by Matt Agorist
According to the United Kingdom’s statistics on the police use of firearms, English cops discharged their weapons a total of 80 times since the turn of the millennium.
In stark contrast to UK cops, however, just last month, American cops sent 100 people to an early grave.
If this doesn’t highlight a serious problem with American police, then nothing will.
In the Land of the Free, police kill at more than 70 times the rate of other first world nations.
In the Land of the Free, we are told to “fear the terrorists” but US police kill 58 times more people than all terrorist activity against US civilians since 9-11!
Using the most recent numbers from 2013 to the present, and remaining conservative by using the FBI’s ‘loosely’ contrived number of 500 per year before then, the death toll reaches a whopping 8,296.
In the Land of the Free, citizens are killed by public servants at nearly twice the rate of soldiers deployed to war.
But these people are criminals, right? They deserve to be killed, right? Wrong.
While many of the citizens who’ve been killed by police in the last 15 years may have had it coming, all of them deserved due process. Not to mention, many of those killed simply came across the wrong cop while engaging in non-violent victimless ‘crimes’ like ingesting an illegal plant. What’s more, some of these victims are innocent children like 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis of Louisiana.
There is no doubt that criminals exist and present a danger to others. However, when the number of people killed by their own government vastly surpasses the number of people who died fighting for that government in foreign wars — something needs to be said.
Some will say that since the US is much larger in population than the UK, and that is why American cops kill more. But this is a farce.
To expose this farce, we can compare the US with communist China.
China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded 9 killings by law enforcement officers in 2015.
Law enforcement in the United States killed 134 times more citizens in the same period.
From 2010 through 2014, there were four fatal police shootings in England, which has a population of about 52 million. By contrast, Albuquerque, N.M., with a population 1 percent the size of England’s, had 26 fatal police shootings during that same period.
So why are police in the US so much more likely to kill than all of these other first world countries?
When we look at violent crime in this country, we can see that it is at an all time low.
While violence among citizens has dropped, violence against citizens carried out by police has been rising sharply.
We will not pretend that cops in the US kill 70 times more people than other first world countries for one simple reason. However, part of the multifaceted situation which has led to the trigger-happiness of American cops is their training.
The cop who just killed Philando Castile attended “Bulletproof Warrior” training, a year before murdering the innocent man, that taught him the public is his ‘enemy’ and he must always be ready to kill. His training worked.
This excessive violence has gotten so bad that American police chiefs are being sent to Scotland to learn steps to change this deadly paradigm. A former hostage negotiator with the Boston police department, Chuck Wexler, brought a team of cops across the pond in a last stitch effort to curb killer cops, and his story was documented by Sky News.
According to Sky News:
As the two sets of police officers met, Mr Wexler described how if confronted by a suspect holding a rock an American officer would pull out his gun.
“You’re going to kill someone for throwing a rock. That’s what you’re gonna do,” said Mr Wexler.
“How would society over here think about you shooting someone with a rock? They would not accept it.”
The senior American officers, from forces such as the NYPD and LAPD, watched demonstrations at Police Scotland training centers.
Sky News cameras joined them as they went out on patrol in Glasgow, and watched as unarmed police dealt with a variety of potentially violent situations.
What the report showed is that cops in Scotland know how to avoid confrontation. Instead of immediately resorting to deadly violence, the Scottish cop will step back, use protective shields, or move behind a car for protection.
What the report also found is that American police have a knack for verbally escalating situations too.
Sergeant Jim Young trains hundreds of Scottish police recruits every year.
“The American style of policing, it’s very authoritative,” he said.
“There’s a difference of going in, straight up at this level, whereby you’re ordering people, you’re shouting at them. You can’t go anywhere after that.
“But if you start down low you can adjust your communications to suit.”
Basically, what this experience is showing is that American police are aggressive both verbally and physically — and it’s deadly.
The good news is that there are cops out there that know this and they are taking action, like the chiefs going to Scotland, to correct it.
“It’s about time that we step up and this is our chance,” said Mr. Wexler. “It’s a crisis but it’s also our chance to do the right thing.”
While the chiefs going to Scotland to learn how not to kill is certainly positive, the violence enacted against random police officers, like the tragic events in Dallas, will be used to justify cops declaring the American public as their enemy.
Below is this eye-opening video of American cops learning to be less violent. This training cannot happen soon enough, as America is already on track to kill over 1,000 citizens in 2016.
(Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA).
