status quo of torture than they do protectors of the populace from violent crime
- How would we deal with violent crime without a police force?
  
  How would we have any violent crime without a police force to commit it?
Contact the police and tell them that you think that the US police departments are sliding into fascism.
I did that to the local police chief and gave examples when they have acted fascist to me.
They sent "mental health professionals" to interview me. Because one must have mental health problems to see police as fascist ?
Anyways if you do start down that path with the police, then expect their family and friends, and the other agencies with access to your locale will begin to show you what fascism looks like in full force.
Fucking worth it.
- The psych part is key too - if they can claim you are mentally ill, not only can they ignore your concerns but they also have a convenient way to dump you in a psych word if you get to annoying.
  Friendly reminder that 988 = 911!
- I did that to the local police chief and gave examples when they have acted fascist to me.
  They sent “mental health professionals” to interview me. Because one must have mental health problems to see police as fascist ?
  And now you know why red flag laws are a bad idea
- What was the reason stated on the warrant when they came into your home?
So is this what the MAGAs mean when they say crime is going up, or…?
I did a quick dig because I wanted to see if the rise in police homicide would trend with population growth and violent crime rates. It did not.
Violent crime has been pretty stable for the past decade. Growth in police homicide exceeded the population growth rate by about 7%, if I did my math right.
I'd like to investigate more when I have the time.
TBF though, US use of force has been underreported and lacked nationwide statistics for most of the previous decades. If I'm not mistaken, one of the federal agencies who attempted to track it stopped giving annual reports in 2017? Idk I'm kind of fuzzy about that.
- The most accurate records of how many people were killed by the police in the US are pretty much from a journalist who counted news pieces or something.
  Here's the head of the FBI in a hearing of some sort: "We can't have an informed discussion, because we don't have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by the police in the United States, last month, last year, or anything about the demographics."
  edit oh yeah the thing I was trying to say in the beginning of the comment comes instantly after that bit: researcher Philip Stinson accumulated over a decades worth of Google alerts on police killings
I am europe based. Can I ask why this is such an issue in the US?
- Police aren't legally accountable for their actions so long as they're acting in the performance of their duties, and lots of departments knowingly have illegal policies on the books to maintain that immunity for their officers.
  People try to sue over it, but the cases are thrown out by the local judge because there's no standing to sue unless the illegal policy had impacted you, so a cop basically has to kill someone before the policies are modified in the smallest way possible, but the killer cop still gets off.
  Additionally, police are allowed to lie in most of their interactions with the public. They have created a culture that encourages dishonesty, so perjury isn't an ethical problem in their eyes.
  
  Not entirely true. Cops are fired, penalized, and held legally accountable quite often. Not frequently enough but you're stating that they are immune.
  Qualified immunity protects state and local officials, including law enforcement officers, from individual liability unless the official violated a clearly established constitutional right.
- The prisons are for profit and the state gets to keep anything it seizes.
- ACAB includes European cops, by the way. Just because they're especially bad in the USA doesn't mean yours aren't also trash.
  Not sure which country you're in, but how have your cops been handling environmental or climate protests? or protests in support of Palestinians?
  
  I'm a Finn and I can vouch for this. It's different, but it's there.
- Ignoring problems tends to make them rot faster. Hollywood is superficial, it's all we got. None of the basics are taken care of, it's why I left (e.g. wealth before health). No safety nets, desperation is easy to find. Limited opportunities if you can't afford to do anything. It's an unsustainable way to live, if you call that living. It's more like surviving.
  
  Yeah but I was referring specifically to the police attacks. Cause I hear about it regularly in the news just to see another aggression?
  Any parallel between expenses and police violence?
- It's an issue in many other countries as well and there are a great many contributing factors.
  Race and "Tough on Crime" politics - Ever since the emancipation of slaves on the basis of race, there have been political figures passing discriminatory policy that allows police to pursue and harass people at their own discretion: black laws, Jim Crow era laws, forced segregation, the 1994 Crime Bill, etc.
  “We have to strengthen our laws when it comes to mob violence, to make sure individuals are unequivocally dissuaded from committing violence when they’re in large groups,” Florida state Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin, a Republican, said during a hearing for an anti-riot bill that was enacted in April.
  It's clear that you can convince people to deregulate and militarize the police if you convince those people they have a greater enemy. You can see these stances and policy directions mirrored across Europe as refugees and immigration from poorer countries have increased in the last decade.
  Lack of Centralization - The FBI is in charge of investigating police departments, and sometimes you see jurisdiction overlaps which allows other agencies like the DEA, State Marshals, Sheriff's Department, etc to investigate each other, but in general a Police Department is held to no standard but their own until things have already escalated past a point of return.
  Some federal programs have tried rewarding PDs that behave well and adhere to specific training or standards, but it's far from enforced.
I wonder if we’ll ever connect the dots. The FBI released a report more than 10 years ago that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Sauce: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Supremacist_Infiltration_of_Law_Enforcement
Lemme guess. 70% of those are black victims.
And now we're voting between "Literal fascist who hired cops to harm minorities" and "literal cop who harmed minorities". And before that was "Literal fascist who hired cops to harm minorities" and "Wrote the bills to enable cops to harm minorities and protected rape victims."
Governments don't protect you, me, or anyone, they never give you the freedoms, only take them. Keep your wits, stay safe, and drink water.
Kinda goes to show the failure of modern protest movements. What did BLM accomplish exactly? They didn't convict Chauvin, it was the people filming him that did that. A lot of realistic ideas were floated to fix policing, but they were drowned out by edgelord calls to "defund the police" and "ACAB". 4 years later nothing has been fixed.
People need to find a better way to make change happen. Raising your fist and marching around doesn't change a thing. Maybe instead of that, people should pool their money together and spend it removing bad politicians/sheriffs/judges etc from office. That's how oil does it.
- A lot of realistic ideas were floated to fix policing
  This guy's grasp on reality:
  people should pool their money together and spend it removing bad politicians/sheriffs/judges etc from office. That's how oil does it.
  
  I mean I plead guilty to posting while intoxicated, but it seems to me the fossil fuel industry does spend a lot of money on elections and basically has a whole caucus representing it in Congress. What do modern protests like BLM, Occupy, etc. have to show? Is there a single meaningful legislative change they can point to? The article seems to suggest quite the opposite. To be fair though, they did inspire a bunch of dismissive lemmy users to feel smug.
- What I found weird was how many large BLM protests were organized for what I think were legitimate cases of police violence. Michael Brown and Jacob Blake come to mind.
  Like there are plenty, plenty of legitimate cases, but when the same crowd doesn't seem to make any distinction between obviously trigger happy cops and pretty undisputable self defense, the end goal and the solution becomes very unclear.
  As you say: vote for better politicians. Vote for as much footage being recorded (cameras on vehicles, bodycams) and fully released immediately. Advocate people of underrepresented ethnicities joining the police force. It's not easy but it's the real path towards a better situation.
Imma unpopular opinion
How many uses of force are justified? Just the fact that they used force to arrest somebody doesn’t mean an atrocity. It could have been 300,000 armed rapists trying to carjack a mother of 3 to get away, or it could have been 300,000 peaceful Palestinian protestors. The relevant number to track is how many unjustified uses of force there were.
Is it possible they’re tracking things better now? When the police document that force was used is HIGHLY dependent on their policies about what has to be documented, which I would suspect is highly correlated with time going by since 2020.
“Use of force” and “injuring” are super broad. If they tackle somebody on the grass to arrest them, that’s a use of force. If they taze somebody causing cardiac arrest, that’s an “injury.”
They do dive a little bit into the details, but I think a lot of the details either undercut the headline narrative or are misleadingly presented. E.g.:
despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.
Half of the agencies reported increases in overall force in the two-year period following Floyd’s murder, the report said.
So, basically, it hasn’t changed. And it went up in half and down in half. I mean it is fine if you want to present that result as an indictment of the claims of reform, but the way they wrote the “everything’s getting worse” headline out of that data is weird.
The most common use of force was stun guns, which are considered “less-lethal” but can also have deadly consequences; the organization tracked more than 20,000 stun gun deployments.
In 2022, the group also cataloged more than 8,000 incidents of chemicals being sprayed; more than 4,700 cases of people hit by weapons like batons and beanbags; and more than 2,100 cases of contacts with K9 dogs.
Sounds like, if those are the numbers out of 300,000, then by far the most common use of force (the remaining 264,200) was tackling / wrestling with a suspect. And then they decided to lead with the descriptions of more lurid uses of force that make up 1%-7% of the times that things happened. No?
Then at the very end the whole tone changes:
of the 757 agencies that disclosed types of force used over time, there were 973 neck restraint uses in 2019. By 2021, there were 112 of those cases, a nearly 90% drop.
Jurisdictions with DoJ reform agreements reported a 22% reduction in overall reported use of force, Mapping Police Violence found. And 13 out of 18 agencies that adopted state or federal reforms reported reductions in use of force.
Policies that reduce overall police encounters can be most effective at reducing injuries and killings by police, such as alternative responder programs dispatching mental health professionals to people in crisis, Sinyangwe said. He said he hoped his database would help officials, including a potential Kamala Harris administration, identify agencies in need of urgent intervention. And he hoped to see an expansion of initiatives shown to work.
See this sounds great. It’s like, some reforms are working and some are not (or just aren’t even being attempted in some places), let’s strategize how we can fix the existing and continuing problems. Let’s get a clear eye on what is happening and try to make things better.
If they had led with this, I would have no griping, but the whole headline and 2/3ds of the article is just feeding into the “OH MA GAWD THE POLICE ARE KILLING EVERYONE WON’T SOMEBODY STOP THEM”.
Bring on the downvotes 😃
- How many uses of force are justified
  Almost none.
  It could have been 300,000 armed rapists trying to carjack a mother of 3 to get away
  It could also have been Thanos robbing the mayor of Gotham 🙄
  Is it possible they’re tracking things better now
  Possible, but extremely unlikely. Several jurisdictions have cracked down on reporting police violence and expanded police immunity.
  The few progressive prosecutors that got elected promising to do something about police brutality have almost all been run out by cops, Republicans, and conservative Democrats colluding to oust them.
  
  How many uses of force are justified
  Almost none.
  How do you know this?
- Bring on the downvotes 😃
  If you insist...
- They kill over 1000 people per year. That number has been rising. That number should be the same each year and it should be zero.
  
  Okay, so if the cops walk up on someone's porch, or in a parking lot or etc, to talk to them and that person pulls out a gun and points it at the cops, what should happen?
- Da Police State Enjoyer has logged on
  
  Aw c’mon, what is the point of being all ACAB people together if you don’t have a “yay police” person to all gather around and yell at
- I think this is what the kids call "critical reading abilities"
  Thanks for providing a strong counterpoint to the click bait narrative, here's a prize 🏆

115 comments