this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 38 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Armed? Like the 92 year old in wheel chair in a nursery home, who was holding a cutlery knife?
Police calls everything armed, and they call everything a lethal threat. They are trained to be scared all the time, despite fewer policemen die from working hazards than bakers!

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 8 points 3 days ago

The biggest source of injury and death for a police man is traffic accidents. A delivery girl moving pizzas isn't much different from a police man, except she delivers delicious, not death, to people.

[–] 13igTyme@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Nursing is a more dangerous job than Police officer.

[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

Nursing is a more honorable job than police officer.

[–] EmpathicVagrant@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

•The kid with a candy bar

•The kid with a cell phone

•Whoever raises their head too much around them.

[–] qx128@lemmy.world 79 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Sure, important metric. But can you please choose better fucking colors for the graph?

[–] masterofn001@lemmy.ca 37 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Caucasian flesh tone color pencil color doesn't work for you?

[–] orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 4 days ago

I'm not colorblind, but I'm aware of the colors that don't work for those who are.

Caucasian flesh tone colored pencil is one of them.

[–] errer@lemmy.world 13 points 4 days ago

If they used brown the plot would be shot

[–] qx128@lemmy.world 12 points 4 days ago

Honestly, I can’t distinguish the colors

[–] blakenong@lemmings.world 7 points 4 days ago

If you are Caucasian and have skin that is any of those colors, please see a doctor immediately.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

To not discriminate against the colorblind, they made it hard for everybody.

[–] navi@lemmy.tespia.org 7 points 4 days ago

my color bind ass thanks you for your service.

[–] madjo@feddit.nl 5 points 4 days ago

Until this comment, I hadn't even realized there were multiple colours in the graph.

[–] jpreston2005@lemmy.world 19 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

fatal police shootings in more-Democratic states have declined 15 percent on a population-adjusted basis, with the rate holding relatively steady since Mr. Floyd’s death.

But in Republican-leaning states, they have risen 23 percent. And within those redder states, exurbs and rural areas, which tend to be more conservative than cities, have the highest rates of police killings.

You're telling me that in republican bastion states of lower education, less unions, less social spending, and more racism, is tied to more violence and a greater amount of extra-judicial killings by the state-sanctioned corporation-protectors? But they have almost 4 weeks of training! How could this possibly be??

But don't worry! They're trying to make it worse! Far worse!

This week, the Justice Department said it would no longer investigate or oversee nearly two dozen police departments that were accused of civil rights violations, including in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. And in April, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at “unleashing” law enforcement, including by directing the U.S. attorney general to “provide legal resources” to defend police officers accused of wrongdoing.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 52 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I'm not actually sure this is true. There is no complete national tracking of police shootings, and if you look at the supposed data before this graph starts, it's basically all just flat year by year, which seems pretty suspect. I highly suspect that people are processing the unknown percentage of incomplete and inconsistently-parameterized data that they have, basically a whole bunch of incomplete bullshit, into a single magic number, which suddenly blesses it with the illusion of comparability year by year which it does not have.

I suspect that the sudden rise in killings starting in 2020, which coincided with near-universal bodycam adoption, heavy pressure from the feds to reform bad departments, serious efforts by the FBI to actually track complete data or as near to it as they could gather, was a result not of increased killings but an increase in the proportion of police shootings that went into the graph.

I could be wrong. That's just my feeling.

Also, yes, holy shit these are some bad colors to choose.

[–] Balthazar@lemmy.world 26 points 4 days ago

And they should plot the numbers per capita to correct for population changes.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 4 points 3 days ago

It doesn't help that suicide by gun is considered the same as gun violence. Accurate metrics are important, and the people upstairs don't want to provide.

[–] GuyFawkes@midwest.social 39 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Thus demonstrating the power of the peaceful protest.

[–] blakenong@lemmings.world 10 points 4 days ago

Meaning it has no power, right?

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

If you divide the data into red states and blue states, you'll see that police killings have fallen in blue states, but risen in red states.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)
[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

Did. Can't seem to find it in my link pile anymore. Take from that what you will. I'll update if I can find it.

[–] jpreston2005@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The article you didn't read?

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

The article that so many people have commented on having incomplete data?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

you’ll see that police killings have fallen in blue states

Does this include deaths in ICE detention centers?

[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 days ago

The growth in 'unknown' accounts for both the rise in armed and fall in unarmed.

The systemic problem was ignored, so it makes sense the only major change is more uncertainty.

[–] tomi000@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

Sure is a coincidence that right after George Floyds murder, the amount of 'unknown' killings rose to like 5 times as high. Pretty sure those can all be booked under 'unarmed'.

[–] masterofn001@lemmy.ca 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The definition of Armed needs some context.

Police are always armed. Does that meanwe should shoot them on sight?

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 27 points 4 days ago (2 children)

This is one among a few different problems with this data. To some departments, “armed” means a firearm. To some, it means a bottle or a stick nearby. To some, it means the officer lied and put something in their report and no one follows up to make sure it’s accurate.

The mishmashing together of all the different incompatible datasets (which do not cover all of the shootings that actually happen) and then the presentation as if it’s a complete picture is just a big lie to make it look like people can make sense of what’s going on. The total lack of even the slightest attempt to disambiguate justified shootings from unjustified is probably an even bigger problem. Pretty much all this chart can tell you is roughly what the total number in an average year is, which isn’t real useful.

[–] masterofn001@lemmy.ca 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Shiny reflection from a cellphone was probably included in the armed category as well.

Yeah, police "fear for their lives" so much, it's amazing they don't just shit their pants and die crying like the racist bitches they are.

[–] Hacksaw@lemmy.ca 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I mean we all saw what happens when you put 40 police officers armed to the teeth in a school with a shooter. They shit their pants for 45 min waiting for the shooter to use up all his ammo on kids before they bravely enter the class.

Fucking cowards the lot of them. ACAB.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 points 3 days ago

I think that's more of a cultural thing. The cops who were faced with the Boston bombers were still chasing them when they were throwing homemade explosives out the window trying to blow up the pursuing cruisers. It was mostly just city cops in the big gun / explosive / car chase battle, it wasn't like some kind of elite FBI counterterrorism force, and they did fine. Some of the reporters who were following along said they actually didn't realize how much danger they were in because of how calm the cops were about it. I have seen cops on YouTube react with far more fear and takes-hours-to-approach-the-car caution to one random unlicensed driver who refused to stop than cops in the Northeast will generally do for genuinely life-threatening situations.

Small-town Texas cops from conservative areas, yes, they're cowardly bullies as a rule in my observation. That actually applies to a lot of parts of the South / Midwest of the US. I mean it is hard to generalize but here are my stereotypes of regional variation in US cops based on observing bodycam videos on YouTube which as we all know makes someone an expert:

  • Deep South, Midwest, Southwest: Authoritarian, often react with extreme almost comical levels of caution to any threat real or perceived, also tend to be low-level violent once the perceived threat doesn't materialize and it's just some hapless person they can be violent against. Putting the cuffs on after a tense situation? Better grab that person's wrist and fold it hard so they're in a lot of pain, that'll help make the whole process go smoothly.
  • California: Just poorly trained, just in general a shit show if anything real is happening.
  • Florida: Unfazed by fairly extreme levels of wildness or violence, fairly qualified at dealing with it, also often dicks but not to an extreme level
  • Northeast (urban): Unfazed by anything and generally qualified, often pretty humane and reasonable, although NYPD is an exception
  • Northeast (rural / suburbs): Mostly as for urban, but some are more as in the Deep South
[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This is one of those areas where modern AI might actually come in handy. Let it go through every bodycam for every incident and write the report without the bias of the officer on duty. And it could go through the archive of all footage to help build better statistics than this self-reported data.

Yeah, it’d have to be an openly auditable model, obviously.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, or just find some grad student. Watching 1000 videos to get a quick sense of how it can be categorized as "justified" vs "not" vs "debatable" would take some time, but it wouldn't be all that hard. Lots of research things take time. Requesting all the footage would be hard, dealing with all the holes in the database would be hard, basically the biggest of the underlying problems is that no one really cares enough to try to make any of this easy. But yes, having the reality to base the conversation on would be a very nice thing to have.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

I don’t think a grad student could handle the volume here and still has some bias, even if the bias comes from “I didn’t get great sleep last night”.

Classification algorithms have been around for decades and are the perfect use of AI.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

Part of the increase is some forces' answer to accusations of racism were to start killing everyone (who is poor).

[–] eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 days ago

"We don't need to defund the police, we need to fund the police!"

Huh I wonder why murders by police have gone up. Certainly not the fascist takeover of all levels of government.

[–] Gammelfisch@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

Not surprised, the Orange Kool-Aid drinkers are also supplying police departments with more military grade equipment.

[–] ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee 8 points 4 days ago

Are gangs standing up for themselves again?

[–] ZeffSyde@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

So... My odds of not being shot by a cop are better if I carry a replica gun, unless I'm reading this wrong.

[–] BenLeMan@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

You're reading this wrong.

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 days ago
  • s/Armed/Police claim were armed/
  • s/Unarmed/Police admit were unarmed/