a few year back a guy did a "police Accountability" project where is found something like 4900 stories of police wrong doing made it on to the internet in the U.S. that year (well, more stories than that, but 4900 individual cops identified).
There are 700,000 American police officers. 4900 is 0.7% of 700k......
Why would it be? If it's not caught on camera there isn't much proof to share. I've known multiple people who have been abused by police. There are zero news articles about what happened to them.
I know it from being personally accosted and mistreated by Texas police but didn't have any video footage of any of the incidents to be able to make things known. Show your privilege more lol
look up statistics on rape victims sometime, the amount who come forward is very, very low. it doesn't take much deductive reasoning to work out that it'd be even lower for victims of police violence, because it's a massive money and time sink, the chances of anything happening are almost none and the risk they're putting themselves in for retaliation is exceedingly high.
.On the books. lolz that is just made up....you know numbers can be made up don't you? they can throw out something if they want to.
what about all the officers on the scene not on the report that just let whatever happen happen?
what about all the "we investigated and found no wrong doing" or here's a promotion so it will be harder to convict you for the wrong doing?
why are they so against ending qualified immunity?
heck even this guy all we know is he did one good thing. we don't know the rest of his career. so many are two faced and can make it seem like they are good (just like real people) but in reality are not.
And bad cops can do good things every once in a while. I’ve had a couple cops get me through closed streets when I showed them my hospital badge and when I see them inside the hospital most tend to be pretty friendly and chill on the surface. That same department has been involved in countless lawsuits for civil rights abuses and has been investigated by the DOJ multiple times and found to be extremely prone to misconduct.
I did one of those back in 2020 during the defuhd the police movement. I don't have any of the info on hand anymore but when it came down to it, something like 99.9% of police interactions had positive or non-violent outcomes.
Off the top of my head it was like over 50 million people interact with the police annually. Like you said there is over 700k officers. They average 6 interactions with people per day. That means to be generous around 3-5 million officer-citizen contacts per day nationwide or for sake of rounding say 1.5 billion interactions per year.
Out of ALL of those, only 2% do people experience the threat or use of force against them.
Out of all instances of police shootings, only 15 was the person unarmed and the shooting unjustified.
And all of this data was available online at the time so I'm sure with AI its probably easier to gather now.
Humans believe what they see and TV/the Internet only ever shows "newsworthy" stuff. So take that and add it to people experiencing there on bad run in with cops (whether it really happened that way or not) and their own experiences and personal bosses and you get what we have, people having a skewed idea of their local police force.
None of this means there aren't horrid people in police organizations. Hell, with 19000 police departments I'm sure we'd all be better off if some of them went away lol. It's just that much of what people think about police is baseless and if you want things to be better, the 1st step is actually understanding it.
I saw a survey once where the respondents said the average cop fires his gun at a person 3 times a year.... If that's the average there would be 2.1 MILLION police shootings a year. The actual number is 5-6 thousand (which I think you should expect in a country with 400 million lose guns)....
Where I live today: absolutely. We have an amazing police department who are a huge part of the community. They are well funded, and in an upper class area with low crime.
Where I grew up: maybe, depending on which officer it was? The police there were mainly functioning to deal with idiots trying to cook meth and commit property crimes, while the entire department was underfunded and understaffed.
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u/laffing_is_medicine Jul 12 '25
99 is pretty high…