Police officers kill about 1,700 Americans every year. In other words, police killings have made up about one out of every twelve violent deaths of Americans between 2010 and 2018. That's including American military deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere during that window. Indeed, more Americans died at the hands of police officers during that period (about 14,400) than died while on active military duty (about 9,400).

Police violence in America is extraordinary in its intensity. It is disproportionate to the actual threats facing police officers, and it has risen significantly in recent years without apparent justification. Its effects are felt across all racial groups, with non-Hispanic whites making up half of all people killed by police officers, even as African Americans are killed at disproportionately high rates compared to any reasonable baseline.

Ultimately, high levels of police violence are a problem for all of society. They exemplify the increasingly unaccountable and militarized nature of police forces, over which elected officials struggle to maintain any kind of control. [...]

To summarize: police killings have risen despite no increase in social or criminal violence generally. Police killings have risen despite a decline in actual killings of police officers (and, as related data show, a decline in assaults of police officers, too). Police killings have risen, but this rise is not driven by reported officially justified homicides, nor is it associated with a larger share of police killings involving armed victims. Instead, what we've seen is a rise in police killings across the board, untethered from actual threats to society, with the victims often being unarmed innocents. About 15 to 25 percent of police killings are of unarmed people.

This killing is largely driven by the same kinds of bureaucratic malfeasance and self-dealing that conservatives have criticized in other public sector unions. When incompetent DMV workers are not fired, when abusive teachers are reshuffled around schools, when bureaucrats use administrative gimmicks to thwart the electorate's desire to rein in excessive spending, we conservatives are quick to (correctly!) identify the pernicious work of public-sector unions. Whereas all workers should have some say in their employment conditions, such as via unionization, public-sector workers already get a say in their employment conditions without a union: they get to vote on who their boss is! Public sector unions give the bureaucrats double the "votes" of the rest of us.

Police unions, which cause higher rates of police killings by shielding bad cops from discipline, are an especially horrible case of the general problem. Police killing is not the work of vigilant warriors defending society at great personal cost, and sometimes going too far: it is the day-in, day-out petty tyranny of a taxpayer-funded bureaucratic lobby group. The difference is that, unlike other public sector unions, police unions have military-grade equipment they can use to violently crush protests against their abuses, and they are legally immune from most consequences. They're teachers' unions, but with tanks and endless get-out-of-jail-free cards.