As 2023 begins, American police polish off another deadly year, ending 1,176 lives in 2022. This number is a new record for police killings in America and yet still, it is set to increase by one, on average, every 8 hours.
Since 2018, cops in America have killed 5,668 citizens. And most people are not saying anything about it.
While it may be easy for some to write off police killings as a problem of American gun culture, this is not major factor. According to a report by the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform (ICJTR), Finland has one the highest gun-ownership rates in Europe, with around 32 civilian firearms per 100 people – but incidents of police shooting civilians are extremely rare. We could only find 9 examples of police killings in Finland in the last two decades, one of which was an accidental shooting of a prison guard.
What’s more, as TFTP reported in 2021, the majority of police killings involve calls in which there was no crime or the suspect is only suspected of a non-violent offense.
“Most killings began with police responding to suspected non-violent offenses or cases where no crime was reported,” according to a report from PoliceViolenceReport.org
It gets worse.
Hellbound and Down 