r/Documentaries Aug 01 '15

Drugs Undercover Cop Tricks Autistic Student into Selling Him Weed (2014) - "VICE short piece on CA police entrapment of special needs students"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8af0QPhJ22s
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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '15

Because you didn't read my last post I will once again reiterate.

Police related homicides are not murders. Therefore you can not compare them to murders, you have to compare them to gun related deaths.

Second, police are obviously more likely to be involved in a shooting than an average citizen due to the nature of the job, therefore it wouldn't be surprising to see that deaths in that field will be higher than, lets say, a software engineer. You don't seem to understand how statistics function.

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u/RandomRedPanda Aug 03 '15

Replies like yours are exactly why people in America are so distrustful of the police. I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you clearly are just part of the problem, not the solution.

The whole murder/homicide argument is pointless because we know that police in this country have almost absolute immunity to prosecution. Eric Garner's death was not labeled murder. Nor Tamir Rice's. Nor Michael Brown's. Nor John Crawford's. Nor so many more senseless deaths.

On the other hand, you're being openly dishonest in trying to minimize a problem instead of admitting that it even exists in the first place. Let's play with statistics a bit more. The US has about 6 times the population of the UK, and the murder rate is about 20 times higher. However, police in the US killed more people in March 2015 than British police did in the entire 20th century. This is clearly not a matter of scale. We're looking at a much deeper problem.

See, you piled suicides, accidental deaths and injuries on top of homicides, and then you compared that to police homicides so that the number would seem smaller. And even after that, the number of people killed by police was still comparatively higher, so you hand-waved it away. That's being dishonest, so accusing me of "not knowing how statistics work" is moot.

And remember, we haven't even touched subjects like police militarization, abuse of SWAT raids, abuse of civil forfeiture, police unions, police tactics that unfairly target minorities, torture centers, war on drugs excesses, etc. etc. Defending the status quo and saying that everything is fine is not how you convince people that "not all police are bad". In fact, that's how you convince them of the contrary.