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One topic raised a lot when talking about the US police killing rate is guns, people, predominantly on the left, and in the UK where I live, even on the right, attribute the high police kill rate on the legality and ease of purchase of firearms in the US. The claim of course being, that if you are unsure of whether your target is armed, you will be more likely to fear for your own safety and less hesitant to shoot.
Perhaps there is some truth to this argument and perhaps not, firearms in general are a topic that I will cover at a later date and deserve a more in depth analysis than I could give it here. What I will say however, is that in other countries where firearms are easily accessible, or even encouraged, such as Switzerland, the death rates are nowhere near the level of the US.
On top of that, in places like the UK where guns are hard to come by, the police are also not generally carrying weapons and tend to be just as armed, or less armed than any armed target they would encounter. Even when firearms were easily accessible in the UK, the police here generally did not carry them and had no issues with not killing people.
Looking beyond the knee-jerk reaction of just blaming guns and then taking what is a false moral high ground, there are many more differences that are worth considering. The first of these that struck me as interesting were the training which the officers receive. In the US, training is around 13 weeks’ full time, whilst in Europe at least, it is closer to the 2-year mark, based on the Manchester police website.
Given this massive disparity in training times, the methods being taught are obviously going to be quite different. Most US training focuses on disarming, disabling and potentially killing their opposition, without the added time, the most important thing of course in the eyes of the state at least will be making sure that their enforcers are capable of defending themselves and neutralising any threat, lest they be unable to maintain what they would consider to be order.
In Europe, and specifically the UK on the other hand, whilst these combat techniques will of course also be part of the training, they can afford also to go in depth on negotiation skills, with a much heavier focus on diffusing a potentially violent situation with word of mouth as opposed to high speed projectiles. Giving the police a skill set that is sorely lacking in common US training.
Even the mentality of police in the UK and the US are drastically different, in the UK, policing is considered by the state to be done by the consent of the public and the police are servants of the public. This is part of the reason why even when private citizens owned firearms, the police did not carry them, since if they were in need of a gun, they weren’t doing their job properly. Emphasis is also put on doing no harm, or if force is required, not inflicting any injury. A good example of this is a clip of police subduing a man roaming the streets with a machete. They are simply taught to only use appropriate and minimal force when all other means of resolution are exhausted.
In absolute contrast to this, US police do so through authority, it is considered an offence in the US not to obey any command from an officer, doing so at best will land you in a cell, and at worst, land you in a pool of your own blood. They are taught to continually escalate force until their objectives are met and any resistance, regardless of how appropriate that force is. The machete wielding man would certainly not have been subdued without harm if he had been in the US.
This kind of authority, when given to anyone, is a great risk. It is no doubt the reason there are so many killings in the US by police, it is the type of job that will attract those who desire power over others. Whilst many try to turn it into an issue of race, be it whites that are killed disproportionately in relation to police encounters and arrests, or blacks by basic population numbers, which is a topic I will cover in future, this is no relevant, the issue is in the mentality and the types of people who go into these roles. In the UK by contrast, anyone could technically perform a citizen’s arrest on a police officer, although not advisable, you would certainly be unlikely to suffer physical harm or death for it.
This, in the end, is why I will argue that it is not guns, but instead the institution and methods taught that cause so many fatalities, in March 2015 alone, the total killings in the US by police, was greater than that of UK police during the entirety of the last century, including 60 years of legal UK guns. Until the US change their training methods and focus more on diplomacy than force, this issue will continue, and will only get worse if they disarm citizens as well.