Washington – Police officers across the United States shot 492 people dead in the first half of 2017, on track to approach 1,000 such incidents for the third year in a row, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.
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The Post, which has been tracking all fatal shootings by police since 2015, said the tally on June 16 of this year was identical to last year’s count.
The paper said that since 2015 it had found twice as many police shootings than those recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“These numbers show us that officer-involved shootings are constant over time,” Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina, told the Post. “Some places go up, some go down, but its averaging out. This is our society in the 21st century.”
The Post began its tracking project following the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.
Brown is one of a series of black men killed by law enforcement over the past three years that have sparked a national debate over racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system.
Police are only charged in less than 1% of the annual police shootings. Rarely (even if the cop was wrong), as in the case shown in the photo, are cops ever convicted. Either such cases result in a hung jury, or an acquittal. It is as if the cops can do no wrong. In 1999, several cops fired a volley of shots in Borough Park, at Gideon Busch, because he wouldn’t quickly drop a hammer. He wasn’t charging at the cops, and his eyes had been blinded by mace. However, they took the easy way out, and killed him. The FBI was useless in that case, as they are in other cases, as they rarely go after cops, in such cases. There was a book called “Justifiable Killing by Police’, written by the 1960’s. Even then, then author pointed out that the decision to use deadly physical force in certain cases, is very subjective. The only reason that the cop, in N. Charleston, S.C., will receive a long prison term, for shooting a fleeing unarmed motorist in the back (and killing him), is because it was recorded on a cell phone video. Otherwise, that cop would have gotten away with murder. Yidden, if stopped in your car, don’t make any sudden moves to get your license, without first telling the cops.
American policemen are simply not too good at their jobs.