Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Police Are Inciting Killing Of Police, Occasionally Successfully!

Anyone keeping up with the protests against police violence knows that the vast majority of the violence is being conducted by the police against the protesters, often while following orders to suppress the protests, most famously when Donald Trump ordered the area in front of a Church to be cleared so he could have a photo op. There have been a small number of instigators mixing in with the protester, but often it's the protesters, not the police that seem to be holding them accountable. This includes some reports of agent provocateurs, which are often hard to prove, but there have been some compelling claims. The police are using minimal amounts of violence as an excuse for much more on their part, mostly against people that aren't being violent.

The threat to police is routinely hyped up and exaggerated. Considering how much hype surrounding the risk of policing you might think it's the most dangerous job in America; but it's not even close. According to The 25 most dangerous jobs in America 01/09/2018 they only come in fourteenth. In all fairness, if you limit the risk to murders, then they're the most at risk according to America's most violent jobs, in 5 charts 12/02/2014, although their numbers appear to be incomplete; however, they report that homicide is only nine percent of all job related deaths, but may be about forty to forty-five percent of police deaths on the job.

Police shoot and kill far more people than those getting killed in the line of duty, not that this justifies killing police. There are about 1,100 people killed by police every year according to the Killed By Police (archive 2013-18) The former owner of this site started it in the middle of 2013 and stopped compiling shootings in the middle of 2018, due to lack of funds; after it lapsed for about a year a new organization bought the domain name Killed By Police; however their numbers aren't quite as complete, but they're still close to if not more than 1,000 per year. Both owners provided sources for each killing.

According to the The Officer Down Memorial Page there are fewer than fifty police officers killed by gunfire in most years; if you count other violent deaths, including Vehicular assault, stabbings or other intentional murders, but not counting accidents, accidental gunfire from other police officers, heart attacks, work related illnesses or other non-intentional deaths they might have between 42 and 82 police murdered in the line of duty. On average this means they kill about 18 times as many people as are killed.

However, the most important thing shouldn't be keeping score to see if it's justified; it should be understanding the causes of both police killings of civilians and murderers of police so that both of them can be reduced as much as possible. Unfortunately there is little high profile effort to do this. There's plenty of good research available on this; and some grassroots organizations are trying to draw attention to this; however, the media practically never covers good research and politicians routinely let politically powerful interests push their views ahead of good science when making policy decisions that could save lives and protect both the police and the public much better.

I went into some of the leading causes of violence and how to prevent them making it far less likely for police to have more conflicts with civilians in the first place in many previous articles including Research On Preventing Violence Absent From National Media, which focuses mostly on early child abuse and corporal punishment leading to escalating violence and a series of articles covering many other contributing factors that concluded with Politicians increase crime; Grass roots efforts reduce crime; Politicians steal the credit, which explains how grassroots organizations that do their own research on leading causes of violence can reduce violence in their own communities, although they rarely get any help from the media to educate the public, or the political establishment to pass good policies based on science, unless they put an enormous amount of pressure on them.

Most of these leading causes of violence shouldn't be dealt with by police at all; they should be addressed with education, social workers helping at risk families, economic reform preventing elites from rigging the economic system so that a large portion of society is kept in poverty, even though they often do the most vital, or what they now call "essential services," due to the pandemic, and other contributing factors that can be addressed long before it leads to escalating violence.

As I said, it's very rare for the protesters to become violent, especially the well organized ones, since they have leaders that discourage this; however, there are some exceptions and that's enough to indicate that the police often do more to incite violence, against themselves, or others, than to prevent it, at least in some cities, often the most violent ones in the country. There were at least two police officers, including one retired officer who were killed during these protest, one in Oakland and another in St. Louis, and these two cities also had another five cops shot with non-fatal injuries. These articles aren't specific enough to be sure that they were intentionally shot in retaliation for police brutality, however, it's a strong possibility, and even if they weren't they're part of the violence that rose as a result of the protests.

Furthermore, over the past fifteen years there have been at least twenty-nine police murders, partly done in retaliation, by at least eleven perpetrators including Micah Xavier Johnson, Gavin Eugene Long, Everett Miller, Christopher Jordan Dorner, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, Marvin Louis Guy, Henry McGee, Liko Kenney, Maurice Clemmons, and Jerad Dwain Miller. At least three or four of this murderers killed ten to twelve police officers, specifically because they were killing black people with impunity, yet they refuse to consider the possibility that excessive force is doing more harm than good. Another two killed police during no-knock SWAT raids, where they may not have even known the people breaking into their homes were police. The courts declined to charge one of them, Henry McGee, who happened to be white, with murder but pressed charges for the drugs they found; the other one, Marvin Louis Guy, an African American, didn't have much if any drugs, yet hey insist on seeking the death penalty, without questioning their right to invade homes using middle of the night gestapo tactics. These ten perpetrators, including two or three that might have been acting in self-defense, killed a total of twenty-three police officers, and at least three or four civilians; and according to A No-Knock Raid in Houston Led to Deaths and Police Injuries. Should Police Rethink the Practice? 01/01/2019 there were eight police officers killed in no-knock raids from 2010 to 2016, since two of them were already listed that means an additional six officers were killed in no-knock raids, bringing the total to twenty-nine.

Radley Balko wrote about this in The Rise of the Warrior Cop seven years ago, reporting on many more people killed or seriously injured in this common practice. Most of the victims are killed or injured by police, in many cases they're not even guilty of anything; however there were more cases where police were killed during these raids. There were dozens of news reports, often only at the local level, about how these raids were going wrong, before he wrote this and dozens more after it including the killing of Breonna Taylor almost three months ago, when there were no drugs found on the premises, and they already had the suspects in custody but apparently may have lied to get a warrant claiming that she, or her boyfriend were receiving packages for them falsely claiming they consulted with the Louisville postal inspector to draw this conclusion.

One of the things Radley Balko points out is the arrest of "Whitey" Bulger was done in a far more cautious manner, in 2011; they knew he was armed and dangerous and that he almost certainly had a stash of weapons somewhere, possibly drugs or other things as well, but they didn't try to get a no-knock warrant, because it was too risky. Instead they waited until he went to the store and arrested him when they knew he couldn't get to his guns quickly with no incident. If they can do this with "Whitey" Bulger, why can't they do this with low level suspected drug dealers?

But why are so many cops so violent? I've known at least half a dozen cops off-duty over the decades, and none of them would act like this. For starters, not all cops are like this at all, and many of them have spoken out, at least a little; but those that speak out too much face serious retaliation, especially in some of the most violent police departments. In many cases, the worst problems are in the most violent cities, often with murder rates at least twice the national average, which is already much higher than most European countries that do a better job educating their people, taking care of children, stopping child abuse and addressing other root causes of violence. Then when these cities have all these social problems and need the best police officers, to help reduce crime they often get the worst.

Another major problem is their training, which teaches them to be far more concerned with following orders than with developing critical thinking skills. One of the leading police reformers is David Couper, author of "Arrested Development" which describes his police reform recommendations. In a Blog article and excerpt from his book he explains one of the major problems with police training:

Hazing and Bullying in the Police Academy 12/16/2013 by David Couper

When I left the Marines and set off to become a police officer, I thankfully was trained as a police officer and not a soldier. That made sense to me as I quickly understood that there was a big difference between the two. ......

“As I was setting up my classroom at their training academy, I looked out the window and observed a formation of their new police recruits. I decided to go outside and get a closer look. The recruits were standing in three ranks—it was an inspection, a situation I could easily relate to from my days as a Marine.

“Suddenly, the training instructors started yelling at the new officers. Some were ordered to do push-ups by way of the familiar military command: ‘Drop and give me ten.’ In addition, I heard the instructors calling the young officers ‘assholes.’ I returned to the classroom in time to greet the chief and his command staff. I introduced myself and the curriculum for the next three days, then asked, ‘Are your officers permitted to call citizens names?’ They seem shocked, ‘We have rules against doing that. Why do you ask?’

“’Well,’ I replied, ‘I was watching your new officers outside this window and observed your trainers calling them very derogatory names. You know, it really doesn’t matter if you have rules against such conduct because when their teachers call them names, they will think that it’s okay for them to do the same to citizens. And if you ever try to discipline them, their defense will simply be, ‘That’s what the department taught me.’”

“I recently learned that the department never did change. Their academy remains stress-based, military, and intimidating. I don’t know if their training officers ever stopped calling recruit officers names. But one thing I do know, is that if they don’t stop, I predict they will continue to have problems with officers disrespecting citizens. How could they expect any different kind of an outcome?…

“Half of our nation’s police academies train in an atmosphere police trainers themselves identify as stress-based; that is, intimidating, even bullying. This makes half of American police academies more like military boot camps or correctional facilities than places in which college-educated young men and women are prepared to be professional police practitioners… Complete article

This training method seems to have been developed by the military to teach veterans to blindly obey orders, when fighting wars based on lies as I explained in Philip Zimbardo, Lucifer Effect, Stanford Prison Experiment and Eli Roth’s Milgram/Obedience experiment much more extensive than most people realize which reviews experiments done by Stanley Milgram to study obedience to authority. Supposedly he was studying why the Nazis blindly obeyed orders, even when they were outrageous and lead to genocide, so they could prevent it from happening again, teaching people that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. However, this research, and other interlocking experiments like the so-called Stanford Prison Experiment, which looks more like a boot camp hazing experiment than a prison experiment, was supported by the Office of Naval Research, which is also involved in developing boot camp indoctrination methods to train cadets. My articles explain how this research could be used, either to warn people against blind obedience, as Milgram and others claim they're trying to do; or it can be used to develop boot camp indoctrination methods teaching blind obedience, which appears to be what they actually did.

This is a major contributing factor for many veterans that have gone on shooting sprees as well as I pointed out Teach a soldier to kill and he just might and this pattern continues to day with one of the most recent ones killing at least one cop, possibly two according Suspect in police killing was member of elite military team 06/08/2020 which explains that he was arrested for killing a cop last Saturday in an ambush style attack, and is also being investigated for the murder of another cop, that I mentioned previously, although they haven't determined that one for certain, but there are a lot of similarities, including both police being shot ambush style from someone in a white van. A significant number of the people that are allegedly hired to protect us, are actually going on many killing sprees, although most veterans and cops aren't inclined to do this, and the good cops or veterans are often leading targets for the bad ones.

Another major problem is apparently the contracts negotiated by their labor unions, which seems to make them virtually immune to wrong doing in many cases as described in this article:

As protests grow, big labor sides with police unions 05/31/2020 by Alexia Fernández Campbell at the Center for Public Integrity

Labor unions exist to protect workers, but most workers aren’t authorized to use deadly force as part of their jobs.

Police unions have written labor contracts that bar law enforcement agencies across the country from immediately interrogating or firing officers after egregious acts of misconduct.

Leaders of the country’s other labor unions are tiptoeing around the subject as their members join protests in hundreds of U.S. cities this week over the killing of George Floyd. Labor leaders have strongly denounced police officers’ actions in that case and called on lawmakers to address systemic racism. But they’re suggesting that collective bargaining agreements shouldn’t be on the table. They’ve been careful not to blame police unions for the problem, choosing to embrace them instead.

Police union contracts are not normal collective bargaining agreements. Police unions have crafted a complex web of disciplinary rules that critics say makes it impossible to hold police accountable for killing unarmed Black citizens. After a Minneapolis police officer pinned Floyd’s neck to the ground for more than 8 minutes while fellow officers stood by and watched, many want to see these union contract rules reformed or dismantled. ......

Nowhere did the report mention how police union contracts typically include language to hide complaints against police officers from the public. It didn’t describe the arbitration clauses that often force police departments to rehire fire, misbehaving cops. Or how police unions have successfully lobbied for state laws granting police officers far more job security than the average U.S. worker.

“These are armed, trained people who are totally not accountable to the community they are policing,” said Sam Mitrani, a labor historian at College of DuPage in Ilinois. Complete article

Anyone familiar with alternative media outlets reporting on the Blue Wall of Silence knows there are more examples of police covering for each other than they can keep track of, but a couple of the most blatant examples seems to have happened in Buffalo New York, even though they don't involve killing innocent people. one of these incidents happened recently when there was a viral video of a police officer shoving an elderly man to the ground as reported in Who is Aaron Torgalski? Buffalo Police Officer Who Shoved 75-Year-Old Protester to the Ground Suspended 06/05/2020 which says "One officer crouches to check on the man before being pulled away by another officer." The video seems to show three officers near the protester when he was shoved to the ground, one of them clearly shoves him the one in the middle seems to support that cop then discourages the other cop from helping him. After the man has been shoved to the ground, and he was clearly injured, then other members of the Buffalo police department walked past the man without helping him.

This was all caught on camera, so anyone can check that and judge for themselves to determine if they think it was justified. Obviously most of the protesters don't think it was justified, nor do I but Buffalo cops and firefighters cheered officers charged with assault as they leave the courthouse indicating they thought it was justified; and 57 members of Buffalo police riot response team resign, not from the force, just from the riot response team, which may involve doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. John Evans, the president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, said, "Our position is these officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square. It doesn't specify clear the square of men, 50 and under or 15 to 40. They were simply doing their job. I don't know how much contact was made. He did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards."

This raises doubts about whether they learned anything from the Milgram Obedience to Authority research, assuming they heard of it; and it indicates that they haven't developed critical thinking skills to consider whether their protecting the public and the democratic process or not and how to accomplish this goal in a more effective way, assuming they think it's a worthwhile goal, which I don't. They cleared the square by intimidating people and assaulting at least one pan,which is a crime. Furthermore, in a democracy, when the people seek to have their concerns addressed it's the job of their representatives to hear them out and address the legitimate concerns. In our country, politicians refuse to do this then order the police to suppress protests which they come up with rhetoric that might sound good but doesn't address the concerns of the people.

This is standard operating procedure for any protest, not just against the police. When protesting against wars based on lies pollution that kills millions, lack of health care that also leads to more deaths and many other issues, they follow these patterns. They pretend these are "democratic" decisions by representatives supposedly elected by the people; however, the media decides which candidates get name recognition by giving them obsession coverage to pretend to defend the people without covering honest candidates that might actually keep their promises. If the police union wanted to they could negotiate terms where they would not be required to suppress legitimate protests, while politicians decline to address the concerns of the people. In many cases that wouldn't involve standing up against the police; although this seems to be an exception, of course.

Instead they're defending the right to use excessive force, as if it's the only way to accomplish their goals, without considering the leading causes of violence or how to prevent them. And other police unions are apparently also fighting to defend the use of excessive force against peaceful protesters or alleged criminals who are under control and not a threat. This seems to include a Florida union according to Florida police organization offers to hire cops who were fired or resigned over police misconduct. 06/08/2020 The sheriff of Bevard County responded to this by saying that F.O.P. is not authorized to recruit for them, fortunately. Police are caught shoplifting at Walmart at least four or five times per year, and these unions never defend them or demand they can keep their job, but when they're caught using excessive force against peaceful protesters, beating on suspects that are already in custody, or in at least one case, assaulting another police officer for stopping them from beating on a handcuffed suspect the unions fight to defend their jobs.

This is a clear indication that they're more interested in defending the oligarchs than the working class! If politicians can negotiate contracts with police unions that hold them accountable for shoplifting then they can hold them accountable for excessive force against the working class.

One of the protesters of police brutality was a former cop, who tried to stop it while on duty, and was punched in the face by the other cop, then instead of firing the abusive cop they fired her according to Buffalo Cop Loses Job And Pension After She Intervenes With Fellow Officer Choking A Suspect 12/22/2014 with additional details at Change.org which is trying to get her pension back. Cariol Horne was present when Gregory Kwiatowski was punching and choking a handcuffed suspect when she pulled his arm away. If another cop had acted like that in Minneapolis then George Floyd would still be alive. There was a similar story about retaliating agaisnt whistleblowers in Minneapolis as well, Two Minneapolis Police Officers Face Retaliation for Doing Their Jobs 2012 They fired her in 2006 without allowing her to keep her pension, even though some of the claims they made to justify this appear to be false. Gregory Kwiatowski had numerous additional excessive force charges and two more incidents where he attacked another cop, one off duty and another one on, and was eventually forced to resign but allowed to keep his pension.

Cariol Horne was fired for doing her job properly, and committed no crime, and even deprived of her pension; while they enabled Gregory Kwiatowski to commit more crimes, until it became clear that he was just too violent to allow to remain on the force and they forced him to resign keeping his pension, the exact opposite of what police departments and unions would be doing if they defended the rule of law and good cops against the bad ones. Protester and former BPD officer, Cariol Horne, gives her firsthand account of police brutality 06/05/2020 Fifteen stories, including Cariol Horne where good cops faced retaliation in corrupt police departments are told in Real Cops Who Stood Up To Corruption In Their Departments (And What Happened To Them) 05/02/2017

There are dozens if not hundreds more incidents where police have been caught often on camera using excessive force or committing other crimes, often with incredibly lame excuses including Minnesota troopers who punctured tires of unoccupied cars during protests 06/09/2020 supposedly to prevent people from driving through crowds, but there's little or no reason given why they would suspect this and at least one of the cars where they slashed tires was a reporter who had all four times slashed, while she was covering the protests; there have also been other stories about them attacking reporters during numerous protests, some listed below and dozens if not hundreds of people filming abusive police practices, some of them compiling multiple incidents including this video, second video, third video, fourth video, and fifth video.

Many Police Union representatives often claim that we should wait for a full investigation when it helps defend the police implicated, often even when there's plenty of evidence implicating them; but don't feel the need to declare them innocent and others guilty before that investigation is done, including one example about seventeen months ago reported in A No-Knock Raid in Houston Led to Deaths and Police Injuries. Should Police Rethink the Practice? 01/01/2019 when Houston Police Department Union president Joe Gamaldi said “We are sick and tired of having targets on our back,” at a press conference on Monday night outside of the hospital where the injured officers were being treated. (All four survived their injuries.) “We are sick and tired of having dirtbags trying to take our lives when all we’re trying to do is protect this community and protect our families. Enough is enough. If you’re the ones out there spreading the rhetoric that police officers are the enemy, well just know we’ve all got your number now. We’re going to be keeping track on all of y’all, and we’re going to make sure to hold you accountable every time you stir the pot on our police officers.”

He must have known this was a no-knock raid; and if he wanted to know how bad the track record for no-knock raids was he could have known this as well, it was six years after Radley Balko published "Rise of the Warrior Cop," and the article goes on to say:

It’s a dangerous tactic. The Times found that between 2010 and 2016, 31 civilians and eight officers died during no-knock raids, while “scores of others were maimed or wounded.” The most notorious no-knock raid left a seven-year-old girl, Aiyana Jones, dead in Detroit in 2011. The ACLU’s 2014 report found that 42 percent of the subjects of SWAT search warrant raids were black and 12 percent were Hispanic. The Times also found that in some of the searches in which an officer was killed, “suspects with no history of violence, found with small quantities of drugs, have wound up facing capital murder charges, and possible death sentences.”

Within seven months of Gamaldi's passionate defense of these four injured officers one of them was charged with murder in botched drug raid suspected of framing 69 people 01/27/2020 It became clear after this that defense attorney's knew he was incredibly corrupt years before and if the police were willing to investigate their own they could have found out and saved lives, along with stopping the framing of dozens of innocent people by at least two rogue police officers. For additional details on this story see 91 more Gerald Goines drug convictions being investigated by district attorney 05/21/2020 and Gerald Goines, an Ex-police officer tied to deadly Houston raid may have presented false evidence, convicting 69 people 02/26/2020 I know there have been many massive police corruption stories in many of the most violent cities in America including Buffalo, Minneapolis, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Boston, Miami, St. Louis, New Orleans and just about any other big city you can imagine. I haven't done a statistical study, but have noticed that the majority of the stories about police corruption seem to come from cities with high rates of violence including murder.

If you Google any large city, especially the most violent ones, with "police corruption," it's virtually guaranteed you'll find something. I tried a few of the less violent big cities as well, including El Paso and Honolulu and found stories about corruption there as well, although at a glance they didn't seem as serious as those in more violent cities. There should be no doubt that if the government and police leadership really was concerned about reducing violence and protecting both citizens and good cops that aren't corrupt they would stand up to the corrupt ones, yet they routinely do the opposite. Occasionally they even try to pass laws that are designed to make it even harder to hold violent police accountable like a bill that was introduced in Arizona four years ago, Arizona May Criminalize Recording Cops in Public 01/11/2016 Fortunately there was so much outrage over this bill that he withdrew it within two and a half weeks Arizona lawmaker kills bill to limit recording of police 01/27/2016; however, there are still many stories of police trying to stop people from filming them.

One of the most effective solutions to this problem being promoted at the grassroots level is an effort to defund the police shifting those funds gradually to programs that addresses the needs of the public so there's less likely to be much crime in the first place, and we would need far fewer police. Unfortunately the media isn't providing fair coverage on this and both parties are opposing it, Biden, Democrats seek to shut down calls to defund police 06/09/2020; unfortunately even Bernie Sanders has spoken against this idea, but this is based on false assumptions and ignorance of what they're trying to do. This article does a far better job explaining the defnd the police movement than the mainstream media:

MPD150: Working Towards a Police Free Minneapolis 06/06/2020

Frequently Asked Questions

Won’t abolishing the police create chaos and crime? How will we stay safe?

Police abolition work is not about snapping our fingers and magically defunding every department in the world instantly. Rather, we’re talking about a gradual process of strategically reallocating resources, funding, and responsibility away from police and toward community-based models of safety, support, and prevention.

The people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises. Rather than strangers armed with guns, who very likely do not live in the neighborhoods they’re patrolling, we want to create space for more mental health service providers, social workers, victim/survivor advocates, religious leaders, neighbors, healers, and friends– all of the people who really make up the fabric of a community– to look out for one another.

But what about armed bank robbers, murderers, and supervillains?

Crime isn’t random. Most of the time, it happens when someone has been unable to meet their basic needs through other means. By shifting money away from the police and toward services that actually meet those needs, we’ll be able to get to a place where people won’t need to rob banks.

Sure, in this long transition process, we may need a small specialized class of public servants whose job it is to respond to violent crimes. But part of what we’re talking about here is what role police play in our society. Right now, cops don’t just respond to violent crimes; they make needless traffic stops, arrest petty drug users, and engage in a wide range of “broken windows policing” behaviors that only serve to keep more people under the thumb of the criminal justice system.

Even people who support the police agree: we ask cops to solve too many of our problems. As former Dallas Police Chief David Brown said: “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country… Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it… Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops… That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”

To really “fight crime,” we don’t need more cops; we need more jobs, more educational opportunities, more arts programs, more community centers, more mental health resources, and more of a say in how our own communities function. Complete article

I'm no fan of violent or corrupt police; but the media and political establishment are even worse. If they wanted to hod the police accountable they could. They can get them discharged quickly for petty shoplifting, and do so on a regular basis; but when it comes to extreme cases of violence against the working class, it's very rare for them to do much if anything, unless they're responding to massive protests. A few police departments have been reasonably quick to fire and charge a few of the most extreme cases after weeks of protests, although they're still very reluctant to charge many other violent police, and were slow to charge the one that started this protest, waiting four days, after it was clear that the national protests were growing, to arrest him, even though the evidence was overwhelming.

We have plenty of research available to show what the leading causes of violence are and how to prevent them; however the media doesn't report on this research and the politicians don't base political decisions based on good science. Instead they serve the interests of the corporations financing their campaigns and rig the economy in their favor. Since good honest candidates that might base their decisions on this research rarely ever get any media coverage they don't become viable candidates due to lack of name recognition. The ones the media give obsession coverage to routinely make lots of promises during campaigns and break them once in office.

One of the leading contributing causes of violence, if not the biggest one, is early child abuse, including use of corporal punishment, leading to escalating violence. We have overwhelming evidence showing that the states that still allow use of corporal punishment in schools, and using it more at home, have higher rates of violence, including murder. for the past ten to twelve years these nineteen (the last states to abolish it was New Mexico in 2011 and states Ohio in 2009, so there were still 21 states allowing it 12 years ago) states had an average of between 22% and 32% higher murder rates each year, with the biggest difference coming in 2018, the last year data is available for as of this writing, showing that the difference is growing. The same goes for police murdered in the line of duty and civilians killed by police. These nineteen states have about 41% of the population, yet more than 52% of police killed or people killed by police are in these states.

A comparison to many European countries that ban corporal punishment in both schools and at home, and provide better child care, education, health care and have improved quality of life shows that they have less than one fifth the murder rates of the United States. This is less than half of the least violent of our states, and only about 7$ or 8% of the most violent of our states. Why do they ignore this research and decline to inform the public about it, so violence could be reduced? Could it be that they're more concerned with controlling the public than looking out for our best interests? These child rearing tactics are designed to do just that.

Additional major contributing causes of violence include, poverty, income inequality, lack of educational opportunities, lack of economic opportunities, and other issues with our economic system that's rigged in favor of the wealthy. This is much worse in abandoned inner cities with the highest rates of violence and poverty. Then instead of addressing these contributing factors, or holding the white collar criminals that control the government accountable they train authoritarian police to behave more like an occupying force in these abandoned inner cities than a police designed to protect citizens.

There are many other countries with much lower rates of violence and they have no need for police to kill a large number of their citizens as the following chart shows.

Not just “a few bad apples”: U.S. police kill civilians at much higher rates than other countries 06/05/2020

Police kill far more people in the U.S. than in most rich countries 06/02/2020

Democrats announce toothless police reform bill 06/09/2020

There's good reason to believe that the reason we have such a violent police force in these cities, is because it's what they're trained to do, and in addition to holding the police accountable, we have to remove those from power who set the stage for this. They lost thie legitimacy long ago, but now it's more obvious than ever as Chris Hedges also points out:

The Treason of the Ruling Class 06/02/2020 by Chris Hedges

The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft.

The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power, ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to have a monopoly on violence. Violence employed by police and security agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, to protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class exposes the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites.

“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience,” Stokely Carmichael warned. And if your opponent is bereft of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with counter-violence. Tyranny takes the place of reform. The danger of widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.

There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. The more things deteriorate, the more the elites feel threatened, the more brutal the police, the National Guard and the organs of state security will become. The longer the serfs defy their masters the more the populations in the jails and prisons, which are already the largest in the world, will swell. Complete article