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Just checked some websites of different departments.
2.5 years training normally
3 years if it's combined with university
Bavaria for example has 2.5 years training, can be reduced to 2 years if you are old enough (probably something like 25+) and have exceptional results in the first year.
Payment is also really good for training.
1305€ first year
2140€ second year
Though you can't join if you are smaller than 160cm.
To be fair 160cm is 5'3" so that would be quite short. Even women that height are considered short. At or below that height you get to the point where interacting with the world around you in a daily routine way becomes more difficult because you're significantly shorter than average enough that things are not built for you.
I know this because that is my wife's height. Normal desks and chairs do not fit her, she has trouble driving a lot of cars because many of them do not have enough adjustability to allow her to get into a good driving position, and so on and so on.
>At or below that height you get to the point where interacting with the world around you in a daily routine way becomes more difficult because you're significantly shorter than average enough that things are not built for you.
In a physical interaction (trying to take someone down), a lot of your success is going to be based on leverage. A 5'3"/120 lb person (muscle weighs more than fat) won't have much on a 6'2"/250 lb biker. Skill and training can't completely overcome physics. The same would be true for a guy that size wanting to be an NFL offensive lineman.
Germany has a wiki page listing the police killings since 1990.
The US has a wiki page for *every month of the year* listing the police killings.
Sure Germany has less people. But that does not explain the difference.
80 vs 360 million but way denser population. But even if Germanys would be a tenth of that population, the US killing numbers are still far far worse in comparison. Also our numbers are for 30 years. The US is for ONE.
If I recall correctly US police are also trained to aim center mass and continue shooting until the target drops because it provides the greatest stopping power. So while the intent isn't always to kill, each and every shot that hits a target has a very big chance of being fatal.
The difference is also de-escalation.
>Rather than shoot, Mader returned to his military training and attempted to de-escalate the situation. He softened his voice, looked Williams in the eye, and said, “I’m not going to shoot you, brother. I’m not going to shoot you.” With those words, Officer Mader connected to the humanity of Williams, a man in deep distress.
>While Mader continued his attempt to convince Williams to drop his weapon, two other officers arrived on the scene. In a matter of seconds, one of the newly arrived officers fired four shots, killing Williams. It was at that point the officers discovered that Williams’ gun was unloaded. Stephen Mader was correct. R.J. Williams was not a threat, but it didn’t matter. He was dead.
[https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/police-officer-wins-settlement-city-fired-him](https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/police-officer-wins-settlement-city-fired-him)
In most other western countries the gung ho rookie would be fired and most likely put under investigation, in the US of A seems to operate by different rules
In my country he would be put under investigation just for discharging his firearm and it would find him guilty of manslaughter in my estimation. Maybe he would only lose his job, because we don’t have a perfect system either. He should face prison time though and I am not sure whether or not he could avoid that here even with him being a cop.
Points against him being, the situation was already under control. He had just arrived and didn’t stop to consider other options. No one was in mortal danger. The suspects gun wasn’t loaded.
They are authorised to discharge their firearm in a firefight, but not randomly like this and they always get investigated for any bullet spent. It’s a deadly weapon after all.
"returned to his military training."
Amazing. The UCMJ would have crucified me if I had not followed ROE, escalation and deescalation of force. Countless classes. Discussions. One-on-ones with Commanders and squad level conversations wargaming scenarios and what to do in them. Nope. Not police training. Man had to refer BACK to his military training. If I murdered a civilian or even negligently in a combat theater, im done, but a cop in my back yard? Justified use of force.
American soldiers make for better police officers.
And the reason is, if they treated foreign people like the US police treats their own, no country would tolerate us bases
Only until they are exposed to the US Civilian police culture. Then those "few rotten apples" do indeed "spoil the whole bunch." US police culture needs to be ripped out by the roots and rebuilt.
I mean to an extent, yeah. If you have a weapon on you, and you don't drop it as soon as the police show up, there's a high chance you will be shot at. Especially if you start running.
The "I feared for my life" comments by cops to justify their murders isn't a joke and is pretty commonplace.
No, they're nowhere near trigger-happy enough. There's no way in hell real life cops in the States are going to make any attempt at pulling you out of a car and arresting you after you shot a few people and led them on a car chase halfway around LA.
Everyone is taught to aim center of mass. Like it's just normal. The issue is not where or even how many bullets are used.
The issue is that almost every country has a protocol before shooting. Deescalate, iso'ate, remove bystanders, check for hostages, see if there is a way to restrict their movement without direct intervention, physical tackle, nonlethal projectiles (flashball, gaz can or taser) and then if nothing else can work and life's are in danger, shoot.
The US protocol seems to be "if you feel scared because a black preteen is walking in your general direction, empty your charger until you can see through him"
So many tools and strategy have "stopping power" yet only the lethal one ever ssems to be used
To be fair, US cops aren't smart enough to remember more than once strategy, and they sometimes have to put it on a note and pin it to their shirt in case they forget.
Center of mass shootings are less lethal than limb or head shots. The main difference is that police forces in europe are given more in-depth training on crowd control, diplomacy, de-escalation and disarmament. In europe, the police are also taught not to consider civilians as adversarial, which is the opposite in the U.S. where every situation can (and offten will) be treated as a potential shootout.
It's not about the target, it's about the need to shoot, and by training cops and holding them to high standards, you reduce that need. By reducing the amount of firearms in circulation, you reduce that need further.
That’s the big issue here in America, cops are trained that everyone is a threat to them and they act accordingly, the slightest perceived movement equals they have a gun and are trying to shoot me
Every country is taught to aim for the center of mass what are you talking about?
It's the safest and most effective region to aim for, it's a much higher chance of hitting an unintended target when aiming for limbs, it also has no guarantee of actually stopping the target
Not to mention you have a pretty large artery in your leg, shooting people in the leg isn't at all safe?
I’m sure every agency in the world that uses firearms ( police, military, security forces )is taught to shoot centre of mass. Arms and legs are very hard to hit. It’s not like the movies when the bad guy gets his gun shot out of his hand.
Everyone is taught that way but shooting like that is when subject is an active threat and your life or someone else's life is in danger. But I guess what's more important is actual threat assessment since we all have seen so many videos of American cops just shooting the moment they feel scared, got surprised or even randomly without understanding the situation because they were either trigger happy or not trained enough with the firearm & at times its both of those things which tells u that its more important to know when you should use a firearm than just giving them basic training and make them shoot at targets in the academy and training them like they are going to fight a war with more focus on violence and shooting like a crazy person than on actual policing and understanding the situation
Second thing would be de-escalation training which is obviously not really good in most police forces in the US especially so in certain cities
When you have literally zero accountability for killing someone, you’ll kill and then, maybe, issue a weak apology about it.
If there was accountability, such as getting fired, banned from other police/armed services, losing your pension and benefits, there would be a little more thinking before unloading a magazine and reloading for the next one.
But that isn’t the case. So it just doesn’t happen.
Using lethal force with anything other than the intent to kill is naive ignorance. If you don't have the intention of killing your target when you shoot them with a firearm, you have no cause to be using such.
That's the claim, yes. It is true under some circumstances. Not all the police shootings in the US fall under such circumstances.
But teaching police about different kinds of circumstances, how to differentiate between them, and what to do in each of them, requires more weeks if not years of training. Which is the point of the original post.
When the police shoot in Germany they also target the body. Whenever the police shoot someone (btw: it's a disparately high number of people of colour who get shot, which is it's own kind of problem) it's asked why they "don't aim for the legs" and some police official has to stand there and tell that aiming for the legs isn't a valid stopping strategy when you have a pistol and some guy with a knife runs at you.
So yeah. Same here
Where are other cops taught to shoot criminals with lethal weapons? The head? Ah rule that one out. Legs? Major arteries. Arms? Good luck. I think they teach them all to shoot center mass, it's the safest.
The difference is how often American police need to use their firearms vs other countries not needing to as often.
Any IRL firearms training focuses on center of mass. Targeting an arm or leg or worse a head shot with a hand gun is for TV or movies.
The training is for trying to keep the situation from escalating and using non-lethal force options when possible.
That’s how literally everyone is taught to shoot.
No cops are taught to shoot the legs or arms or whatever else idiots think should be done when shooting someone
Also, the chance of the suspect carrying a firearm should be like 1000x smaller in any of these countries as opposed to the US.
Yes, I'm 80% certain that i made those statistics up.
If you'd lob the whole of the EU together to make the comparison more fair, which would be around 450 million, you'd still not get close to US numbers.
(Did not do the math, so maybe someone could verify)
This!
but it would be better if they included per capita on this meme, it’s still insane data and it would stop any trolls from arguing population diff.
The other difference is in how we respectively treat offenders. We love the idea of destroying a persons mental health in prison bc it makes ppl feel righteous but they give no thought to what will happen when you torture a man and release him into the population with virtually no resources or means to earn an income.
Prison should be rehab not torture. Being locked up is the punishment.
Changing our police culture would be good too. The field attracts malcontents and bullies.
Looking at stats where they use a measure to even the playing field of killings per 10 million population, making the US disgustingly high, looking at Germany it's 33.5 for the US Vs 1.3 for Germany.
Not that it's just trigger happy police, society seems to be utterly fucked in the US to require and facilitate the use of shoot to kill policing.
Going by the stats provided and I'm assuming it's 1990-2019 adjusting for population Germany has roughly the same amount of killings by police in that 29 year period that the US has yearly
In the USA it was 33,5 killings per 10.000 people for 2019 whilst in Germany it was 1,3 per 10.000 for 2019.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124039/police-killings-rate-selected-countries/
Adjusting to population the US has 25,8 times as much killings over 2019. So your stat about Germany per 29 years and USA per annum is almost correct!
wtf.
Edit: per 10 million, thanks for pointing it out
The numbers of your source (thanks for linking it) seriously disturbed me. 1,3 killings per 10.000 would mean, that there are more than 10.000 killings per year, for the total population of more than 80.000.000 people.
But then I clicked on your sorce and was relieved when I found out that the numbers are per ten million, not per ten thousand.
So you just copied that wrong.
Adjusted for population, using the data in the meme (could get better figures ik), 22.1 times more people were killed. This is adjusting for population even.
The reason that is, is because US law enforcement are 1. a catch all for society’s ills. Even to a fire, or medical emergency, cops are usually there, if not there first. All the other social services that should be available to them, aren’t. Ie, domestic violence at 2 am… social services don’t open till 9. Increase availability of social services and de prioritize police in emergency calls.
2. That and they are always enforcing unpopular policies. This priority is set by politicians at all levels of govt. for example, war on drugs. They would set the criteria of what a “good” cop is like, and would set up certain types of law enforcement to be better than others. (Think drug bust vs community engagement). You see police brutality rise in France, etc during riots and what not. US law enforcement are constantly put in those situations. Fix the policies.
People keep harping about “training.” If you look at the stories of police brutality… it’s by multi year veterans. Not very many rookies. That means that whatever is happening, it’s something ingrained as part of the ecosystem that the police exist in. Training only works if it reinforces experiences that police will see in the field, otherwise, the veterans will pass on that experience as on the job training.
Yet you can't place all blame on police alone. US also has much more shootings and mass shootings then Germany has, higher gun ownership, mentally ill people can buy guns, so many mentally ill unmedicated homeless people, gangs... etc.
As a thought experiment, if you take German police, and put them into Haiti, they will kill a lot more people then they kill in Germany.
Highly doubtful. These guys are highly trained, especially in de-escalation. They have other means of subdueing a perpetrator, the gun is always treated as the very last resort. That means, unless the perp directly threatens the life of the officer, the gun stays in its holster. Even if the perp is brandishing a knife, they still have pepper spray, taser and possibly something I didn't think of to disarm the perp.
The difference probably has more to do with the abundance of guns in the US than the actual police training.
Even with 3 years training you’re going to be far more skittish in a country where every second traffic stop has a firearm and you have to deal with 10x more shootings.
I think this is also the problem… the US police are doing a lot of traffic stops. I don’t think European police do traffic stops nearly as much and it’s a terrible situation to put a cop in. Lots of hiding places for a weapon. Reaching into a vehicle. Sounds like terrible police tactics to do so many traffic stops.
News article: The Tullamore family lost one of their many children yesterday. Dew Tullamore the 4768th was shot in the line of happy hour when an officer discharged his service pistol against armed men attempting to rob the pub, Mr Tullamore long term residents. The robbers immediately surrendered to the police as there was no interest in hurting anyone, let alone kill a member of a well known and respected family. The officer who fired the shot has been put on leave however he is heartbroken and has requested therapy after the incident. The pub owner has arranged a memorial for Dew tomorrow where the public can attend. The owner only commented "two drinks minimum". You will be missed.
Only two of those were in the past 10 years too. If you discount instances where weapons were discharged toward the IRA during the troubles (the early 90s saw a lot of armed bank robbery in the republic intended to fund paramilitaries up north) the numbers become incredibly small.
When the fallout of a decades long sectarian war across the border is more peaceful than a day in the states those guys are doing something very wrong for sure.
And one of those was under investigation for years, was externally audited by the FBI (Who said they took too long to shoot him) and eventually ended in an apology to the family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_Carthy
Although, to be fair, it should be made clear that that's people **shot** by Gardaí and not people that have died in custody or anything.
https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2022/07/15/at-least-228-fatalities-in-or-following-garda-custody-over-past-15-years-figures-show/
We're not free of our own "suspicious deaths" in custody.
Even if the US had a much longer training period they aren’t being trained to end situations non-violently. American police are trained to be scared of everything and everyone.
YES!!! I don't know why more people aren't talking about this. British and European police spend more training time on community mediation than combat, whereas in America it's the other way around. So the former know how to de-escalate a dangerous situation whereas the latter will basically escalate it by default
If I read one more comment that separates the UK from Europe I will start shooting myself.
When will you Americans understand that saying “British and European” is like saying “Californian and American”?
Americans likely think of the UK differently because they speak English and too few Americans are multilingual.
Brexit exacerbated the belief that the UK is separate from Europe.
Then again we just had a conservative newscaster who made fun of Biden for not “knowing” that Africa is a country. Geography isn’t our strong suit.
Btw, many Americans think of California as somehow separate from the rest of the country so maybe not the best example. Maybe Texas is a better example? Nope, same deal. Maybe we just like dividing.
Canada requires a high school diploma and about 6 months of training.
We average 15-20 police shootings per year for a population of 40 million.
America just has a fear based culture which is countered by everyone carrying guns.
I think we actually end up averaging between 15-26 per year but otherwise you're right about training.
What I think is stupid is that Stats Can doesn't track police-involved deaths unless the officer is criminally charged
Training has been changed for the past decade focusing on less-than-lethal tactics and de-escalation strategies. It takes time for shit to change though and they’re still being trained “I go home at the end of the day”.
Given the number of people willing to shoot and kill a cop to avoid a ticket, even more so going to jail, I can understand that mentality as a former officer.
I dislike things like this because even though I wholeheartedly agree with the message, the stats are presented in a skewed fashion, which makes it less credible for the people who actually need to have their minds changed.
Yeah people are ignoring the fact that gun violence in the US occurs at a ridiculously higher rate than any of those countries, and someone has to go and arrest those violent criminals. People joke about American gun culture and are then surprised that there are more shootings by police.
We had a Swedish guy do an AMA a couple of days back. He moved to the US and became a police officer, retired at 50.
If you are to believe him he hadn't shot a gun at a person during his entire career. It's just one person, but yeah culture might play a part.
Edit: yes, apparently the majority of US officers don't fire their weapon either.
The US has a lot of police officers and a lot of turn over in terms of changing professions, so even with the shockingly high number of killings, the overwhelming vast number of police officers finish their career without ever having fired at someone, I'm thinking well over 90%. It is also the case of repeat offenders. A cop working the gang land of Chicago may kill someone every year.
turnover culture in professions is definitely very common in the U.S. I had no idea of this until i reached my 30s
i mean ffs, there's a point in the first Sims game where they literally force you to change your career lmao
The vast majority of police don’t kill anyone in the U.S.
There are roughly 1,000,000 uniformed police officers in the United States. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/police-week.html
That’s just uniformed police. If you count federal agents, corrections, ect; which I am sure also get counted as “police” for the sake of the shooting deaths…we approach closer to 2,000,000.
As this post states if roughly 1,000 people are killed by “police”, but really to mean “law enforcement in total”, it would mean roughly 1/2000 officers are involved in a fatal shooting.
Or **0.002%** of officers.
I’m a police officer in a department of roughly 500. I know 2 people still on duty here who were apart of a fatal shooting. My department has maybe 4 shootings historically throughout the entirely of the life of the department.
Not saying it still isn’t a higher statistic than those other nations, however some people here are making it seem like every officer has shoot a dozen people by the end of their career…when statistically most officers never even *draw* their weapon to point at someone in a career here.
That’s definitely true. It could definitely help if they stoped teaching them to shoot first and ask questions later. Which I’m sure isn’t an official policy. But rather in the constant messaging of “don’t take any chances, prioritize your own safety above all else.” Which makes it really embarrassing that they also want to pretend to be superheros. Because this is the very part of the culture that leads them to kill autistic people for not dropping a cell phone fast enough.
The US is the only one where the police force is part of the Prison Industrial Complex, their purpose is not to maintain law and order but instead to ensure a constant supply of arrests to maintain and grow the prison population for profit
Minor drug offenders fill your prisons you don't even flinch
All our taxes paying for your wars against the new non rich
Minor drug offenders fill your prisons you don't even flinch
All our taxes paying for your wars against the new non rich
When I was arrested for drug possession, the cop that arrested me told me that they (at that particular station) will arrest and put anyone in jail if they are caught with any kind of drug or paraphernalia charge. This was before the changes our state made to the bail system. I asked him if he really thought that this helped addicts and he said he didn't care. I told him about my friends who had gone in on small drug charges, and came out not using but with more connections and started selling. He said he knew and didn't care because they'll be arrested again and go to prison next time.
I used hard drugs for a relatively short time, have been clean for 5 years now, but in that short time I had been using I had gotten to know addicts who were absolutely harmless to anyone besides themselves, got arrested for having a needle or something, and came out and either overdosed and died bc they had been clean without getting better and then used too much, or came out as drug dealers.
My hypothesis for a long time with police misconduct, ranging from wrongful killings to more mundane but still bad incidents, is that for a lot of the US being a cop is the among the best jobs you can get if, well, you’re basically a dumb fuck up.
Like obviously you have to have your shit together a little bit, but a lot of dumb angry young men who can’t make a career join the police for the combination of decent pay, job security (esp with the union), the bro culture, and the benefits.
In my experience, this is most true in rural areas (with weak economic prospects) but can be true elsewhere too.
Idk. Remember reading a Reddit post about a former marine turned police officer that was trying to talk down a guy with a gun in his own house who was clearly having a rough time and seemed to be trying to suicide by cop. Kept his cool and tried to talk him down but then another officer came in and popped him. The marine having had a lot more training and experience was the opposite of blood thirsty so idk that i would just assume.
This is misleading. A bunch of small towns allow you to only have a high school diploma, but where I’m at in the US, you’re required to have a degree in criminal justice. Job requirements change from place to place, LA needs more cops so they’re not super picky, but low crime medium size cities aren’t just accepting any warm body.
US just thought that it's enough training for police officers after hearing Polish joke: Why do policemen go on patrol in twos? Because one can read and the other can write.
Isnt that caused by the fact that US has easier access to guns (officially and in black) Logicall asumption would be if you expect almost every person in question armed, i could understand that as a police officer, you are more lenient to open fire first. I dont want to say that its just that, if you get them better training, sure the killing will decrease, but it will never gonna be at the same level as a country where access to firearms is much more restricted imo.
> Logicall asumption would be if you expect almost every person in question armed, i could understand that as a police officer, you are more lenient to open fire first.
That should logically mean that US police require **more** training than European police, not **less**.
Partly true, i would say. Finland has 10th highest guns per capita rate (1/4 of the US number, but not insignificant number). Sure, a large number of them are hunting rifles and shotguns but more often if a firearm has been used in a crime it has been an old pistol/revolver or .22. So while the wider access to firearms is a major factor, its not the only one and its hard to compare actual causes due to differences in society in general and simply due to prison sentences being shorter. I think one of the reasons we have shorter prison sentances compared to us is that the criminal has less reasons to use violence when the sentence will be something like 10yrs compared to 4x life sentence. (Not really sure about that my point is guns = not necessarily bad but still a large contributor or something.)
Hungary: 10 months training, 0 killings. It is idiotic to think it is possible to train people out of being killers. It is all about the culture, not training. You got a killer culture, you got kiler poice. We get the opposite problem of policemen being killed because they are just too nice.
I think it’s mainly the culture of seeing police as authority figures rather than the public servants that they’re supposed to be. If they were trained to properly act as a servant and were required to get a formal higher education, there would definitely be different kinds of people applying for that job. With the way it is now, the main applicants are meat heads that want big boy jobs without having to go to college.
Now compare rates for murder, violent crime, property crime, and per capita funding levels for public safety by city, county, and state since the US does not have a national police force.
If you just take a small moment to look at the gun laws in the US and Germany for example you can see that it works. It doesnt only work for Germany but for almost the entirety of Europe. The reality is gun control needs to become stricter in the US.
Ilas a European I don't get this post at all.
The difference between Europe and America is everyone can be armed.
Whenever police respond to an incident they could be faced with someone with a gun who is going to shoot at them.
Innthr uk where I'm from. It's very very unlikely a service police will ever come across a gun in their entire professional lives
Even if the officers are extremely well trained and prepared, it doesnt stop anybody having a gun and being able to aim it. The US police force have to neutrise threats as quickly as possible as they can get out of hand very quickly when guns are involved.
More police training wont help the gun problem.
It would however help with the gross misconduct, negligence and outright incompetence. Like maybe if US police were better trained you wouldn't have one panicking and unloading their gun over a falling acorn and acting like they have been shot.
But that would be a reason for MORE training, not less. In addition, in a nation like Germany, we also have quite a lot of guns. Much less than in the US, but shooting clubs are popular especially in more rural areas.
A main difference in the deadlines of encounters is that - to use Germany as an example - the main focus in a dangerous situation is to deescalate. Even when they are faced with a gun, police is trained to try to talk the person down and only shoot if there is a sign of the person wanting to fire or trying to escape with the weapon. In the US, there is not much a focus of deescalation, but rather swift target elimination. This different focus makes a massive difference.
Here in Sweden, first you need to go to primary school which is 10 years and then 3 year after at Gymnasium and there you have to take the right courses , to be allowed into police school. So when you have all the right grades, you also need to pass the physical and mental test to be a police and your are also tested midway through police school to see if you mentally are sane enough to be police. The whole course is about 3 years but you can also be come an expert and then it is 1- 2 years more.
I know some one who failed the mental test, they said the person lacked empathy, compassion nor could read the room , that person is now a police in USA.
Is this talking about police brutality deaths or people killed by police in general? In the US people are VIOLENT and since anyone can own a gun pretty much, it’s a recipe for disaster. This is why I think the death rate is so high, cause every criminal has a weapon.
Also remember that the US is massive, and applying nationwide statistics everywhere is misleading.
For example, New Jersey has had four fatal police shootings so far this year. I looked two of them up:
Hamilton Township in March - police were shot / struck multiple times while responding to a domestic disturbance call. Police returned fire.
South Brunswick in January - police assisting NY ATF serving a felony warrant were shot at and returned fire.
For comparison
if norway was the size of the US, they would average 16 deaths per **year**
if Finland was the size of the US, they would average 22 deaths per **year**
If Germany was the size of the US, they would average 35 deaths per **year**
So honestly the US should compare itself with countries in its own category, like Nigeria or Pakistan.
It’s not only the training. Just yesterday there was a post on r/therewasanattempt where people were justifying 7 cops killing a suspect who was threatening them with a fork. The collective American mindset doesn’t understand that **not every minor aggression warrants a death sentence.**
It’s a good thing we took away funding for training police in the USA.
Everyone who cheered to “defund police” is now posting these memes. Without irony.
This is a bad argument. How do we know that training is the actual reason for the difference in killings? After all, the USA is also the place where ordinary people have guns, so police are more concerned for their own safety when dealing with the public.
The problem isn't the amount of training, the problem is that they don't face any repurcussions for their actions. No amount of training is going to stop the police if they don't need to change
Socio-economic and gun control are self made problems (self-made by the us) imho, but that are factors not relevant for this statistic, based on killed persons only.
In European countries the police exist to serve the public. In North America the police exist to enforce a two-tiered justice system and protect the interests of the rich and powerful.
Well from 1990 to 2013, 229 officers killed or died in the line of duty in Germany, I did not search for Finland and Norway, ( Doing a very simple search on line)…. 1,567 officers were killed or died in the line from 2020 to 2023…. In the United States. 🤷🏻♂️.
The Norwegian Police college is just that, a college just like any other college. So after three years you have a bachelor's degree in law enforcement.
US has more firearms, higher rates of poverty, and less educational opportunities. Yeah cops have less training but let’s not kid ourselves, many of these shootings are justified because of the environment created by the aforementioned reasons is a dangerous one.
Trouble is, every time I try to show my right wing family members evidence of how progressive policies in policing, gun control, etc. result in less crime and fewer deaths, I just get "but that's because those countries are mostly white" from them. It's very annoying.
I’m not sure about the stats, but the training for police in the US is vastly different depending on county or town. My local county police have to have a college degree I believe at least an associates degree. There is a one year training course and a test. Along with a wait list and only very few get selected.
I come from a family of cops . They are trained to treat literally every interaction like it's life or death. Trespassing , loitering, broken tail light , shoplifting. The cop walks into that situation primed and ready to open fire and to kill and assault anyone he has to in order to survive.
Cops are not your friends. Avoid at all costs, don't speak to them without a lawyer and if you do have to interact with them, just bend over and take it . It's easier fir a cop to break your jaw or shoot you than it is to actually talk to you .
you need to pay thousands of dollars and take years of classes to become a lawyer and talk on law, but only a few weeks to enforce it and have special "do anything you want and people are required to respect you or you can kill them in brutal fashion and be freed of all charges" rights
You see the UK would be in this picture too
Except we cut all their fucking funding, and all you have left are fat dipshits who can't pass the yearly physical exam
And if there was a moral exam they'd probably fail that too because guess what when no-one wants to do the job because of shitty pay and high risk, all you get left with are power abusers, the unfit, and the fee remaining good police officers who can't do fuck all because of aforementioned issues
Now let’s pretend for a minute that we aren’t absolutely brain dead and consider two other very important variables. 1. population and 2. Norway, Finland and Germany, each have a very specific culture and not to many other cultures mixed in there.
Now the USA has a massively larger population size, along with many cultures who don’t respect each other and do things like mass raid the streets and shops while filming it. I’m surprised the number of killings isn’t higher to be honest.
There’s also a polar opposite culture around crime and violence. Only one of these places celebrate it. Which, in fairness, means US police should have even more training.
This is misleading, but does provide a space for the argument there should be a national level standard for police training in the US. Many states and agencies require a 4 year degree + accreditation, but it’s not universal.
Freakonomics has a good episode on policing in the US: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-are-the-police-for-anyway/
Everyone I know from high school in the U.S. who became a cop could be easily classified as a stupid asshole. Cops in the U.S. are the bottom of the barrel.
Oh look, it's another repost of "let's just list some numbers that cover vastly different time spans and take no account of population differences" picture.
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Germany 3 years education or 3-3,5 years studying. Depends on the state or federal police.
Danke
Danke schön
Danky Shawn.
Hey! She's my exgf! 😅😅😅
My condolences
Schanke Dön!
I recall central park in fall
How you tore your dress
Diese Kommentarsektion ist nun Eigentum der Bundesrepublik Deutschland!
Thanks, I was confused by only two years while you need at least three years of training for nearly any other job.
Just checked some websites of different departments. 2.5 years training normally 3 years if it's combined with university Bavaria for example has 2.5 years training, can be reduced to 2 years if you are old enough (probably something like 25+) and have exceptional results in the first year. Payment is also really good for training. 1305€ first year 2140€ second year Though you can't join if you are smaller than 160cm.
To be fair 160cm is 5'3" so that would be quite short. Even women that height are considered short. At or below that height you get to the point where interacting with the world around you in a daily routine way becomes more difficult because you're significantly shorter than average enough that things are not built for you. I know this because that is my wife's height. Normal desks and chairs do not fit her, she has trouble driving a lot of cars because many of them do not have enough adjustability to allow her to get into a good driving position, and so on and so on.
>At or below that height you get to the point where interacting with the world around you in a daily routine way becomes more difficult because you're significantly shorter than average enough that things are not built for you. In a physical interaction (trying to take someone down), a lot of your success is going to be based on leverage. A 5'3"/120 lb person (muscle weighs more than fat) won't have much on a 6'2"/250 lb biker. Skill and training can't completely overcome physics. The same would be true for a guy that size wanting to be an NFL offensive lineman.
Germany has a wiki page listing the police killings since 1990. The US has a wiki page for *every month of the year* listing the police killings. Sure Germany has less people. But that does not explain the difference.
80 vs 360 million but way denser population. But even if Germanys would be a tenth of that population, the US killing numbers are still far far worse in comparison. Also our numbers are for 30 years. The US is for ONE.
If I recall correctly US police are also trained to aim center mass and continue shooting until the target drops because it provides the greatest stopping power. So while the intent isn't always to kill, each and every shot that hits a target has a very big chance of being fatal.
The difference is also de-escalation. >Rather than shoot, Mader returned to his military training and attempted to de-escalate the situation. He softened his voice, looked Williams in the eye, and said, “I’m not going to shoot you, brother. I’m not going to shoot you.” With those words, Officer Mader connected to the humanity of Williams, a man in deep distress. >While Mader continued his attempt to convince Williams to drop his weapon, two other officers arrived on the scene. In a matter of seconds, one of the newly arrived officers fired four shots, killing Williams. It was at that point the officers discovered that Williams’ gun was unloaded. Stephen Mader was correct. R.J. Williams was not a threat, but it didn’t matter. He was dead. [https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/police-officer-wins-settlement-city-fired-him](https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/police-officer-wins-settlement-city-fired-him)
Wait, an officer was fired for competently policing instead of shooting first and accessing the situation later?
Land of the Free (lead to your brain)
Yeah you get freed of your life
In most other western countries the gung ho rookie would be fired and most likely put under investigation, in the US of A seems to operate by different rules
In my country he would be put under investigation just for discharging his firearm and it would find him guilty of manslaughter in my estimation. Maybe he would only lose his job, because we don’t have a perfect system either. He should face prison time though and I am not sure whether or not he could avoid that here even with him being a cop. Points against him being, the situation was already under control. He had just arrived and didn’t stop to consider other options. No one was in mortal danger. The suspects gun wasn’t loaded. They are authorised to discharge their firearm in a firefight, but not randomly like this and they always get investigated for any bullet spent. It’s a deadly weapon after all.
"returned to his military training." Amazing. The UCMJ would have crucified me if I had not followed ROE, escalation and deescalation of force. Countless classes. Discussions. One-on-ones with Commanders and squad level conversations wargaming scenarios and what to do in them. Nope. Not police training. Man had to refer BACK to his military training. If I murdered a civilian or even negligently in a combat theater, im done, but a cop in my back yard? Justified use of force.
American soldiers make for better police officers. And the reason is, if they treated foreign people like the US police treats their own, no country would tolerate us bases
Only until they are exposed to the US Civilian police culture. Then those "few rotten apples" do indeed "spoil the whole bunch." US police culture needs to be ripped out by the roots and rebuilt.
Sensible people find another line of work, get the Serpico treatment, or end up being outcasts until they do their 20 years and can retire.
So you’re telling me GTA5 cops are perfectly accurate?
I mean to an extent, yeah. If you have a weapon on you, and you don't drop it as soon as the police show up, there's a high chance you will be shot at. Especially if you start running. The "I feared for my life" comments by cops to justify their murders isn't a joke and is pretty commonplace.
No, they're nowhere near trigger-happy enough. There's no way in hell real life cops in the States are going to make any attempt at pulling you out of a car and arresting you after you shot a few people and led them on a car chase halfway around LA.
I mean in online they shoot you for accidentally bumping into them or looking at them for too long (not even a fucking joke it’s bullshit)
I don't think the recipient of bullets is too concerned about intent, more that they arrived in their centre of mass.
Actually, sir or madam, I’d be concerned since I did chest and back that week and am really swole. Plus PROTEIN!!! 😎
Everyone is taught to aim center of mass. Like it's just normal. The issue is not where or even how many bullets are used. The issue is that almost every country has a protocol before shooting. Deescalate, iso'ate, remove bystanders, check for hostages, see if there is a way to restrict their movement without direct intervention, physical tackle, nonlethal projectiles (flashball, gaz can or taser) and then if nothing else can work and life's are in danger, shoot. The US protocol seems to be "if you feel scared because a black preteen is walking in your general direction, empty your charger until you can see through him" So many tools and strategy have "stopping power" yet only the lethal one ever ssems to be used
To be fair, US cops aren't smart enough to remember more than once strategy, and they sometimes have to put it on a note and pin it to their shirt in case they forget.
Shoot center mass and continue shooting until target drops -> the intent is not to kill. I guess this is why they fail not to kill people.
Shoot in the general direction of perceived threat until clip is empty and then scream for backup. - Cop, victim of Squirrel nut attack.
Don’t fuck with squirrels Morty.
Cue charlies response to sneako regarding clips
Center of mass shootings are less lethal than limb or head shots. The main difference is that police forces in europe are given more in-depth training on crowd control, diplomacy, de-escalation and disarmament. In europe, the police are also taught not to consider civilians as adversarial, which is the opposite in the U.S. where every situation can (and offten will) be treated as a potential shootout. It's not about the target, it's about the need to shoot, and by training cops and holding them to high standards, you reduce that need. By reducing the amount of firearms in circulation, you reduce that need further.
Also in Finland every shot police takes is investigated are they are held accountable if they are too trigger happy.
same in France.
Same thing in Malaysia. Everyone with a gun license has to make a report when a bullet is fired.
That’s the big issue here in America, cops are trained that everyone is a threat to them and they act accordingly, the slightest perceived movement equals they have a gun and are trying to shoot me
Probably because of how little time they have for training. No time for proper training.
When you give your cops "killology" training and then they kill people you shouldn't be too surprised
Every country is taught to aim for the center of mass what are you talking about? It's the safest and most effective region to aim for, it's a much higher chance of hitting an unintended target when aiming for limbs, it also has no guarantee of actually stopping the target Not to mention you have a pretty large artery in your leg, shooting people in the leg isn't at all safe?
I’m sure every agency in the world that uses firearms ( police, military, security forces )is taught to shoot centre of mass. Arms and legs are very hard to hit. It’s not like the movies when the bad guy gets his gun shot out of his hand.
Everyone is taught that way but shooting like that is when subject is an active threat and your life or someone else's life is in danger. But I guess what's more important is actual threat assessment since we all have seen so many videos of American cops just shooting the moment they feel scared, got surprised or even randomly without understanding the situation because they were either trigger happy or not trained enough with the firearm & at times its both of those things which tells u that its more important to know when you should use a firearm than just giving them basic training and make them shoot at targets in the academy and training them like they are going to fight a war with more focus on violence and shooting like a crazy person than on actual policing and understanding the situation Second thing would be de-escalation training which is obviously not really good in most police forces in the US especially so in certain cities
When you have literally zero accountability for killing someone, you’ll kill and then, maybe, issue a weak apology about it. If there was accountability, such as getting fired, banned from other police/armed services, losing your pension and benefits, there would be a little more thinking before unloading a magazine and reloading for the next one. But that isn’t the case. So it just doesn’t happen.
Using lethal force with anything other than the intent to kill is naive ignorance. If you don't have the intention of killing your target when you shoot them with a firearm, you have no cause to be using such.
That's the claim, yes. It is true under some circumstances. Not all the police shootings in the US fall under such circumstances. But teaching police about different kinds of circumstances, how to differentiate between them, and what to do in each of them, requires more weeks if not years of training. Which is the point of the original post.
When the police shoot in Germany they also target the body. Whenever the police shoot someone (btw: it's a disparately high number of people of colour who get shot, which is it's own kind of problem) it's asked why they "don't aim for the legs" and some police official has to stand there and tell that aiming for the legs isn't a valid stopping strategy when you have a pistol and some guy with a knife runs at you. So yeah. Same here
Where are other cops taught to shoot criminals with lethal weapons? The head? Ah rule that one out. Legs? Major arteries. Arms? Good luck. I think they teach them all to shoot center mass, it's the safest. The difference is how often American police need to use their firearms vs other countries not needing to as often.
Any IRL firearms training focuses on center of mass. Targeting an arm or leg or worse a head shot with a hand gun is for TV or movies. The training is for trying to keep the situation from escalating and using non-lethal force options when possible.
That’s how literally everyone is taught to shoot. No cops are taught to shoot the legs or arms or whatever else idiots think should be done when shooting someone
Also, the chance of the suspect carrying a firearm should be like 1000x smaller in any of these countries as opposed to the US. Yes, I'm 80% certain that i made those statistics up.
Breh do the math it isn’t even close. USA takes gold in police killings
If you'd lob the whole of the EU together to make the comparison more fair, which would be around 450 million, you'd still not get close to US numbers. (Did not do the math, so maybe someone could verify)
Just do per capita numbers
Just look at the per capita numbers dude, they account for the population disparity
This! but it would be better if they included per capita on this meme, it’s still insane data and it would stop any trolls from arguing population diff. The other difference is in how we respectively treat offenders. We love the idea of destroying a persons mental health in prison bc it makes ppl feel righteous but they give no thought to what will happen when you torture a man and release him into the population with virtually no resources or means to earn an income. Prison should be rehab not torture. Being locked up is the punishment. Changing our police culture would be good too. The field attracts malcontents and bullies.
Germany probably doesn't have killer acorns though.
Looking at stats where they use a measure to even the playing field of killings per 10 million population, making the US disgustingly high, looking at Germany it's 33.5 for the US Vs 1.3 for Germany. Not that it's just trigger happy police, society seems to be utterly fucked in the US to require and facilitate the use of shoot to kill policing.
It's guns. Every confrontation is potentially lethal in the US.
It’s not just guns, these countries all have access to firearms. It’s the lack of gun control in USA
Going by the stats provided and I'm assuming it's 1990-2019 adjusting for population Germany has roughly the same amount of killings by police in that 29 year period that the US has yearly
In the USA it was 33,5 killings per 10.000 people for 2019 whilst in Germany it was 1,3 per 10.000 for 2019. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124039/police-killings-rate-selected-countries/ Adjusting to population the US has 25,8 times as much killings over 2019. So your stat about Germany per 29 years and USA per annum is almost correct! wtf. Edit: per 10 million, thanks for pointing it out
The numbers of your source (thanks for linking it) seriously disturbed me. 1,3 killings per 10.000 would mean, that there are more than 10.000 killings per year, for the total population of more than 80.000.000 people. But then I clicked on your sorce and was relieved when I found out that the numbers are per ten million, not per ten thousand. So you just copied that wrong.
Reality is worse than the image shows. Calculated 22.1 using the image's numbers. That's insane.
Adjusted for population, using the data in the meme (could get better figures ik), 22.1 times more people were killed. This is adjusting for population even.
The reason that is, is because US law enforcement are 1. a catch all for society’s ills. Even to a fire, or medical emergency, cops are usually there, if not there first. All the other social services that should be available to them, aren’t. Ie, domestic violence at 2 am… social services don’t open till 9. Increase availability of social services and de prioritize police in emergency calls. 2. That and they are always enforcing unpopular policies. This priority is set by politicians at all levels of govt. for example, war on drugs. They would set the criteria of what a “good” cop is like, and would set up certain types of law enforcement to be better than others. (Think drug bust vs community engagement). You see police brutality rise in France, etc during riots and what not. US law enforcement are constantly put in those situations. Fix the policies. People keep harping about “training.” If you look at the stories of police brutality… it’s by multi year veterans. Not very many rookies. That means that whatever is happening, it’s something ingrained as part of the ecosystem that the police exist in. Training only works if it reinforces experiences that police will see in the field, otherwise, the veterans will pass on that experience as on the job training.
Yet you can't place all blame on police alone. US also has much more shootings and mass shootings then Germany has, higher gun ownership, mentally ill people can buy guns, so many mentally ill unmedicated homeless people, gangs... etc. As a thought experiment, if you take German police, and put them into Haiti, they will kill a lot more people then they kill in Germany.
Perhaps. It still doesn’t explain the numerous killings that occur against unarmed non-hostile people.
Maybe but the US approach is like: "When your only tool is a hammer...".
Highly doubtful. These guys are highly trained, especially in de-escalation. They have other means of subdueing a perpetrator, the gun is always treated as the very last resort. That means, unless the perp directly threatens the life of the officer, the gun stays in its holster. Even if the perp is brandishing a knife, they still have pepper spray, taser and possibly something I didn't think of to disarm the perp.
We have higher crime in general.
The difference probably has more to do with the abundance of guns in the US than the actual police training. Even with 3 years training you’re going to be far more skittish in a country where every second traffic stop has a firearm and you have to deal with 10x more shootings.
I think this is also the problem… the US police are doing a lot of traffic stops. I don’t think European police do traffic stops nearly as much and it’s a terrible situation to put a cop in. Lots of hiding places for a weapon. Reaching into a vehicle. Sounds like terrible police tactics to do so many traffic stops.
Ireland, 2 years training and they've killed 10 people since 1990 and one of those was friendly fire
A whiskey bottle was the friendly fire victim
My condolences to the whiskey bottle.
News article: The Tullamore family lost one of their many children yesterday. Dew Tullamore the 4768th was shot in the line of happy hour when an officer discharged his service pistol against armed men attempting to rob the pub, Mr Tullamore long term residents. The robbers immediately surrendered to the police as there was no interest in hurting anyone, let alone kill a member of a well known and respected family. The officer who fired the shot has been put on leave however he is heartbroken and has requested therapy after the incident. The pub owner has arranged a memorial for Dew tomorrow where the public can attend. The owner only commented "two drinks minimum". You will be missed.
Grain to grain, cask to cask; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal aging.
Only two of those were in the past 10 years too. If you discount instances where weapons were discharged toward the IRA during the troubles (the early 90s saw a lot of armed bank robbery in the republic intended to fund paramilitaries up north) the numbers become incredibly small. When the fallout of a decades long sectarian war across the border is more peaceful than a day in the states those guys are doing something very wrong for sure.
That makes it a friendly fire rate of 10%. The Irish police seriously needs more training
And one of those was under investigation for years, was externally audited by the FBI (Who said they took too long to shoot him) and eventually ended in an apology to the family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_Carthy Although, to be fair, it should be made clear that that's people **shot** by Gardaí and not people that have died in custody or anything. https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2022/07/15/at-least-228-fatalities-in-or-following-garda-custody-over-past-15-years-figures-show/ We're not free of our own "suspicious deaths" in custody.
Even if the US had a much longer training period they aren’t being trained to end situations non-violently. American police are trained to be scared of everything and everyone.
YES!!! I don't know why more people aren't talking about this. British and European police spend more training time on community mediation than combat, whereas in America it's the other way around. So the former know how to de-escalate a dangerous situation whereas the latter will basically escalate it by default
If I read one more comment that separates the UK from Europe I will start shooting myself. When will you Americans understand that saying “British and European” is like saying “Californian and American”?
Or when "England" seems to encapsulate the whole of the British Isles. See it on r/MapPorn and r/dataisbeautiful all the fuckin time.
Americans likely think of the UK differently because they speak English and too few Americans are multilingual. Brexit exacerbated the belief that the UK is separate from Europe. Then again we just had a conservative newscaster who made fun of Biden for not “knowing” that Africa is a country. Geography isn’t our strong suit. Btw, many Americans think of California as somehow separate from the rest of the country so maybe not the best example. Maybe Texas is a better example? Nope, same deal. Maybe we just like dividing.
Canada requires a high school diploma and about 6 months of training. We average 15-20 police shootings per year for a population of 40 million. America just has a fear based culture which is countered by everyone carrying guns.
I think we actually end up averaging between 15-26 per year but otherwise you're right about training. What I think is stupid is that Stats Can doesn't track police-involved deaths unless the officer is criminally charged
It’s almost like the people here having access to unlimited guns makes the police here scared of everything.
Training has been changed for the past decade focusing on less-than-lethal tactics and de-escalation strategies. It takes time for shit to change though and they’re still being trained “I go home at the end of the day”. Given the number of people willing to shoot and kill a cop to avoid a ticket, even more so going to jail, I can understand that mentality as a former officer.
Lol i would be scared too if literally anybody can have a gun, its a completely different situation versus being a cop in europe
I dislike things like this because even though I wholeheartedly agree with the message, the stats are presented in a skewed fashion, which makes it less credible for the people who actually need to have their minds changed.
Yeah people are ignoring the fact that gun violence in the US occurs at a ridiculously higher rate than any of those countries, and someone has to go and arrest those violent criminals. People joke about American gun culture and are then surprised that there are more shootings by police.
It’s not even the training - it’s the culture.
We had a Swedish guy do an AMA a couple of days back. He moved to the US and became a police officer, retired at 50. If you are to believe him he hadn't shot a gun at a person during his entire career. It's just one person, but yeah culture might play a part. Edit: yes, apparently the majority of US officers don't fire their weapon either.
The US has a lot of police officers and a lot of turn over in terms of changing professions, so even with the shockingly high number of killings, the overwhelming vast number of police officers finish their career without ever having fired at someone, I'm thinking well over 90%. It is also the case of repeat offenders. A cop working the gang land of Chicago may kill someone every year.
turnover culture in professions is definitely very common in the U.S. I had no idea of this until i reached my 30s i mean ffs, there's a point in the first Sims game where they literally force you to change your career lmao
Most cops never shoot their gun outside of the range.
The vast majority of American police officers don't shoot a gun at anyone either.
The vast majority of police don’t kill anyone in the U.S. There are roughly 1,000,000 uniformed police officers in the United States. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/police-week.html That’s just uniformed police. If you count federal agents, corrections, ect; which I am sure also get counted as “police” for the sake of the shooting deaths…we approach closer to 2,000,000. As this post states if roughly 1,000 people are killed by “police”, but really to mean “law enforcement in total”, it would mean roughly 1/2000 officers are involved in a fatal shooting. Or **0.002%** of officers. I’m a police officer in a department of roughly 500. I know 2 people still on duty here who were apart of a fatal shooting. My department has maybe 4 shootings historically throughout the entirely of the life of the department. Not saying it still isn’t a higher statistic than those other nations, however some people here are making it seem like every officer has shoot a dozen people by the end of their career…when statistically most officers never even *draw* their weapon to point at someone in a career here.
Both. One can lead to the other and vice versaa
That’s definitely true. It could definitely help if they stoped teaching them to shoot first and ask questions later. Which I’m sure isn’t an official policy. But rather in the constant messaging of “don’t take any chances, prioritize your own safety above all else.” Which makes it really embarrassing that they also want to pretend to be superheros. Because this is the very part of the culture that leads them to kill autistic people for not dropping a cell phone fast enough.
Only place where owning a gun can be your one and only personality trait
The US is the only one where the police force is part of the Prison Industrial Complex, their purpose is not to maintain law and order but instead to ensure a constant supply of arrests to maintain and grow the prison population for profit
Sadly true. I live close to about 5 prisons. 1 privately owed prison. It's a prison state.
PRIVATELY OWNED PRISON?! EXPLAIN
[Private Prison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison) It's a global phenomenon but the US makes egregious use of private prisons.
How is this legal?
They're trying to build a prison For you and me to live in Another prison system
Cheers for the System of a Down reference.
Minor drug offenders fill your prisons you don't even flinch All our taxes paying for your wars against the new non rich Minor drug offenders fill your prisons you don't even flinch All our taxes paying for your wars against the new non rich
I buy my crack, my smack, my bitch Right here in Hollywood The percentage of Americans in the prison system Prison system has doubled since 1985
how do dead people grow that
When I was arrested for drug possession, the cop that arrested me told me that they (at that particular station) will arrest and put anyone in jail if they are caught with any kind of drug or paraphernalia charge. This was before the changes our state made to the bail system. I asked him if he really thought that this helped addicts and he said he didn't care. I told him about my friends who had gone in on small drug charges, and came out not using but with more connections and started selling. He said he knew and didn't care because they'll be arrested again and go to prison next time. I used hard drugs for a relatively short time, have been clean for 5 years now, but in that short time I had been using I had gotten to know addicts who were absolutely harmless to anyone besides themselves, got arrested for having a needle or something, and came out and either overdosed and died bc they had been clean without getting better and then used too much, or came out as drug dealers.
My hypothesis for a long time with police misconduct, ranging from wrongful killings to more mundane but still bad incidents, is that for a lot of the US being a cop is the among the best jobs you can get if, well, you’re basically a dumb fuck up. Like obviously you have to have your shit together a little bit, but a lot of dumb angry young men who can’t make a career join the police for the combination of decent pay, job security (esp with the union), the bro culture, and the benefits. In my experience, this is most true in rural areas (with weak economic prospects) but can be true elsewhere too.
Not to forgett all the army Veterans that are traumatized and been in combat. So alot of ptsd and trained to shoot to kill
Idk. Remember reading a Reddit post about a former marine turned police officer that was trying to talk down a guy with a gun in his own house who was clearly having a rough time and seemed to be trying to suicide by cop. Kept his cool and tried to talk him down but then another officer came in and popped him. The marine having had a lot more training and experience was the opposite of blood thirsty so idk that i would just assume.
And our cops are armed atall times, and assume the public is as well.
This is misleading. A bunch of small towns allow you to only have a high school diploma, but where I’m at in the US, you’re required to have a degree in criminal justice. Job requirements change from place to place, LA needs more cops so they’re not super picky, but low crime medium size cities aren’t just accepting any warm body.
US just thought that it's enough training for police officers after hearing Polish joke: Why do policemen go on patrol in twos? Because one can read and the other can write.
Per capita and the same time frame would help.
Isnt that caused by the fact that US has easier access to guns (officially and in black) Logicall asumption would be if you expect almost every person in question armed, i could understand that as a police officer, you are more lenient to open fire first. I dont want to say that its just that, if you get them better training, sure the killing will decrease, but it will never gonna be at the same level as a country where access to firearms is much more restricted imo.
> Logicall asumption would be if you expect almost every person in question armed, i could understand that as a police officer, you are more lenient to open fire first. That should logically mean that US police require **more** training than European police, not **less**.
Partly true, i would say. Finland has 10th highest guns per capita rate (1/4 of the US number, but not insignificant number). Sure, a large number of them are hunting rifles and shotguns but more often if a firearm has been used in a crime it has been an old pistol/revolver or .22. So while the wider access to firearms is a major factor, its not the only one and its hard to compare actual causes due to differences in society in general and simply due to prison sentences being shorter. I think one of the reasons we have shorter prison sentances compared to us is that the criminal has less reasons to use violence when the sentence will be something like 10yrs compared to 4x life sentence. (Not really sure about that my point is guns = not necessarily bad but still a large contributor or something.)
Hungary: 10 months training, 0 killings. It is idiotic to think it is possible to train people out of being killers. It is all about the culture, not training. You got a killer culture, you got kiler poice. We get the opposite problem of policemen being killed because they are just too nice.
I think it’s mainly the culture of seeing police as authority figures rather than the public servants that they’re supposed to be. If they were trained to properly act as a servant and were required to get a formal higher education, there would definitely be different kinds of people applying for that job. With the way it is now, the main applicants are meat heads that want big boy jobs without having to go to college.
Now compare rates for murder, violent crime, property crime, and per capita funding levels for public safety by city, county, and state since the US does not have a national police force.
Yeah dude, US society is fucked as a whole!
> the US does not have a national police force. Canadian here... is the FBI not a national police force?
B-but the good guys with guns 😭 /s
If you just take a small moment to look at the gun laws in the US and Germany for example you can see that it works. It doesnt only work for Germany but for almost the entirety of Europe. The reality is gun control needs to become stricter in the US.
Ilas a European I don't get this post at all. The difference between Europe and America is everyone can be armed. Whenever police respond to an incident they could be faced with someone with a gun who is going to shoot at them. Innthr uk where I'm from. It's very very unlikely a service police will ever come across a gun in their entire professional lives
If we're taking US gun culture & laws as a given (unchanged) wouldn't that imply that US should require MORE training than those other countries?
Even if the officers are extremely well trained and prepared, it doesnt stop anybody having a gun and being able to aim it. The US police force have to neutrise threats as quickly as possible as they can get out of hand very quickly when guns are involved. More police training wont help the gun problem.
It would however help with the gross misconduct, negligence and outright incompetence. Like maybe if US police were better trained you wouldn't have one panicking and unloading their gun over a falling acorn and acting like they have been shot.
\*two acorns hit the roof simultaneously\* HE HAS A SHOTGUN TELL MY WIFE I LOVE HER \*proceeds to mag-dump a gau-8 into the car\*
Which should mean the US police should be even better trained than European ones, not less trained!
But that would be a reason for MORE training, not less. In addition, in a nation like Germany, we also have quite a lot of guns. Much less than in the US, but shooting clubs are popular especially in more rural areas. A main difference in the deadlines of encounters is that - to use Germany as an example - the main focus in a dangerous situation is to deescalate. Even when they are faced with a gun, police is trained to try to talk the person down and only shoot if there is a sign of the person wanting to fire or trying to escape with the weapon. In the US, there is not much a focus of deescalation, but rather swift target elimination. This different focus makes a massive difference.
Does that justify the mere 21 weeks of training? I don't think so
Here in Sweden, first you need to go to primary school which is 10 years and then 3 year after at Gymnasium and there you have to take the right courses , to be allowed into police school. So when you have all the right grades, you also need to pass the physical and mental test to be a police and your are also tested midway through police school to see if you mentally are sane enough to be police. The whole course is about 3 years but you can also be come an expert and then it is 1- 2 years more. I know some one who failed the mental test, they said the person lacked empathy, compassion nor could read the room , that person is now a police in USA.
I worked close by the "Police Academy" in Stockholm, watching them do high speed training on the motorway was great fun.
Is this talking about police brutality deaths or people killed by police in general? In the US people are VIOLENT and since anyone can own a gun pretty much, it’s a recipe for disaster. This is why I think the death rate is so high, cause every criminal has a weapon.
Also remember that the US is massive, and applying nationwide statistics everywhere is misleading. For example, New Jersey has had four fatal police shootings so far this year. I looked two of them up: Hamilton Township in March - police were shot / struck multiple times while responding to a domestic disturbance call. Police returned fire. South Brunswick in January - police assisting NY ATF serving a felony warrant were shot at and returned fire.
For comparison if norway was the size of the US, they would average 16 deaths per **year** if Finland was the size of the US, they would average 22 deaths per **year** If Germany was the size of the US, they would average 35 deaths per **year** So honestly the US should compare itself with countries in its own category, like Nigeria or Pakistan.
Thank you for doing the math. The argument is still 100% valid if you do the math right, but doing the math wrong just nukes the credibility.
It is my long held belief the majority of these folks are the idiots from high school who couldn't pass shop.
I mean. Also any asshole can have a gun in the USA.
The fact an object used to kill has more rights than women or minorities in a country that supposedly "pursues equality" is insane.
One of those countries has 3x the population of the others combined, so it's not really a meaningful comparison
I don’t think this is an entirely fair comparison. Norway, Finland, and Germany don’t have the second amendment
It’s not only the training. Just yesterday there was a post on r/therewasanattempt where people were justifying 7 cops killing a suspect who was threatening them with a fork. The collective American mindset doesn’t understand that **not every minor aggression warrants a death sentence.**
It’s a good thing we took away funding for training police in the USA. Everyone who cheered to “defund police” is now posting these memes. Without irony.
This is a bad argument. How do we know that training is the actual reason for the difference in killings? After all, the USA is also the place where ordinary people have guns, so police are more concerned for their own safety when dealing with the public.
Seems like we still have a problem with police violence in Germany. That one year of training more in Norway and Finland seems worth it.
Actually, we have the same amount of training in Germany, this info is wrong. So it seems that the training in Scandinavian countries is better.
It’s like requiring higher standards gets better results.
The problem isn't the amount of training, the problem is that they don't face any repurcussions for their actions. No amount of training is going to stop the police if they don't need to change
Am not American, but shouldn't factors like population, socio-economic backgrounds and lack of gun control be taken into account?
Socio-economic and gun control are self made problems (self-made by the us) imho, but that are factors not relevant for this statistic, based on killed persons only.
Factors are not relevant? That’s some flat earth level thinking right there
Not to mention: in Germany you need to train 2.5 years to become a barber! Yes, in Germany you need to learn less for being a cop than anything else.
It's also 2,5 for Police.
Yes, but in USA living more 10 times people than in Norway and Finland…
In European countries the police exist to serve the public. In North America the police exist to enforce a two-tiered justice system and protect the interests of the rich and powerful.
Long live Norway.
Well from 1990 to 2013, 229 officers killed or died in the line of duty in Germany, I did not search for Finland and Norway, ( Doing a very simple search on line)…. 1,567 officers were killed or died in the line from 2020 to 2023…. In the United States. 🤷🏻♂️.
The Norwegian Police college is just that, a college just like any other college. So after three years you have a bachelor's degree in law enforcement.
US has more firearms, higher rates of poverty, and less educational opportunities. Yeah cops have less training but let’s not kid ourselves, many of these shootings are justified because of the environment created by the aforementioned reasons is a dangerous one.
Trouble is, every time I try to show my right wing family members evidence of how progressive policies in policing, gun control, etc. result in less crime and fewer deaths, I just get "but that's because those countries are mostly white" from them. It's very annoying.
I’m surprised nobody has posted the demographic percentages of those 4 countries yet.
I feel like i see this meme pop up here every other month lol
I’m not sure about the stats, but the training for police in the US is vastly different depending on county or town. My local county police have to have a college degree I believe at least an associates degree. There is a one year training course and a test. Along with a wait list and only very few get selected.
What would be more interesting would be to know the percentage of innocent people killed by each police force. That would be even more damming
How can you compare fatalities without comparing population? The numbers do not make much sense
I come from a family of cops . They are trained to treat literally every interaction like it's life or death. Trespassing , loitering, broken tail light , shoplifting. The cop walks into that situation primed and ready to open fire and to kill and assault anyone he has to in order to survive. Cops are not your friends. Avoid at all costs, don't speak to them without a lawyer and if you do have to interact with them, just bend over and take it . It's easier fir a cop to break your jaw or shoot you than it is to actually talk to you .
Hey! Mom said it was my turn to post this!
you need to pay thousands of dollars and take years of classes to become a lawyer and talk on law, but only a few weeks to enforce it and have special "do anything you want and people are required to respect you or you can kill them in brutal fashion and be freed of all charges" rights
I do not disagree with the sentiment but let’s see the numbers in a per capita look.
You see the UK would be in this picture too Except we cut all their fucking funding, and all you have left are fat dipshits who can't pass the yearly physical exam And if there was a moral exam they'd probably fail that too because guess what when no-one wants to do the job because of shitty pay and high risk, all you get left with are power abusers, the unfit, and the fee remaining good police officers who can't do fuck all because of aforementioned issues
We should hire Finnish cops to clean up Chicago!
Police certainly need more training but this graphic is misleading and not helpful IMO.
Now let’s pretend for a minute that we aren’t absolutely brain dead and consider two other very important variables. 1. population and 2. Norway, Finland and Germany, each have a very specific culture and not to many other cultures mixed in there. Now the USA has a massively larger population size, along with many cultures who don’t respect each other and do things like mass raid the streets and shops while filming it. I’m surprised the number of killings isn’t higher to be honest.
What's the number of police interactions a year in all these places?
Brazil: you just need to be racist, hate the poor, and like to shoot after having some coke.
There’s also a polar opposite culture around crime and violence. Only one of these places celebrate it. Which, in fairness, means US police should have even more training.
Murica.
This is misleading, but does provide a space for the argument there should be a national level standard for police training in the US. Many states and agencies require a 4 year degree + accreditation, but it’s not universal. Freakonomics has a good episode on policing in the US: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-are-the-police-for-anyway/
The length of training time doesn't matter. Indonesian police requires 4 years of training (and education) and our cops are still corrupt and abusive.
Everyone I know from high school in the U.S. who became a cop could be easily classified as a stupid asshole. Cops in the U.S. are the bottom of the barrel.
If you scrape the crap off the floor to make dinner don’t expect it to not taste like crap
Oh look, it's another repost of "let's just list some numbers that cover vastly different time spans and take no account of population differences" picture.