Population of England and Wales: 56 million (2011 census)
Police Shootings in England and Wales: 1 in 2012 and 3 in 2013 with 0 fatalities
The U.S. has roughly 6 times the population the population of England and Wales. Extrapolating their police shooting statistics to our population yields an average of 12 police shootings a year. Believe it or not, there are no reliable statistics on police shootings in the U.S., but the annual civilian death toll undoubtedly is hundreds if not thousands:
“Several independent trackers, primarily journalists and academics who study criminal justice, insist the accurate number of people shot and killed by police officers each year is consistently upwards of 1,000 each year.”
A Nevada journalist who attempts to track police shootings from news stories estimates 83 people were killed by American cops in the 23 days between August 9, when Michael Brown was killed, and August 31. If that’s representative, American cops are killing over 1,300 civilians a year.
Police defenders and apologists might argue crime is inevitable and the police are shooting criminals. But this argument falls apart on close inspection. We know police are shooting citizens on little or no provocation, and that innocent people and people guilty of only trivial offenses (such as traffic violations) are getting shot by cops. The so-called “war on drugs” with its highly dangerous “no-knock” tactics have spawned police shootings of unarmed and entirely innocent people in their own homes, including children and elderly, such as the infant that was severely injured by a police flash-bang grenade. In some cases, residents were killed simply because cops went to the wrong address. Michael Brown was merely jaywalking when he was accosted by the cop who gunned him down.
What’s more, police work is becoming safer, not more dangerous. Police deaths in the line of duty are dropping dramatically in the U.S., and traffic accidents kill more cops than guns do. In 2013, there were only 33 firearms-related police on-duty deaths, the lowest number since 1887, and only slightly double the number of cops who died from heart attacks (14) while at work.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/30/law-enforcement-deaths/4247393/
This works out to roughly 57 civilians killed by police bullets for every cop killed by a civilian. That’s a kill ratio every military organization in history would envy. (In World War 1, the Central Powers/Entente kill ratio was roughly 1.3:1, costly for the Allies but not enough for Germany to win the war.)
So why do American cops shoot so many more people than English cops do? Differences in police philosophy and policies have got to play a role. Also England, unlike America, isn’t awash in guns. But I think American gun culture matters more than the physical presence of guns. Our gun-happy culture naturally spawns trigger-happy cops. But as England’s experience convincingly shows, there’s nothing inevitable about police shooting civilians, because they have a population in tens of millions but near-zero police shootings. Clearly, our cops shoot citizens and theirs don’t because our cops think differently than theirs. That’s an attitude problem, not a crime problem. Which means it’s something we can change if we demand change.