[southerntofu]

> police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.

Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it, little will be done.

Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder. Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of accountability.

If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely outcome.

> you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop

That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met several people who had a family member killed by police. Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is not my case.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_du_25_mars_2023_...

[WarmWash]

Being killed by police is different than being murdered by police.

Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and not a threat.

The 990 police killing videos that become available every year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad actors trying to kill police and getting themselves killed.

Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.

[southerntofu]

The dynamic doesn't look very different here, at least from reading the news. I don't know about the US (though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation), just for anyone's curiosity, in France police killing of a threatening person is the outlier. [1]

We don't have guns circulating freely around here (though some people have them such as for hunting). Many police murders take place in police custody (such as El Hacen Diarra just this month). According to the most comprehensive stats i could find [2], out of 489 deaths by police shootings (1977-2022), 275 victims were entirely unarmed.

[1] Not very scientific method: any case of police being assaulted and using "self-defense" is widely spread in the media, and those few cases per year don't account for the dozens of deaths every year.

[2] https://bastamag.net/webdocs/police/