this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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This is one among a few different problems with this data. To some departments, “armed” means a firearm. To some, it means a bottle or a stick nearby. To some, it means the officer lied and put something in their report and no one follows up to make sure it’s accurate.
The mishmashing together of all the different incompatible datasets (which do not cover all of the shootings that actually happen) and then the presentation as if it’s a complete picture is just a big lie to make it look like people can make sense of what’s going on. The total lack of even the slightest attempt to disambiguate justified shootings from unjustified is probably an even bigger problem. Pretty much all this chart can tell you is roughly what the total number in an average year is, which isn’t real useful.
Shiny reflection from a cellphone was probably included in the armed category as well.
Yeah, police "fear for their lives" so much, it's amazing they don't just shit their pants and die crying like the racist bitches they are.
I mean we all saw what happens when you put 40 police officers armed to the teeth in a school with a shooter. They shit their pants for 45 min waiting for the shooter to use up all his ammo on kids before they bravely enter the class.
Fucking cowards the lot of them. ACAB.
I think that's more of a cultural thing. The cops who were faced with the Boston bombers were still chasing them when they were throwing homemade explosives out the window trying to blow up the pursuing cruisers. It was mostly just city cops in the big gun / explosive / car chase battle, it wasn't like some kind of elite FBI counterterrorism force, and they did fine. Some of the reporters who were following along said they actually didn't realize how much danger they were in because of how calm the cops were about it. I have seen cops on YouTube react with far more fear and takes-hours-to-approach-the-car caution to one random unlicensed driver who refused to stop than cops in the Northeast will generally do for genuinely life-threatening situations.
Small-town Texas cops from conservative areas, yes, they're cowardly bullies as a rule in my observation. That actually applies to a lot of parts of the South / Midwest of the US. I mean it is hard to generalize but here are my stereotypes of regional variation in US cops based on observing bodycam videos on YouTube which as we all know makes someone an expert:
This is one of those areas where modern AI might actually come in handy. Let it go through every bodycam for every incident and write the report without the bias of the officer on duty. And it could go through the archive of all footage to help build better statistics than this self-reported data.
Yeah, it’d have to be an openly auditable model, obviously.
Yeah, or just find some grad student. Watching 1000 videos to get a quick sense of how it can be categorized as "justified" vs "not" vs "debatable" would take some time, but it wouldn't be all that hard. Lots of research things take time. Requesting all the footage would be hard, dealing with all the holes in the database would be hard, basically the biggest of the underlying problems is that no one really cares enough to try to make any of this easy. But yes, having the reality to base the conversation on would be a very nice thing to have.
I don’t think a grad student could handle the volume here and still has some bias, even if the bias comes from “I didn’t get great sleep last night”.
Classification algorithms have been around for decades and are the perfect use of AI.