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)
I can’t even come up with some smart ass response to this. I’m just so tired of useless incompetent pieces of shit not only getting these positions but also whining about being shot.
There should be some double jeopardy at this point or something where if a cop says that you shot at him and had a gun, and they fire back at you, you should be able to obliterate their kneecaps at the very least.
They pointed a gun at a guy that lit himself on fire in protest recently. Was a bullet gonna put the fire out? If all you know is a hammer everything looks like a nail
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.
That guy just wants to take turns around the little children’s table of murdered-people’s-recognition and say that one ethnicity deserves more sympathy than another. Apparently, he’s saying that one particular group deserves more time with the microphone than another.
In reality, it’s all of us who are being murdered and race is just a distraction. The race battle is alive and well even among all of us who are on the same side, which is ridiculous.
That’s them winning, because every ounce of effort we blow arguing who deserves more sympathy today is an ounce of effort not directed toward the police.
Besides, it’s not even race; its economic class that matters. Who has any numbers documenting rich people who were shot with pencils in their hands because they looked like guns?
It doesn’t exist.
Yes, I would agree. But this is lemmy. And I hope I’m wrong about people’s reaction here. I’m speaking for people who I do not support, and who’s ideas don’t make logical sense to me, so i will shut up now and let those people make their questionable points instead.
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.
Ok I’m dumb, ELI5?
It’s only the black that’s getting shot.
Ah yeah that’s nowhere even close to registering where I live, luckily.
Luckily the police shoot every color there
You are not alone. I spent two minutes trying to recognize a pattern made by the holes before scrolling down to the comments.
I thought this kind of humor wasn’t allowed on Lemmy…
Good to see something offensive for once, I mean it.
That’s some dark humor.
Why are all the holes white?
It looks like the target was held up to a plaster wall for clarity.
Edit: nope I’m stupid, it’s a styrofoam target, so it was probably a target for airsoft
😂. 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.’
Well… I’m not gonna lie. I too am lazy and had hopped that you could point me to the controversial data that support your comment.
I did a quick search though and the only convdincing result that I could find is, that its hard to tell
So if don’t mind, can you please oblige me, where did you find the convincing proof that there is no racial bias in police brutality?
Already updated it with a link. For bonus points I was sceptical of his data and methods but both myself and a professor I know checked and it’s solid work.
Doesn’t stop people with a race related hate message from trying to discredit it but science don’t care 🤷
Intersting. This was posted 4 years later by Harvard, stating :
Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police
Black Chicagoans, for example, were found to be over 650% more likely to be killed by police than white Chicagoans.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/blacks-whites-police-deaths-disparity/
Neither of those statements indicate a racial disparity in police response by themselves.
If you don’t understand why…perhaps read the study I posted and see how it’s done.
I found this article commenting on the paper you linked
Paper finding no racial bias in shootings by police criticized
Interesting though his main criticism of the paper is a bit ah…subjective (below). Seems more like he’s manipulating data for an outcome tbh.
I had a look at the author and he seems to have based his career on race relations which makes me worried about his impartiality too.
‘The CPE report acknowledges three problems with measuring police force: measuring “excessive” force against all force, measuring differences in police use of force, and measuring force incidents as unchanging rather than constantly changing. Goff said Fryer neither acknowledges these concepts nor deals with them as problems.’
