Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: History of Cops Convicted of Murder Follow Up

About six and a half years ago the tracking of police shootings by the grassroots was just beginning and I compiled my own list of A Brief History of Cops Convicted of Murder. Although this didn't consist of a peer reviewed study by most academic standards it was becoming increasingly obvious that if police were less likely to commit murder it couldn't have been much less. Since then there still hasn't been a peer reviewed statistical study to show for certain that police are more likely to commit murder than the rest of us, however, there's enough raw data virtually guaranteeing that this is true, and there were statistical studies showing police were more violent at home more than twenty years ago, although this research has been ignored by mainstream media and police.

Starting in the middle of 2013 going through at least the end of 2020, there have been grassroots efforts to list all the police shootings they could find and they found over a thousand stories, sometimes over one thousand two hundred, listing their sources each year where people were killed by police. This comes to about seven or eight percent of all killings each year, although the vast majority of them are listed as justifiable homicide by the police, judicial and political establishment. the total percentage of active duty police officers at any given time is less than a quarter of one percent, perhaps as low as a fifth of one percent of the total population yet they commit seven or eight percent of all killings. Even if this is justifiable homicide, which you can judge for yourself by checking Killed By Police 2017 (includes May 2013 through July 2018 from archives) and Killed By Police (includes 2015 through November 2020 from archives), then it's far more civilians killed by police than any other wealthy stable country in the world.

Of course, in most cases if you accept the claim that most of these are justifiable homicide an argument could be made that they're defending the rest of us by stopping dangerous people from killing. However, if you keep track of the cases being highlighted by police watch groups, it's clear that a much higher percentage than the police or traditional media imply are clearly unjustifiable. In many cases, even the police are considering them murder and charging some of their own, but there are still many others where the police are covering up and trying to protect their own.

Considering the fact that current police officers make up less than a quarter of one percent of the public at any given time and the number of murders per year is typically about 16,000 or so and just under 70% of them are actually solved the share of solved murders for the police per year would be only about twenty-seven, which is only four percent of those listed as being killed by police. And this would mean that they equally likely to commit murder, not less likely as most propaganda implies; however it's virtually guaranteed that they're significantly more likely to commit murder and many other crimes as an enormous amount of data listed by cop watchers show. However, since there's relatively fewer of them, it's easier to determine if police are more likely to be serial killers, and they are. The Wikipedia List of serial killers in the United States has about four hundred and fifty entries and five of them are police, Joseph James DeAngelo; Manuel Pardo; Anthony Sully; Robert Hohenberger; and Robert Neal Rodriguez. Another police officer, Juan David Ortiz, is currently awaiting trial for killing four and kidnapping one more who escaped. Presumably the only reason he's not on the list yet is because he hasn't been officially convicted, but he has confessed, so there's little doubt that he'll be found guilty. These six don't include Stephen Richard Smith who seems to fit the definition of a serial killer and committed his murders while working as a police officer, and there could be more that aren't on this list, so it might be even worse. There's little or no doubt that police appear to be statistically more likely to be serial killers, and there are at least a few that ahve committed mass murder as well, so they may be as likely if not more likely to be mass murderers or sprre killers as well.

DeAngelo and Ortiz were both employed as police when they committed their murders, and the other three had all left the police force, but just one alone is statistically enough to be average, and with Ortiz added that's double that. Furthermore, I knew about Pardo, DeAngelo and Ortiz from previous searches and found the rest by simply searching for police on the list, but neither DeAngelo and Ortiz were listed as police officers, and Ortiz wasn't listed at all. If DeAngelo, who was arrested within the past few years and was widely known to be a police officer wasn't listed as being a police officer then there could be more serial killers that were police officers without being described that way on this page. There are even more serial killers who tried to become police officers, but didn't succeed for one reason or another including David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader, and many others, indicating that police work is more likely to attract violent people, and there's plenty of other evidence to show that those more interested in controlling others are more inclined to seek employment as police officers. Some of these people are weeded out in the recruitment process but it's likely those doing the hiring are more concerned with officers that will blindly obey orders even when it's clear the economic system is rigged towards the rich and police are expected to enforce rules that are clearly biased. Those standing up to corruption or for fairness for the working class are often weeded out instead of the most violent police officers.

Even though this wouldn't be considered a peer reviewed statistical study by many academics there's more evidence listed below to support this and the following article does cite a couple peer reviewed studies showing they're more likely to commit domestic violence at home:

One Group Has a Higher Domestic Violence Rate Than Everyone Else — And It's Not the NFL 12/19/2014

The NFL has jump-started a national conversation on domestic violence, but there's one group we're overlooking: The people we trust to keep us safe.

In families of police officers, domestic violence is two-to-four times more likely than in the general population — from stalking and harassment to sexual assault and even homicide. As the National Center for Women and Policing notes, two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10% of families in the general population.

After Rozniakowski reportedly resigned from his job Monday, police say he kicked open the door to Morrow's home, shot her to death and wounded her teenage daughter before being apprehended at the scene.

There is an epidemic of domestic violence by police officers: In the last two weeks, a Cleveland police officer was arrested for stalking and domestic violence, and officers in New Jersey and New York were charged in domestic violence cases.

A 2013 Bowling Green State University study, through news searches, tallied 324 cases of reported officer domestic violence. It is likely that this number is a gross underestimate, because as the National Center for Women and Policing has detailed, officers frequently cover for each other. Complete article

These studies have been cited so often over the years, at the grassroots level, not in mainstream media, that fact checkers looked into it, often assuming it was false; however, they found that it was mostly if not entirely true, except for a few cases where the results were exaggerated. Some of these fact checkers did point out that although 40% of police families experienced domestic violence, only 28% of those cases of violence were by the police officers them selves, which is still a lot. Furthermore, there are a lot of reports of police being much more effective at covering it up, since the victims often have to report to other police officers, who often cover for them, as several articles citing this study point out.

There's also a relatively New Study That Examines the Tragic Relationship Between Police Officers and Suicide 09/14/2019 "13 out of every 100,000 people die by suicide in the general population – that number increases to 17 out of 100,000 for police officers. During the 2018 calendar year, 167 law enforcement officers tragically took their own lives, and that number is projected to increase during 2019." As I show below, using Murder/Suicide Blogspot for a sampling there are at least thirty-nine, possibly more entries from police that kill their family members then kill themselves, which is slightly more than one percent of their total entries, while the total number of police working in the United states is less than a quarter of one percent at any given time (usually about 0.22 percent). Since this includes many ex-police there might be two or three times that but it's highly unlikely that it's a full one percent of the population, meaning police are statistically more likely to commit murder suicide if this sample is adequately random.

And there are many more murder cases against police, some involving convictions, others that probably should involve convictions as the following list of a few high lighted examples, plus many more, including some for lesser crimes. I haven't organized and counted them, and doubt if this would be enough to prove that police are statistically more likely to commit murder even when you exclude the justifiable homicides; however, this is far from a complete list, and my best guess is that given enough time this can be proven. Furthermore, even if it's not enough to prove that police are statistically more likely to commit murder there are far more than enough stories showing they routinely try to cover up for each other and aren't held to the same standards the rest of us are. There's no doubt they get away with far more, and even when convicted they're much more likely to get retrials, have their convictions overturned, or if this doesn't happen, they usually receive far more lenient sentences than the rest of us would.

A surprising number of murders by police or ex-police officers aren't even on duty and can hardly even pretend to be justified, and not surprisingly are related to domestic disputes in their own personal life. One of these is Timothy Dean a Former Sunray police chief who was sentenced for New York double murder. 08/02/2019 He conspired with another former Sunray Tx. police police officer and his wife, who he met while working at another small Texas police department, to kill her ex-boyfriend who won custody of their two children in upstate New York. Apparently one of the reasons they lost custody of her kids was that Timothy Dean was charged with abusing his step-children. This may be the same reason he lost custody of his own child from a previous marriage.

A Baltimore Police officer, Eric Banks, was also charged with murder in stepson's death. 07/14/2021 Even though he hasn't been convicted yet, since the stepson was found in a hole in the bedroom wall and the officer resisted arrest and declared "My life is over" and “choke me choke me," it seem virtually guaranteed that he'll be convicted, assuming he doesn't plead guilty. Another Maryland cop, Cpl. Michael Owen Jr., was charged with murder after a man was shot 7 times inside his police cruiser while he had him handcuffed. 01/29/2020 it hardly seems likely that he could be found not guilty either, even though so many other cops are in clear cut cases. This police officer was also among six who were being investigated for a separate fraud case against banks or insurance companies. I've reported previously that this is far more common than many other crimes by police, although they get much less attention. Even though it's far less serious than murder, the epidemic level of insurance fraud by police raises major doubts if they can be trusted to do their job.

In another case, showing how much more likely police officers are to be treated leniently when they are convicted than the rest of us a N.J. appeals court orders new sentencing hearing for ex-Deptford cop, James Stuart, who fatally shot friend. 03/02/2020 (Keep in mind, many of these "ex-cops," including James Stuart, were still working as police officers at the time of the alleged murder, although this one was while he was off-duty, and were fired during the investigation; if in doubt look it up.) This officer allegedly accidentally killed his friend after a night of drinking when he tested a blood alcohol level of 0.14%, almost double the legal drunk driving amount in most states, four hours after the shooting. He was originally sentenced to thirty years, which most of us almost certainly would have gotten. However, after this was overturned it was cut to seven years and even that was overturned meaning that he could get out as soon as it's resolved even if it's not cut much if any more, depending on how much time he spent in pretrial or out on bond, since this took place eight years ago. Of course, we're all legally allowed to appeal guilty sentences, technically at least; however, in practice it may depend far more on how much money and political clout people have, and police officers routinely show they have far more political clout and even if they don't have enough money for legal expenses, they can often collect it from unions or other unnamed sources by starting a legal defense fund; we may never know who donates to it or if there's a conflict of interest.

Another Ex-NJ cop, Joseph Macchia, who killed man during a bar fight gets 6 years in prison 07/27/2018 This cop was only convicted of "reckless manslaughter" which is why his sentence was so low. There's little or no chance that the rest of us could get so light a charge or sentence, unless we had much better connections than most people; the sentencing of many police officers show that justice or consistent guidelines don't apply to them. The family of the victims are trying to pass a law making it illegal for police to carry their guns while getting drunk, but there's little or no chance of that passing. Despite especially harsh words from this judge and many other officials or pundits there's little reason to indicate they mean it, when they routinely impose such low penalties for police while pushing for the harshest sentences for the rest of us, assuming police are even charged when they kill people, when they're usually not. He wasn't even charged right away, which is common for the police who are rarely charged quickly often until there's an enormous outrage from the community.

Another incredibly low sentence for murder given to a police officer was Amber Guyger who only received ten years for killing her neighbor when she allegedly thought she was in her own home, but wasn't even on the right floor and killed her upstairs neighbor. She even tried to get that sentence overturned but, Appeals court upholds murder conviction of ex-Dallas officer Amber Guyger, who killed neighbor Botham Jean in his own home. 08/06/2021 According to that article she will only serve ten years at the most and may be out on parole as early as 2024, which will be no more than six years in jail and some of that may have been spent out on bail. There's no way the rest of us could possibly get as lenient a sentence as that, and if we did we would be happy enough not to try to appeal it. Furthermore, her face book posts, which went viral at the time, showed and incredibly elitist attitude thinking that police were better than everyone else, and half jokingly threatening people that don't obey her quickly. She also posed with people wearing "All Lives Matter" which was designed to downplay the slogan "Black Lives Matter," without ackowledging the fact that black lives are at greater risk. Her attitude may have seemed to have changed, with or without the advise of lawyers teaching her to appear remorseful.

But at least she was charged relatively quickly, although there was a delay of a few days which ended after massive protests and the original charges were also changed from manslaughter to murder as a result of those protests; in another case, which is almost as obvious the police refused to press charges against one of their own in New York until pressured by the Civilian Complaint Review Board which Filed Charges Against NYPD Officers Brendan Thompson and Herbert Davis, Family of Kawaski Trawick and Organizers Demand Firings 09/03/2021 This took two years and there's little reason to believe there'll be a conviction, even though the evidence seems to indicate there should be. According to It Wasn’t the First Time the NYPD Killed Someone in Crisis. For Kawaski Trawick, It Only Took 112 Seconds. 12/04/2020 he locked himself out of his apartment while carrying a butter knife and a stick for some unexplained reason, when the fire department helped him get back in. Presumably, if the police had checked with them, they would have known the situation was resolved but they arrived several minutes later, and seeing the door was damaged but that a chain was securing it at the time they knocked but quickly broke the chain, breaking into the apartment without a warrant or legal justification then found Kawaski Trawick still holding the butter knife and stick and when he asked “Why are you in my home?” instead of answering him they started yelling at him to drop the knife, and within a couple minutes tased him, then shot and killed him. According to a bodycam they referred to him as "Just a Perp," saying that none of the police were hurt; however, he never committed a crime, but by breaking into his apartment without a warren they did, and they didn't abide by policy trying to deescalate the situation, instead acting in a panic. Clearly they were the real "perps" violating the law to break in and he was justified to ask who was in his home, posing little or no threat with a butter knife.

Another famous case where a former police officer wasn't charged for his participation in a murder was when Gregory McMichael and his son Travis killed Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and they weren't arrested for almost two and a half months, and then only after a video of the murder went viral and they were arrested under public pressure. Eventually A Former DA was indicted after allegedly 'showing favor' to men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery; 09/02/2021 she allegedly told two police officers not to arrest Travis McMichael who pulled the trigger. Gregory McMichael was retired; however, he only left the police force less than a year before the murder and spent more than thirty years as a police officer, and even volunteered to continue watching for burglars in his own neighborhood, which is what he claimed he was doing; however, Ahmaud Arbery was a local resident jogging and there was no reason to believe he was a burglar, let alone kill him. If he was behaving like this in retirement there's little doubt that he was as racist during his thirty plus years as a police officer.

Another Chicago cop was given a life sentence for plotting to kill a businessman, even though he didn't kill him according to Steven Mandell Ex-Chicago Cop Gets Life, Plus Five Years, In Gruesome Kidnap-Torture-Murder Plot 12/11/2014 Date of plot: 2012 which says "Prosecutors said Mandell and former Willow Springs police officer Gary Engel were on the verge of carrying out their gruesome plot when they were arrested two years ago. Engel hanged himself in his cell shortly after the arrest." This was a sadistic cop according to this story, so I don't doubt he deserved to get life in jail and this sentence could protect the rest of the public; however, when considering the fact that his intended victim was a wealthy businessman I can't help but wonder if the only reason he got such a long sentence is the victim had significantly more political power than poor people in the ghettos.

There may be good reason to believe that the Chicago police department was involved in torture on a wider basis and when they targeted the poor they were much less likely to be held accountable as indicated in a report from Democracy Now: A Black Site in Chicago? Police Accused of Running Secret Compound for Detentions & Interrogations 02/26/2014 Additional reporting shows that some of the same people torturing the poor, mostly minorities were also involved in other torture abroad as also reported by Democracy Now: Exporting Torture: Former Chicago Police Detective Tied to Brutality at Guantánamo 02/26/2014

This is just a small fraction of epidemic levels of police corruption that has been exposed over the years; in many cases, these police departments have supposedly been cleaned up and they're not supposed to be nearly as bad as they used to be; but even if this is true there's good reason to believe that many of these major prosecutions don't get all the corruption or perhaps even most of it, as indicated by new reports of more corruption. A couple of the most brazen examples are Wikipedia: Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa who are two former New York Police Department (NYPD) police detectives who worked on behalf of the New York Mafia, principally the Lucchese crime family, while they committed various illegal activities; (Date of Murders: 1980s and the early 1990s) and another example was Wikipedia: Michael Jerome Corbitt (March 17, 1944 - July 27, 2004) who was a police chief of Willow Springs, Illinois, and an associate of Chicago Outfit mobsters such as Sal Bastone, Sam "Momo" Giancana and Antonino "Tony," "Joe Batters" Accardo. Date of Murder: March 1982. There's been significant evidence showing that even if they weeded out a significant portion of the corruption in New York or the Chicago area, or many other corrupt police forces there's still more where that came from including the scandal with Joe Gliniewicz in Fox Lake in the outer North West suburbs of Chicago, that almost certainly goes well beyond the crimes blamed on Joe Gliniewicz as I reported previously in Scripted media coverage of Joe Gliniewicz's "suicide" is incomplete at best which strongly indicates there's much more corruption going on than they expose, and there's a strong possibility that it wasn't a suicide at all.

There may be good reason to believe that there might have been another alleged suicide or homicide that was an attempt to cover up more corruption in Baltimore although the corruption was still exposed as reported in 8 cops allegedly used an elite Baltimore police team to plunder the city and its residents 02/13/2018 which says "The Gun Trace Task Force, as its name suggests, was originally meant to get guns and violent criminals off the streets. In an investigation spanning over the past few years, however, federal officials uncovered a team fueled by corruption: The police officers in the unit set people up for baseless searches. They robbed people. They carried toy guns to plant as fake evidence in case they killed an unarmed person. They clocked overtime when they weren’t working at all. As then–US Attorney for Maryland (and now–Deputy Attorney General) Rod Rosenstein put it at the time of the indictment, 'This is not about aggressive policing, it is about a criminal conspiracy. These are really simply robberies by people wearing police uniforms.'"

What has received less attention was that one police officer who may or may not have been involved in the corruption allegedly committed suicide the day before he was expected to testify as reported in EXCLUSIVE | Possible suspect in Det. Suiter's death interviewed last week, says attorney. 10/14/2020 His family and some investigators believe this was a homicide, which had obvious implications. This was also reported on in a little more detail in FBI confronted Baltimore Det. Suiter weeks before his death 01/28/2021 which says:

Less than a month before Baltimore Police Det. Sean Suiter was fatally shot in the head, FBI agents confronted him with allegations that he had planted drugs at the scene of a police chase and fatal crash seven years earlier, according to an FBI document obtained by The Baltimore Sun.The document says that during the Oct. 24, 2017, meeting, Suiter denied knowledge of drugs being planted at all and was “frustrated and upset” that he had been accused of being involved.

He asked for an attorney before speaking further.The memo summarizing the interview, called a “302 report,” was provided to The Sun this week in response to a series of Freedom of Information Act requests. It shows, for the first time, that Suiter was informed that there were allegations against him in the case against fellow officers. Suiter was fatally shot in West Baltimore while on duty, one day before he was set to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the drug-planting incident, which occurred in 2010.

Suiter had been granted limited immunity by prosecutors to discuss the case.In the eventual indictment, federal prosecutors relied on the account of another officer at the scene that described Suiter as unwittingly picking up the planted drugs. Suiter’s attorney, Jeremy Eldridge, maintains that the officer had no culpability in the incident and was not concerned about being implicated. But he also said he never was told — from his client or from investigators — that there were allegations that Suiter was involved.

“The prosecutor said from Day One that Sean was not a suspect,” Eldridge said Thursday. “This information confirms what we have known from the beginning, which is that Sean has always maintained his innocence.” Suiter’s death was ruled a homicide by the State Medical Examiner’s Office and remains classified that way. An outside panel tapped by the department to review the case concluded that he likely killed himself and staged it to look like a homicide. The panel’s 2018 report noted that the FBI had attempted to interview Suiter and that he had asked if he might lose his job. The panel speculated about whether Suiter might have felt pressure about the investigation. The drug-planting case came to light in the fallout of the Gun Trace Task Force corruption scandal.

GTTF Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, in addition to pleading guilty to robberies and drug dealing, admitted to authoring a false report about the 2010 incident, which preceded the GTTF. He said that he knew drugs were planted but was adamant at his sentencing that he was not the one who did it. “I wish I had come clean when I found out the drugs were planted,” Jenkins said at the hearing. Agents told Suiter in the October 2017 meeting that they had been told multiple versions of the incident, one that involved Suiter planting the drugs.

One other version, from a fellow squad member at the time named Ryan Guinn, was that while Suiter recovered drugs from the vehicle, he did not know they had been planted. An FBI special agent “advised Suiter that there was [also] information that at some point Suiter had found out about the drugs being planted.” The agent’s name is redacted from the report. The agent “also explained to Suiter that the facts surrounding this incident were going to become public no matter what because there were going to be actions in court involving the convictions for the men who were charged with the drugs.

”Two men, Umar Burley and Brent Mathews, were convicted at the time and sentenced to federal prison for the drugs planted in their vehicle. The two men said they were startled by police who swooped in on them, and fled in their vehicle, which collided with an elderly couple, killing one person. Burley was also convicted of manslaughter.Federal and state prosecutors vacated those convictions in the wake of the Gun Trace Task Force revelations. Burley and Mathews won an $8 million civil settlement from the city that was finalized last fall.

Suiter was out with another homicide detective when, according to his partner, David Bomenka, Suiter said he thought he saw someone in an alley and stopped to investigate. When the partner was out of view, Suiter rushed into a vacant lot and was shot. Police believe he was shot with his own weapon. Police offered a six-figure reward for tips and locked down the Harlem Park neighborhood for days after the shooting. The monitoring team for the U.S. Justice Department consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department said the lockdown, which involved stops and searches of residents, raised “clear constitutional concerns.”

The ACLU of Maryland filed a lawsuit on behalf of residents, which is pending in U.S. District Court. Among the tips received by investigators was an account from a federal informant who said he was nearby when the shooting happened, and said that he was told that Suiter was shot by someone after he came upon their drug stash.But some investigators said there was a lack of evidence of a shooter, and came to believe his death was likely a suicide staged to look like a murder.

That prompted the outside review, by a panel consisting of two retired homicide detectives, a former federal prosecutor, a former New Jersey State Police superintendent and a retired chief of detectives from a New York county district attorney’s office. They said one motivation for a staged suicide was to preserve benefits for his family. In October, the city agreed to a $900,000 settlement on benefits for his family.

During the Gun Trace Task Force trial, it was revealed that at least one officer who cooperated with the government, Det. Momodu Gondo, alleged he had stolen money with Suiter and other officers in the past. The panel review noted Suiter had deleted messages from Gondo and another convicted officer from his phone.Police moved to close the investigation into Suiter’s death following the panel’s report and a review of the investigation by the Maryland State Police, but Suiter’s family has maintained that he did not take his own life and have called the case a cover-up. The Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office also said last year that it was still following up on information. There have been no recent updates about the status of the case."

This clearly indicates that many members of "The Gun Trace Task Force" might have been a greater threat to the public than the people they were investigating, some of whom might have been innocent. Whether or not Burley and Mathews were set up and possibly framed, they hit an innocent elderly couple killing one of them and had the manslaughter charge dismissed because of police misconduct, which might have indirectly caused the accident. Tax payers often get stuck with massive legal bills for misconduct like this; in this case they paid Burley and Mathews $8 million and $900,000 to the family of Sean Suiter, with at least one more lawsuit pending from the ACLU and possibly one from the family of the elderly person that was killed in an accident.

This is far from unprecedented; in a previous article I pointed out that many cities across the country pay out hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars or more for police misconduct, and in many of those cases they don't even fire the police officers or charge them with crimes, and there are more of these examples listed below. Furthermore, there are many more cases where police are caught over and over again framing suspects; if you Google "Police planted drugs to frame suspect in (pick your large city)" or a similar phrase you'll find one case after another where police are framing suspects, and the police rarely, if ever, get as much times as the suspects when they get caught.

However, even though there may be strong doubts about whether or not Sean Suiter or Joe Gliniewicz actually killed themselves or they were murdered by co-conspirators, who may include more police officers or those with criminal ties to them, trying to cover up their crimes there are still far more police suicides or domestic violence cases, including murder or murder suicide than most people realize. There was a study that says that the general population commits suicide at a rate of 13 per 100,000, but police commit suicide at a rate of 17 per 100,000, and even though there's no study listing all their murders or murder suicides, there are many more stories being reported every year indicating it's almost certain that they're as bad if not worse than the general public.

A few examples of police involved in domestic violence and murder suicide include A Texas cop, Nick Pitofsky, commits murder-suicide days after posting gun review about protecting wife: investigators 02/28/2014; A Former Houston Police Sergeant, Hilario Hernandez, Killed Librarian Wife, Whose Body Was Discovered by Daughter in 2019 06/29/2021; A Philadelphia Police Officer Kills Wife, Self in Juniata Park Home, Investigators Say 07/08/2019; and many more; I found at least five or six domestic murders by police officers, most that were murder suicides listed below. I may add to this soon, but there's little or no chance that I'll find more than a fraction of the police implicated in murder without better access to official records, Google searches, even with the help of other people compiling their own lists are highly unlikely to be complete.

Most of the articles listed below resulted in dead police, often by suicide or convictions, when they're too obvious to ignore; however there are many cases where the police get much more lenient sentences than most of us would get. In at least four or five cases, probably more, both the killer and victim in murder suicides are police. In Several other cases, when a spouse, usually the wife, of a police officer was killed the police officer claimed it was suicide and in at least one case, Levi Chavez, that's what the jury found, although the family of the wife strongly disagreed. In another case, with two convictions for David Camm, who allegedly killed his wife and two children for insurance, it was eventually overturned and he was found not guilty, after spending twelve years in jail, with one year in between out on bond for his second trial. He then tried to get the insurance money, although it's unclear if he succeeded he did win a suit for wrongful conviction for $450,000, which was more than the policy. In both these cases the family of the wife was convinced that the cop should have been convicted, and after looking at both cases, my best guess is they're right, and that many police are more likely to get away with murder than the rest of us.

Another reporter who listed 15 Evil Cops Who Got Caught Doing The Unimaginable 07/21/2016 provided a few more examples, some which I already mentioned, and more that I haven't yet in this article; and made a point of saying, "The large majority of police officers worldwide are honest, well rounded citizens aiming to protect and better the communities they operate in," which we all hope is true, of course. I have said myself that I've known at least four or five police officers off duty taht are clearly good people, however, I've also met many more on-duty, some reasonable and others that clearly like bullying people. My impression, from personal experience and reading reports of other police officers, is that the best police officers, including the ones I met, are from middle or upper class cities where they don't ahve a large problem with crime anyway. And the worst are in lower income areas, including a few that I stayed at in the past and many much worse abandoned inner cities.

We have peer reviewed studies showing that police are more likely to commit domestic violence, and more likely to commit suicide; and a relatively simple look at a list of serial killers shows they may be more likely to be serial killers, even if some academics don't consider this statistically representative; but there are no peer reviewed studies showing whether or not police police are more likely to commit murder, which is also true about veterans, which I've covered in other articles. As I indicated, after looking at an enormous amount of raw data, which isn't complete, it seems clear that neither the murder rates for police or veterans could be much if any below average, and are almost certainly well above average, especially for police, if you count on duty killings that might be questionable. The FBI has an enormous amount of data on this and if they recorded it properly there's little doubt they could share it with academics that could do a peer reviewed study, yet they choose not to. The reason is almost certainly that they don't want to know the answer, and they know as well as me what such a study would probably show. Furthermore, they often keep a large portion of this information secret, and anyone trying to do their own research without inside help has little or no chance of collecting complete data.

A large portion of the murder suicides listed below were found on Murder/Suicide Blogspot which has just over 3,800 entries and at least thirty nine of them are police officers, probably more. These thirty nine police officers don't count several that were killed in the line of duty by someone that committed suicide that they didn't know, only those that involved police killing their own family members and themselves; one possible, but unlikely exception is a couple killed but police declined to say which person was the killer, but this would still be a domestic dispute. I found these thirty eight by using the search function starting with cop then tried a couple other terms, but it's unlikely that I found all the police officers at this site, although I may ahve come close. This means that at least one percent of entries are police officers, and as I said before, less than a quarter of one percent of the public are police officers at any given time. If you count ex-police officers then we don't have an exact percentage of the public, but it's unlikely that it's more than two or three times the percentage of people currently serving as police officers, which may mean that police are statistically more likely to commit murder suicide, perhaps by a large margin.

There should be no doubt that we have major problems with many police officers and the establishment often fights tooth and nail to cover it up, although recently, in some cases, they've been so obvious that they convicted them, and even though some receive exceptionally short sentences the rest of us could never expect, there are others that are so bad that they get much longer sentences. However, if you look at a lot of the more effective research showing how to reduce violence long before it escalates, which I've covered in many other articles, then it's clear that an even bigger problem are the media and politicians that ignore this research and rely on increasingly authoritarian and militarized police instead of funding programs that are less controversial and far more effective.

Other countries have used the best research to implement policies that reduce murder and other crime rates much more effective than us, and they have a higher quality of life without training police to behave in authoritarian ways suppressing the rights of their citizens and even killing many of them. There should be no doubt that if the can do it so can we, assuming our media reports on the best research on programs that reduce violence before it escalates and politicians use this research to make policy decisions, funding programs that are far more effective, and in many cases, save far more than they cost!

The following meme might be a little high, if figures of people killed by police are as low as eleven to twelve hundred per year, but this is still shockingly high even with the lower numbers.

Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy

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Thursday, September 30, 2021

History of Cops Convicted of Murder Follow Up

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