The Myth of the Trigger-Happy Cop

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despite the impression often created by TV news and social media, not all but many law-enforcement agencies have dramatically reduced the number of officer-involved shooting incidents.

The NYPD is a case in point. Consider the numbers. In 1971, the first year that the department began compiling detailed data on police shootings, officers shot 314 people, 93 of them fatally. Two decades later, in 1991, the number of NYPD shootings had decreased to 108, with 27 fatalities—a significant reduction but still a disturbingly high number. By 2015 (the last year for which complete official statistics are available), the number of people intentionally shot by NYPD cops had plummeted to 23, with eight resulting in a fatality—a reduction of more than 90% over the previous 4½ decades.

Let me put that in context. In a city of 8.2 million people—and in a police department of more than 35,000 armed officers who in 2015 responded to more than 66,000 calls involving weapons—NYPD cops shot and killed eight criminal suspects. All of these individuals had prior arrest histories, five were carrying a gun or pellet gun, one was stabbing an officer with a knife, and two were violently struggling with cops to avoid arrest.

Eight criminal suspects shot and killed is far from a perfect record—it’s eight human lives away from being perfect—but the statistics show that the NYPD has made tremendous strides in reducing such shootings.

There are a number of reasons for this progress. For one, technological advances such as virtual-reality “shoot/don’t shoot” training exercises have helped to condition NYPD cops to react correctly to real-life situations involving potentially deadly force. The deployment of defensive devices such as pepper spray and Tasers has also given NYPD cops less lethal alternatives to gunfire for defending themselves and others against armed suspects.

Extensive data collection on every police shooting—from the number of shots fired to the officer’s number of years on the job—has helped NYPD commanders to spot trends and develop training improvements. Increased training in the “three Cs”—cover, concealment, containment—has taught officers to avoid being put into situations where they are forced to fire their weapons. “Officer restraint” has become the NYPD’s training emphasis.

There is no complete official national database on police shootings, so it is impossible to obtain accurate historical data on trends in police shooting incidents. (Creating such a database should be a national priority.) But according to an unofficial database maintained by the Washington Post, it is clear that fatal officer-involved shootings are actually statistically rare—and unjustified officer-involved fatal shootings are rarer still.

According to the database, law-enforcement officers shot and killed 963 people in the U.S. in 2016. In contrast to what people might expect given the headlines, police actually shot and killed twice as many whites as blacks—465 versus 233—although in relation to their percentage of the national population, blacks were shot and killed at a higher rate than whites.

The racial disparity is troubling (though it must be qualified by comparison to the racial disparity in crime rates), and a thousand people dead from police bullets in the course of a year is far too many.

But in a nation of 320 million people, where violent crime is a large and persistent problem, it is also not shockingly high. It is important to note that of the 963 people shot and killed by police last year, 852 had guns, knives or other weapons, according to the database, while 48 of the people shot and killed were described as unarmed. (In 63 cases, it was unknown if a weapon was involved.)

The fact that a suspect has a weapon doesn’t automatically make a police shooting justifiable, just as the absence of a weapon doesn’t automatically make a shooting unjustifiable. But it does indicate how often police officers find themselves confronting people armed with dangerous weapons. The notion that cops are engaged in the wanton slaughter of Americans of any race simply isn’t true.

Indeed, one tragic measure of the risks that cops face is the number of them killed while doing their jobs. According to news reports, 64 of America’s 900,000 law-enforcement officers were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2016, a third in “ambush-style” attacks that in some cases were prompted by anger over recent police shootings.

Charles Campisi at WSJ

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Trigger Happy Cops are only in the minds of the snowflakes and pea-brained hollywood directors(Micheal Moore,Martin Scorsee,Etc)and greedy blood sucking trial lawyers

@Spurwing Plover: There seems to be some issues with the spam filters allowing links.

Trigger Happy Cops are only in the minds of the snowflakes and pea-brained hollywood directors(Micheal Moore,Martin Scorsee,Etc)and greedy blood sucking trial lawyers

Trooper Sean Groubert shooting of an unarmed man is far from something concocted in the liberal mind., Same applies with the police assassination of Caroline Small. Officer Michael Slager unloading his 9mm into a running victim’s back is hardly something the left made up. And I could go on and on as technology has advance, we see them regularly.

The problem is that policemen have become unaccountable due to their relationship with prosecutors and the courts. Want to see a young prosecutor’s career go down the toilet? Have him piss off the cops.

I really don’t think that police shootings of unarmed black men is racist. They just happen to be the poorer folks that are less likely to have the resources to give them a challenge in court.