That's the
message from many of the protesters who have
filled American cities for nearly two weeks,
demanding justice for the death of George Floyd and
seeking to end a litany of police killings of black
Americans.
The protests have rippled across the United
States and throughout the world, with activists
streaming through the streets of
many capital cities in solidarity with the
movement.
Floyd was just one of the many Americans killed by
police officers each year. But in other developed
countries, such incidents are rare.
Statistical comparisons show that police in the
US typically shoot, arrest and imprison more people
than similarly developed nations.
Each nation listed below either accompanies the
US in the G7 group of the world's most advanced
economies, or is ranked similarly on global
wealth, freedom and democracy indexes. But when
it comes to policing and criminal justice, the
US is a noticeable outlier, and black Americans
are disproportionately affected.
Data on arrests, deaths and prison populations do
not exist uniformly across developed countries, so
it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how the US
fares in comparison to every nation. For instance,
it is impossible to know exactly how many people die
at the hands of police officers in the US each year:
no single, nationwide database that contains such
information exists.
"We can't have an informed discussion, because we
don't have data," former FBI Director James Comey
told the House Judiciary Committee in 2015. "People
have data about who went to a movie last weekend ...
and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by
police in the United States last month, last year,
or anything about the demographics. And that's a
very bad place to be."
We are therefore forced to
rely on estimates -- but even they paint a stark
picture.
A
media review by the Bureau of Justice Statistics
(BJS) found a total of 1,348 potential
arrest-related deaths in the ten months from June
2015 through March 2016 -- an average of 135 deaths
per month, or just over 4 per day. (The review
excludes deaths under the jurisdiction of federal
and tribal law enforcement, and the BJS acknowledged
it does not provide a complete picture.)
By comparison, only 13 people in the UK died in
or following police custody in the closest time
period, according to the country's
police watchdog. In Australia, 21 deaths
occurred in police custody or custody-related
operations in 2015/16. Those measures are the most
accurate comparison to the US's figure of
arrest-related deaths,
according to the UK Home Office. The UK's figure
does not include every death that occurred following
police contact.
American police also shoot more people than forces
in similarly developed countries.
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The FBI
recorded that 407 people were shot in an act of
"justifiable homicide" by a police officer in 2018,
a decline on previous years. But homicides ruled
justifiable do not capture every police killing, and
the FBI's numbers are derided by many human rights
groups and news organizations which have collected
far higher figures. The
Washington Post counted 1,004 people fatally
shot by police in 2019, for instance, while the
group
Mapping Police Violence tallied 1,099.
Comey's comments to the House Judiciary Committee
illustrate the FBI's own acceptance that their
number does not tell the full story. Nonetheless,
even the FBI's figure dramatically dwarfs that of
many other countries, where police shootings are
highly isolated incidents. And police in New Zealand
and the UK (except Northern Ireland) do not
routinely carry firearms.
Canada may most closely follow the US among G7
countries. Official data is only collected when an
officer is charged, but an analysis by CNN affiliate
CBC found 461 fatal police encounters between
2000 and 2017.
Americans are also more likely to be arrested or
jailed than their peers worldwide.
A total of 10,310,960 arrests were made in the US in
2018 -- that's one arrest made per every 32 American
citizens. Those figures give the US a far higher
arrest rate than the UK or Australia, among others.
Of those confronted or arrested by police, black
Americans are more likely to be subjected to force
-- a key complaint of the protesters marching across
the US.
Police officers are more likely to use force on
black Americans -- and,
according to a 2016 study published in the American
Journal of Health, black men are nearly three
times more likely than white men to be killed by
police intervention. Comparable figures for other
countries are not readily available.
In general, more Americans are subjected to the cogs
of the criminal justice system than in many other
countries; and more end up in prison, too.
The US
has the largest prison population in the world, as
well as the largest incarceration rate per capita,
according to
World Prison Brief -- a London-based initiative
that counts inmate populations around the world
annually.
Rates are high across the country. If every US state
were counted as a country, the 31 countries with the
highest incarceration rates in the world would all
be US states, according to the
Prison Policy Initiative. Oklahoma, Louisiana
and Mississippi all have incarceration rates of over
1,000, meaning more than one in a hundred people in
those states were prisoners in 2018. By comparison,
the highest incarceration rate outside the US is in
El Salvador, where 614 people per 100,000 are
prisoners, according to the Prison Policy
Initiative.
Black Americans make up a third of the US prison
population, despite only making up around an
eighth of the country's total population.
The UK and
Canada suffer similar issues, but not on the
scale that the United States does.
The available data paints a clear and concerning
picture -- and explains why policing and justice
reform have been rallying cries of protesters
for so long.
CNN's
Sergio Hernandez contributed to this report. - "Source"
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See
also
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Houston Funeral: 'When Has America Ever Been
Great?'
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