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atlih | 5 years ago

Just because there's a lot of news of US police brutality and little or no news from [insert country]'s police brutality, that data point could just as well mean that the news are more robust in the US than that there's less of it in other countries.

discuss

williamdclt|5 years ago

34.8 people murdered by the police per 10 million residents in the US, versus 3.8 in France, 1.3 in Germany and 0.5 in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...).

It's pretty weak evidence, as the officer in the video is talking about violence during interview, not about killing civilians and I'll agree that these are different things. But it's more than enough to make me skeptical that you should be grateful that you're being interrogated by an american officer rather than an european one...

Very anecdotally, I've watched/read a lot of american news during the elections and the idea that they are "more robust" or more impartial than european news makes me chuckle (at least western europe as it's what I know, and not pretending that our journalism is laudable either)

seamyb88|5 years ago

There are some pretty poor attempts to justify it, but "it's not that our police are bad, it's that our News is brilliant" has to be up there.

konjin|5 years ago

The US isn't better or worse than Europe, it's different. Having lived in both the hypocrisy of Europeans when it comes to police brutality to gypsies is astonishing, doubly so since I'm half gypsy but white enough to get a free pass and get told how bad 'they' are.

newacct583|5 years ago

Largely true. It's not that the US police are less abusive per officer or per interaction, it's more than the US does way too much policing.

bzbarsky|5 years ago

How are you defining "way too much policing"?

Just looking at Western Europe (arbitrarily defined, granted, and leaving out some really small countries) in the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen..., the US has fewer police per capita than (in increasing per-capita order) Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Spain. More police than (in decreasing per-capita order) England+Wales, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Norway.

The US has about 25% more police per capita than Norway. Germany has 63% more police per capita than the US does.