Death by Police Officer Statistics

[Zambini]

Okay, first of all, my mom thinks America < Finland in every single way.

She sometimes says that police in America will shoot a suspect, and she exagerates like crazy and says something like "police kill people all the time" or
something of that sort, so i'm trying to find statistics on such events in both Finland and America.


But I dont know what to google. I tried "statistics + Killed by police" and stuff like that but I just dont know what to search.



Could one of you statistics majors post links to information of this sort?

ty ^^


[edit] Dang, I forgot I cant edit the title, I was gonna add the word 'statistics' in the title of this post.....

[Blondie]

Try using death ratio?

[Sovereign]

You could try looking up something like "police kill suspect" in the news (keep in mind that any results you get would be informal at best, useless at worst). You could also try searching the Statistical Abstract of the United States here

[whitecree]

Try a two part search. "Finland murder rate" and "USA murder rate". You might have to search through that to find exactly what you're looking for.

[Hitman]

Population of Finland: 5,223,442
Population of United States: 295,734,134
Number of Police Officers in Finland: 7718
Number of Police Officers in United States: 663,535

Finland has a Smaller Population then the US, Has less Police Officers then the US, and has a Lower Crime Rate then the US. So your Mom is probably right, there are less Police Shootings in Finland then the US.

This is an intersting article

[whitecree]

Originally Posted by The article

On its cover, for example, the report refers to all the victims of police shootings as "felons justifiably killed by police," a categorization that Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, termed "deeply offensive and legally incorrect."

So I guess the prof wants the cops to consult with him before they shoot anybody? What a twit.

Think about it; a felon is somebody who is already known to have committed a crime and has been charged/tried/convicted. That is what a felon is. It would be different if the word was "suspect". So how is shooting a felon deeply offensive (except to the felon in question) and legally incorrect? You'd have to be on the scene in order to judge the latter. Was the felon calmly buying a pack of smokes, or was he threatening a cop or another civilian?

People make this mistake all the time. They want to live in an ordered, safe society, but refuse to recognize that there are people who delight in ruining everything they touch. Thus you require a police force to assist in maintaining order. Sometimes the cops are forced by circumstances to use deadly force. Most cops are under tremendous pressure, and have had many close calls in the past. Can they be blamed if they are somewhat jumpy? I'm only surprised that more of these poor saps (cops) don/t go overboard.

[Zambini]

The lack of good data "is a national scandal," said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and a leading authority on police use of force. "It's a scandal in the sense that these are public servants who work for us and are paid to protect us."

I agree with this in some part.
Its not a scandal.
Clinton + fat intern was a scandal.
Enron was a scandal.

this is a disappointment that there are no good facts publicly recorded. They should be in the census or something.