Comment by WarmWash

Comment by WarmWash 5 days ago

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Being killed by police is different than being murdered by police.

Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and not a threat.

The 990 police killing videos that become available every year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad actors trying to kill police and getting themselves killed.

Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.

southerntofu 5 days ago

The dynamic doesn't look very different here, at least from reading the news. I don't know about the US (though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation), just for anyone's curiosity, in France police killing of a threatening person is the outlier. [1]

We don't have guns circulating freely around here (though some people have them such as for hunting). Many police murders take place in police custody (such as El Hacen Diarra just this month). According to the most comprehensive stats i could find [2], out of 489 deaths by police shootings (1977-2022), 275 victims were entirely unarmed.

[1] Not very scientific method: any case of police being assaulted and using "self-defense" is widely spread in the media, and those few cases per year don't account for the dozens of deaths every year.

[2] https://bastamag.net/webdocs/police/

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  • WarmWash 5 days ago

    >though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation

    It's easy to track because anytime it happens it's instant major news on the internet. Trust me, in the economy of social media clout, few things rank as valuable as police murder.

    Pretti was frontpage of reddit within 30(!) minutes of being shot. Even without bystanders there is a whole group of creators whose whole channel is combing bodycam footage for wrong doing. These videos are worth (tens) of thousands in ad views if nothing else.

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    • ndsipa_pomu 4 days ago

      Bodycam footage? How are they getting immediate access to bodycam footage?

      As I understand it, the footage is not from bodycams as ICE don't wear them and police will turn them off when it suits them.

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      • WarmWash 4 days ago

        Some, maybe all, ICE agents were body cams, but I haven't seen any footage. I'm not sure what the process would looks like, this whole ICE violence thing is only a few months old, whereas most regular police have had bodycams for 5+ years now and getting the footage is well established.

        Police also definitely don't turn it off when it suites them, although some have, but again, it's a Streisand effect when they do. I really cannot stress enough that police doing bad things has extremely high monetary value for the people who find it, and you also get paid for the crazy bodycam videos you find along the way. If you're a cop and you turn off your cam before breaking the law, you are almost certainly going to be the face of a 1M+ view youtube video. People, like yourself and me, gobble that up.

        It doesn't matter much anyway, because there is 100x more footage of cops doing bad things with their cam on.

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