The United States had 1,055 fatal police shootings last year. Britain had 1.
1,055 reasons "reform" won't cut it, especially now that state and federal governments are pumping more money than ever into police departments.
In December, a Los Angeles Police Department officer’s stray bullet hit and killed a 14-year-old girl in a dressing room at a mall. In January, Nashville police tried to help a man wandering on the highway; instead, nine officers gunned him down when they saw that he had a boxcutter. In February, Amir Locke was shot and killed after officers executed a no knock warrant in his home. The encounter that ended his life lasted 10 seconds.
Replace “police” with “gang” or “lone shooter” and imagine the furor the above paragraph would generate. (In December, a gang member’s stray bullet killed a 14-year-old girl while she hid in a dressing room at a mall, etc. ). I’m not likening police to gangs or active shooters. That’s facile. And, as every cop I’ve ever interviewed says—regardless of their politics— cops don’t go to work in the morning eager to kill someone that day.
While violent crimes in the general population induce insta-backlash against reform and a double-down on pro-carceral policies, police killings virtually never lead to accountability or policy changes, unless they happened to be captured by gruesome bystander video.
The Washington Post reports that in 2021, fatal police shootings hit a record high of 1,055. Skeptics of serious police reform often point out that fatal encounters with police are statistically rare (all murders are statistically rare). But they shouldn’t be rare, relative to, say, car accidents or dying of old age—they should be zero, or as close to zero as possible. While the US topped more than a thousand fatal police shootings in 2021, Britain and Wales had … 1 police killing.
How?
America is a global outlier across many grim metrics (incarceration, overdoses, Covid deaths, etc.), so it’s hard to make direct comparisons. For instance, Britain saw a drop in violent crime during the pandemic, which might account for less aggressive policing, while the US saw an increase. But the relationship between crime rates and police killings is unclear. According to the Lancet, during the 1980s and 1990s, when crime rates were much higher than today, police killings never surpassed 1,000. Excess police killings, then, can’t be explained away by a crime spike.
The major difference in police training and the attitude the training imbues offers a clearer explanation. On average, US officers spend around 21 weeks training before they are qualified to go on patrols. British officers do more than twice that. Recently, it became mandatory for officers in Britain to obtain an academic degree. In the US, only eight percent of police departments require officers to have attended any college at all.
More importantly, police academies in the US prioritize firearms training over de-escalation. "Most of the training in the US is focused on various types of use of force, primarily the various types of physical force. The communication skills are largely ignored by most police academies,” police science professor Maria Haberfeld told the BBC. "This is why you see officers very rapidly escalating from initial communication to the actual physical use of force, because this is how they train.”
British officers, most of whom don’t carry guns, spend a bulk of their training on de-escalation. It’s why, relatively often, footage will go viral of British police disarming some knife wielding maniac. A Louisville study showed that officers with just eight hours of de-escalation training received 26 percent fewer citizen complaints. Yet, more than six years after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 21 states still don’t mandate de-escalation training, reports American Public Media.
In 2015, a delegation of US officers visited a Scottish police department, where they do things very differently than American cops. In Scotland, 98 percent of police officers do not carry guns, according to the New York Times. Despite major social challenges, police embrace a “guardian” attitude. Whereas in the US, in certain neighborhoods, cops can take on the role of an occupying force.
The US cops seemed perplexed when Scottish officers explained that despite not being armed with guns, they hadn’t had a death on the line of duty since 1994. And Scotland is hardly a cop-hugging, crime-free utopia.
There is poverty, crime and a “pathological hatred of officers wearing our uniform” in pockets of Scotland, he said, but constables live where they work and embrace their role as “guardians of the community,” not warriors from a policing subculture.
“The basic fundamental principle, even in the areas where there’s high levels of crime, high levels of social deprivation, is it’s community-based policing by unarmed officers,” Constable Higgins said. “We police from an absolute position of embracing democracy.”
Obviously, another major difference is that the Scottish populace is not armed to the teeth. But if we’re eager to pursue policy changes, like more funding for police based on a rise in violent crime, why aren’t we seriously willing to consider policy changes when police kill a record number of people?
When violent crime rose during the pandemic, tough-on-crime advocates, as well as self-professed moderates, blamed the so-called Ferguson effect: the theory (or more of a hunch, really) that protests against police brutality drove the spike in crime. Activists who demanded defunding the police, the thinking goes, emboldened criminals, dampened officers’ spirits and made them scared to do their jobs. Apparently, police weren’t afraid to pull the trigger.
Scottish police, meanwhile, do not have their feelings so easily hurt.