They have to put the shooting range used for the final test underground not because an outdoor shooting range is infeasible for most police departments but rather because there are a lot less oak trees and thus less acorns and it hugely reduces the chance of trainees and officers randomly panicking and shooting each other.
You can laugh at this policy (how dare you laugh at our hero’s in blue!) but the reduction in accidental gun violence from police in training has been remarkable and police departments are considering trying to do traffic stops in similar underground facilities to reduce the risk to patrol officers actually out on the job.
[Meme transcription: 3 orangutans sitting on an interview couch. One asks, “Where acorn?”]Okay I feel like I'm missing a recent news story
US police officer shoots at unarmed suspect after mistaking acorn drop for gunshot (YouTube)
Cop gets spooked by a falling acorn, the cop and his partner unload their weapons at the handcuffed man in the backseat of the cops car, somehow not wounding him.
"Horrible accuracy, but at least they all went inside the tar--oh."
This is totally unbelievable, as not a single bullet went through anyone's dog.
This is funny, and police do murder innocent dark skin ethnicities at a much higher rate, but that doesn't just erase the other
7/10ths5/10ths of executions which are white people.Edit: white to black was a 7:3 ratio but it's more like 5/10ths when you include other demographics.
Apparently when BLM protests started we had a large reduction in our ability to record the race of police shooting victims in the US:
But as of 2020, Black people in the US were more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter
Yes I agree with you 100%, I've never on any occasion argued against any of that.
Actually, the data has been largely unreliable since at least 2015, as James Comey while he was head of the FBI puts it: "I think it’s embarrassing for those of us in government who care deeply about these issues, especially the use of force by law enforcement, that 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 police in the United States last month, last year, or anything about the demographics, and that’s a very bad place to be." All US Federal data on police use of force is self-reported since forever.
For about 2 decades, largely one of the biggest sources for data was Philip M. Stinson, who tracked nationwide shootings with Google Alerts. There was also another great study on the matter by PNAS called "Risk of being Killed by Police in the United States by Age, Race-ethnicity, and Sex".
Thats some right wing talking point. It's valid that we overfocus on the race issue. Though you also have to consider the amount of white people available for exexution vs black people. Unfortunately using bad statistics only gets those race people to focus on race more rather than the OP stats cops have in general. We about to be downvoted into oblivion though. This is Lemmy! You cant say things like that in the echo chamber :,)
Are you saying my talking point is right wing? Because I see it the opposite way. I see that sweeping victims under the rug that right wing people can associate and potentially empathize with makes it a partisan issue when instead we should all be united against police brutality and unjust murders of all our peoples. It could be any of us, at any moment, without any consequence for them.
Making police out to be an Anti-Black figure is in itself a conservative political philosophy that too many right-wingers would support.
It’s valid that we overfocus on the race issue.
The eternal struggle in American politics is whether to persecute black people because they are largely poor, or to persecute poor people because so many of them are black.
Unfortunately using bad statistics only gets those race people to focus on race
The efforts by both historical and modern American leadership to impose a formal caste system on a melting pot of ethnicity and migrating communities has produced an enormous number of contradictory policies and practices.
But one upshot is how you can focus in on a particular state or agency or subset of the criminal statistics, and get any kind of trend you want.
You can then draw all sorts of conclusions - some of them pretty nakedly illogical and incoherent - and then build a media career around using these statistics to prove your fringe view to a gullible audience.
I might say that the problem isn't with "bad statistics" nearly so much as pure "bad faith". Arguing for vicious, sadistic, and largely ineffectual policies by pointing to a singular cohort in a sliver of the overall data set and insisting we need to do full-on Gestapo-esque policing if anyone is to sleep soundly ever again.
😂. I've seen the stats and surprisingly there's no racial bias shown in police shootings. Apparently cops will blow you away regardless of race which is rather sweet
We need to see those stats please!
Edit apparently I'm not lazy today.
Here is a Harvard study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force?page=0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C1
'On the most extreme use of force –officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.'
That's some dark humor.
