Police in the US Kill Citizens at Over 70 Times the Rate of Other First-World Nations

[Firn]

The Washington Post had an opinion which gathered a surprising amount of positive responses.

Of course, officers’ safety is vital, and they’re entitled to defend themselves and the communities they serve. But they’re failing to see the connection between their aggressive postures and the hostility they’ve encountered in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and other communities. When you level assault rifles at protesters, you create animosity. When you kill an unarmed man on his own property while his hands are raised — as Fairfax County police did in 2013 — you sow distrust. And when you threaten to Taser a woman during a routine traffic stop (as happened to 28-year-old Sandra Bland, who died in a Texas jail this month), you cultivate a fear of police. This makes policing more dangerous for everyone.

It is important to keep the statistical context in mind. The Guardian initiated a fine project, aptly named "The Counted", as shockingly there is no official statistic keeping track of how those persons.

[davidbfpo]

A sometimes hard to watch video montage of recent and not so recent incidents from the NYT:

Those videos, all involving white officers and black civilians, have become ingrained in the nation’s consciousness — to many people, as evidence of bad police conduct. And while they represent just a tiny fraction of police behavior — those that show respectful, peaceful interactions do not make the 24-hour cable news — they have begun to alter public views of police use of force and race relations, experts and police officials say.

Videos have provided “corroboration of what African-Americans have been saying for years,” said Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown University Law School and a former prosecutor, who called them “the C-Span of the streets.”

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/us...f-police.html?

The article is also worth reading about body-worn and vehicle video systems are not a magic solution.

[davidbfpo]

A long article in The Guardian; with a sub-title:

Police in Kern County, California, have killed more people per capita than in any other American county in 2015. The Guardian examines how, with little oversight, officers here became the country’s most lethal

In 2015:

In all, 13 people have been killed so far this year by law enforcement officers in Kern County, which has a population of just under 875,000. During the same period, nine people were killed by the NYPD across the five counties of New York City, where almost 10 times as many people live and about 23 times as many sworn law enforcement officers patrol.

Link:http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...olice-killings

There is an interesting table for:

America's deadliest counties for police killings this year Among all US counties with five or more officer-involved killings logged by the Guardian in 2015, Kern County saw the most deaths per capita.*
The deadliest counties — those with 10 or more deaths – are show below

[AmericanPride]

Thanks for sharing the article, David. I'm going to take a look at it shortly - I used to live just north of Kern County.

When I was in Army Recruiting, my battalion owned all of Central California, including Bakersfield and Kern County. The north-south running Central Valley (which includes the county at its southernmost portion) is not an affluent region. In fact, it has many of the markers of a third-world country, including, among other things, high food insecurity, high unemployment, and low education and health outcomes. It is dominated by the agriculture industry, which while labor intensive, does not produce a high number of jobs. There is a growing healthcare industry in Fresno (about 2 hours north of Bakersfield) but it suffers from a lack of available talent. An estimated 30% of the population is either an illegal migrant or has one in their immediate family. Needless to say, poverty is widespread. There are some projects to rejuvenate the region's economy, including the construction of a high speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The estimated train commute from Fresno to SF would be under an hour (compared to a 3 hour drive). Although the project has broken ground, there is widespread resistance from landowners and agriculture because of the loss of land and the fear of urbanization. Water is of course another major issue with the state responding to the drought by arbitrarily fining residents and municipalities for not decreasing usage by 25% but leaving the farms unregulated. Many in the ag industry have not upgraded their irrigation infrastructure to more efficient systems because of lack of capital (or lack of the desire to use it). This has raised basic cost of living for low income households. Lastly, the Central Valley is a transit corridor between Northern California (SF, Sacramento) and Southern California (LA, San Diego, with eventual stops in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Mexico). This brings through a massive amount of commercial, illegal, and transient traffic on I-5 and Highway 99. Bakersfield itself sits just north of wear I-5 and HWY 99 come together.

Unsurprisingly for recruiting purposes, Kern Country was a high producer because many of the qualified candidates (granted, it was a smaller pool), had few other opportunities. There are many structural problems in California making this problem more pronounced, such as budget cuts to secondary education institutions and the increasing difficult (and cost) on attendance at a state college.

All of Central California has experienced white flight in the last 5 years as well, leaving Kern County with a significant and rapidly growing Hispanic population. Politically speaking, the Central Valley is predominantly represented by Republicans in Congress. The Fresno police department, though serving a major metropolitan area, suffered from a lack of funds, especially after the recession and the self-imposed austerity measures that followed. Fresno PD response times are horrible and in many cases, they do not respond at all unless there is an immediate threat to life. I would think it's safe to guess that Bakersfield suffers from something similar.

I suspect these structural factors all have a bearing on law enforcement and governance outcomes in Kern County.