Cops – Killing and Being Killed

April 3, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

This story from Kos has been quickly circling through the left portion of the Internet.

Let’s assume that the numbers are accurate.*

Don't bother adjusting for population differences, or poverty, or mental illness, or anything else. The sheer fact that American police kill TWICE as many people per month as police have killed in the modern history of the United Kingdom is sick, preposterous, and alarming.

The author is right. Although the US has a much larger population, and it has more police officers . . .

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

. . .but even adjusting for that, the US killings by cops dwarf the UK figure**.

Adjusting for the number of cops, US cops killed 8 times as many people in a single year as UK cops did in 115 years. But before we conclude that US law enforcement is “sick and preposterous” and dominated by homicidal racists, we might look at the other side – the number of cops who get killed. The entire UK police force since 1900 has had 249 deaths in the line of duty. The US tally eclipses that in a couple of years.

In this century, 25 UK officers died in the line of duty. The figure for the US, 2445, is nearly one hundred times that. Adjusting for numbers of officers, US deaths are still ten times higher.

My guess is that what accounts for much of the UK-US difference is guns. Most British cops don’t carry guns. Last August, I posted (here – it’s gotten over 25,000 page views ) a video of a berserk man wildly swinging a machete in a London street. The police come, armed only with protective shields and truncheons. Eventually, they are able to subdue the man. In the US, it’s almost certain that the police would have shot the man, and it would have been completely justifiable. More cops with guns, more cops killing people. 

But more civilians with guns, more cops getting killed. Since 2000, six UK cops have died from gunshots; in the US, 788.  We have 11 times as many cops, but 130 times as many killed by guns.***

(I did not include the yearly data for the UK since it would not have been visible on the graph. In most years, total cop deaths there ranged between 0 and 2.)

Thanks to the ceaseless efforts of gun manufacturers and their minions in legislatures and in the NRA and elsewhere, US cops work in a gun-rich environment. They feel, probably correctly, that they need to carry guns. If that man in London had been wielding an AR-15 (easily available in many states in the US – in the UK, not so much, not at all in fact), the cops could not have responded as they did. They would have needed guns. There would probably have been some dead civilians, perhaps some dead cops, and almost certainly, a dead berserker. 

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* We don’t have a good source of data on how many people the police kill.  (See this WaPo article.) An unofficial source since 2013 is KilledByPolice.net. The data on killings by the UK police is also not precise. Politifact (here) says that the Wikipedia numbers that the Kos article is based on are “far low, but we don’t know how low.” PolitiFact does suggest that many of those killings by police were not by London Bobbies. They were by the R.U.C in Northern Ireland during the “Troubles” with the I.R.A.

** The denominator for the UK – the number of police officers over the last 115 years  – is my own very rough estimate.

*** The other two leading causes of police deaths are heart attacks and car accidents. Maybe UK cops practice better cardio fitness. But they also spend less time patrolling in cars, and they are less likely to be chasing other cars on the highways.