American officers are trained to kill, that is the problem
About a week ago, a video showing five LAPD officers tasering and shooting a homeless man leaked. Once again, I looked to European news and couldn’t find anything similar.
The day after the video leaked, The Guardian reported that American police officers have killed on average 928 people every year for the past eight years.
As an international student, I can’t help but compare the number to the one in my home country.
According to Norway’s police department website, two people have been killed and 18 have been injured by the police from 2002 to 2013. Obviously, the United States is way bigger than Norway, but it’s easy to see that we have a problem in this country.
There is no way that 7,424 people deserved to be killed by police since 2007.
The most significant difference between the police here in the United States and those in Norway is the way they are trained and use lethal weapons. American police are among the best trained in the world, but what they are trained to do is part of the problem.
According to an article in The Atlantic by Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and current scholar who researches policing, the police academy emphasizes their own safety more than anything else. Those future police officers are constantly told they should be afraid because every individual is a potential threat.
They have to watch painful videos of other officers being shot after a moment of inattention or hesitation. Tactics like these increase the general level of paranoia and fear among future officers.
If we look back at the video footage from the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, it’s clear how the training is impacting some officers’ actions. The officer who killed Rice did not see a 12-year-old playing with a BB gun. He saw a potential threat, irresponsibly playing with a deadly weapon. He saw what he was taught to see and did what he was taught to do.
If American officers really view people as potential threats, they have to distinguish it from a real threat and think about the consequences of pulling the trigger when it’s not necessary.
Because the culture is different, things would have gone differently in Norway. Guns are illegal everywhere in Europe except Switzerland. Because guns are only associated with violence and death, they are terrifying to many Europeans. This is one of the main reasons officers in Norway wear handguns around their waists, to show authority and frighten criminals. They rarely pull the trigger. In most cases, other non-lethal weapons like tasers or batons are enough.
Norwegian police also do not treat citizens like potential threats. In my experience, they love to talk to anyone as long as their job is not interfered with. They have even given me a ride home a couple times on a Saturday night because it was raining or I had been drinking a little too much.
When an underage male gets to ride in a police car from a bar-area, it’s usually not because of weather conditions.
This being said, it is important not to generalize American police too much. Some officers are not as impacted by training as others and know when to pull the trigger. The problem is that there are too many that are, and the result is too many unnecessary shots fired and too many innocent lives taken.
