I don't find it hard at all to believe that there are five hundred deaths a year in a nation of 310 million people where police carry guns, issue orders that their training tells them must be obeyed immediately or you "will be dropped."
First of all, you have to collate the number from a wide variety of local newspapers. News media doesn't like to portray the police in anything but a nice light. We had a young 26 year old Latina woman, who was on her way to work last autumn, and a police car driven by a cowboy-mentality cop was doing his fastest to get to a police chase half the county away. His cop car veered over the center divide, and his car struck hers and killed her. Our news media spun the story on its head, so that you came away from reading their reports believing she perhaps was at fault. Only by talking to people who had been on the road that day would you find out the truth. It was a news black out in terms of the media mentioning it.
Here in California, just last summer,there were three people a week being killed by cops in Southern California. And that is from those reported deaths that get media attention.
Let's talk about the idea that the police were in danger: often there is no danger at all.
Perfect example of what I mean: Summer 2013
A 911 call apparently was made after a neighbor mistakenly interpreted a man sitting on a porch as a “drunk with a gun.” Officers arrived, ready for battle, and the man was killed . . . while watering his neighbor’s lawn
KTLA Long Beach “Cops”, or “Police” Murder 35 year old Long Beach man for watering lawn in Long Beach upscale neighborhood Belmont Shore.
A neighbor called the LBPD about a man with a gun that was sitting
in a lawn chair on a friends front lawn with what appeared to be a firearm.
Police admit not following procedure. The 35 year old subject was not ordered to drop
his firearm (garden hose) before LBPD shot and killed him.
He had been killed with a total of six blasts from shot gun that the police were carrying!
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The above happened in a quiet tree lined neighborhood of "respectable citizenry. So if it is that bad in a suburban setting, what is it like if the neighborhood is a bit shoddier? Or if the person is not respectable?
About a decade back, a guy in Novato, Calif., (Another suburban enclave) called the police because at three o'clock in the morning, a mentally ill neighbor of his was standing on the roof of his car and twirling a broom. Within a moment or two of arrival, the cops shot the mentally ill man dead.
The guy who had called the cops told a reporter: "I own a gun. If I wanted my neighbor dead, I could have killed him myself and saved the cops the trip."
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