DEFUND:

So far this year, 481 civilians have been shot to death by police in the United States, according to the Washington Post. There have been an estimated 7,397 gun-related homicides overall during this period (excluding suicides and accidents). This means that roughly one out of every fifteen Americans shot to death so far in 2020 has been killed by a police officer.

Since 2015, cops fatally shot at least 353 people who were unarmed (that is, not even possessing a toy, blunt object, or other instrument). In total, 5,416 civilians were killed by police gunfire over the last five years; one out of every fifteen was unarmed. And it is important to note that these data only count police shootings. Hundreds more civilians are killed by cops every year by tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets, chokeholds, positional asphyxia, blunt force trauma, getting struck by police cruisers and other causes; a large share of these civilians were also unarmed. Many never committed a crime.

Deaths, however,only represent a small fraction of overall police violence. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), at least 985,300 Americans experienced non-lethal threats or use of force from police in a single year (2015, the most recent year of data available on the BJS website). Relative to the overall U.S. population at the time, approximately one out of every 324 Americans was verbally or physically assaulted by a cop in that year. Indeed, every year departments nationwide receive thousands of "officially sustained" (i.e., sufficiently credible to justify disciplinary action against officers) excessive force reports as a result of such encounters.

There are also widespread reported rapes, sexual assault, and sexual harassment incidents involving on-duty cops every year (and of course, many more cases likely go unreported). According to an investigation from the Buffalo News, from 2005 to 2015, "a law enforcement official was caught in a case of sexual abuse or misconduct at least every five days." The officers are usually armed. The victims are typically isolated, and often physically restrained. Sometimes there is an imminent threat of force or arrest. Nonetheless, cops often have the audacity to claim that these sex acts, against civilians under police custody, were consensual. An investigation by the Associated Press found that many cops use police tools and databases to stalk and harass exes or people they are sexually interested in (and for other personal purposes). Female police officers are also regularly subject to harassment from their male peers.

This is what we learn from a cursory glance at police behaviors in the line of duty. However, cops also regularly commit crimes, and carry out violence, off-duty. For instance, rates of domestic abuse are as much as four times higher among law enforcement than in the broader population.

In short, hundreds of thousands of Americans are brutalized every year by law enforcement. The United States is an extreme outlier among wealthy liberal democracies in this regard. The level of aggression cops deploy in an area seems to have no correlation with that area's level of violent crime--nor is it related to the overall levels of violence in society (indeed, violent crime in the broader society has decreased substantially over time, and police killings increased in response) -- nor does it seem proportional to the actual danger law enforcement agents face on the job.

How dangerous is policing? One way to get a handle on this question is to compare the homicide rate for police officers in the line of duty to that of the average American in their day-to-day life. It may seem intuitive to assume that a police officer is many times more likely to be killed on the job than is a civilian going about their usual routines. In fact, the ratios are pretty close.

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