Than Police Brutality in the United States Compared to Other Countries
Given the protests against police brutality in the past few weeks, as well as the assassinations of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and more by the police, it’s worth looking at how the US compares to other countries when it comes to the prevalence of police violence.
As it turns out, the United States has much higher per capita police violence than other wealthy countries such as Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. per capita than any other of these countries, with black Americans disproportionately affected.
There is no centralized database on police violence.
Tracking police violence is difficult given the lack of a centralized database of these numbers. Instead, in recent years, prompted by the assassinations of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York, figures have been collected simultaneously by newspapers, individuals and the federal government . Data collection in recent years has shown us that police violence is much more prevalent than previously thought.
Even with this lack of centralized data, it is still clear that, by virtually every conceivable metric, the United States has significantly higher levels of police violence than other wealthy countries. This includes the number of people killed by the police, the number of people who have died in custody, the number of annual arrests, and the number of people who go to jail. In terms of racial inequality, black people are imprisoned and killed at a disproportionately high rate, not only in the United States, but also in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Canada and the UK have the same problem of racial inequality when it comes to who is imprisoned and who is killed by the police, but in general they are less likely to kill or imprison their citizens.
So what are these numbers?
Putting these numbers in context, every year the US police kill 31 out of every 10 million people , which is five times more than the Swedish police, 10 times more than the Australian police, 15 times more than the New Zealand police, and more more than 30 times more than the German or British police.
Police violence in the United States is a huge problem, and it’s not just the number of people killed by the police. People are more likely to die while in police custody in the United States , about double the number in Australia and five times the number in the UK.
When it comes to how many people we put in jails, the US has five times the number of prisoners in prisons than many other countries : 716 out of 100,000. In terms of the number of prisoners per capita, the countries in second place, the third and fourth places are Cuba, Rwanda and the Russian Federation, where for every 100,000 people there are 510, 492 and 475 prisoners, respectively. These rates are still significantly lower than in the United States.
Do countries like Australia, Canada, Sweden and the UK have work when it comes to monitoring and preventing police violence? Certainly. Are they even approaching the level of police violence seen in the United States? Absolutely not.
When it comes to reducing police violence, it’s worth remembering that the US stands out sharply when it comes to how fast the police shoot, kill, and imprison citizens.