After watching parts of the Micheal Brown documentary and following the news over the past few years, I am simply stunned at how many police shootings occur in the United States compared to other countries.
It almost feels like every few days or weeks we see another breaking headline for a Police Shooting. Now I do understand that since you have the right to own and carry a gun in the US, which will naturally increase the amount of people killed, but it aside from that, I feel as if we are constantly seeing headlines for the deaths of unarmed victims, many of which are youth or teenagers.
As we saw in the Micheal Brown case, an unarmed teenager was shot and killed. This tragedy is only one of thousands that have occurred in the United States over the past few years. Since these tragedies happen so often, we have almost become accustomed to seeing them in the news, making it seem of less significance.
However, in many countries around the world, fatalities from police shootings are a foreign issue that rarely ever happen in their communities. For example, in the first 24 days of 2015, there were 59 fatal shootings in the United States, meaning almost two and a half people were killed by police per day. In England and Wales, however, there have been 59 fatal shootings in the past 24 years, meaning there have only been about two and a half people killed by police per year.
I know the United States is a very different country from much of Europe, and that people can bend statistics to improve their argument, but I believe the facts are pretty clear in this case. All of this research raised a question for me. Why is it that the United States has more fatal police shootings than the rest of europe, considering they have the same job of protecting and serving? Is it the training? After all, much we talked about in class, US Police spend on average almost four times as much time learning how to use weapons then how to effectively communicate with people.
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The amount of police shootings in our country are just out of the charts. Just yesterday when I was watching the news, Atatiana Jefferson was shot and killed by a police officer in Fort Worth. She was inside her own home, and a non-emergency call was made to the police. The officer came and shot her dead just a few seconds after entering the home, with no other plan in mind for the officer. It's really sad that our country hasn't found a way to stop these senseless police shootings. I feel that officers aren't taught right with some police forces, because if you're taught about shooting 5 times as much as communicating, officers will look to shoot way too early. I believe the training has to be altered to emphasize communication rather than defense tactics and shooting.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Trip. After reading your post it amazes me how many police shootings are really going on here in our country. And half the time the kids that are being shot aren't doing anything wrong, and they just happen to not be white. The chart of Iceland and stockton is crazy to look at as well, because well for one stockton is a small city where we live, and Iceland is a whole country. That is crazy to think about. I feel that officers need to stop judging the scenes they approach right away, and let it play out before they start to make assumptions about what is really going on. If they did that then maybe we will start to see that rate slowly drop. But who knows it may never happen.
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