With 2024 wrapped up, it's time to check in with the Washington Post to find out how many unarmed Black suspects were shot by police last year:
The good news is that only ten unarmed Black suspects were shot. That's a small number and an all-time low.
The bad news is that this number is higher than it is for unarmed Hispanic suspects (8) or unarmed white suspects (6) even though Blacks make up a smaller share of the population.¹
The good news, nonetheless, is that shootings have gone down 72% since 2015.
The bad news is that all of this decrease happened in 2015-19. Since then there's been virtually no progress. Apparently all the protests around George Floyd had no effect.
¹Adjusted for population, the rate of unarmed Black shootings in 2024 was 2x higher than Hispanics and 8x higher than whites.
À propos : https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/a-chicago-judge-just-erased-her-predecessors
I wonder if the growth of handgun ownership is simply making it more likely that the people police are encountering are armed.
I know from local news stories that the police are confiscating more guns when they make arrests, which suggests that a larger fraction of people are carrying guns when they commit other crimes. It could also mean that more people in a mental health crisis have guns on them at the time.
They also mark them as armed if they had, say, a hand tool or pocket knife or were sitting in a car or...
We use the concept of unarmed as a surrogate for unjustified shooting. The reality is more complicated.
- For example, is is possible that a person who is armed is also, at the point of shooting, representing a life and death threat.
- Similarly, an unarmed person can, potentially, be threating someone's life.
So, shooting to kill is a reasonable response to an unarmed person who is threatening someone's life? If they aren't armed, what exactly is the threat? How do police in other countries handle such situations? It seems like everyone has just accepted that if a cop feels threatened, then they are justified in shooting and killing someone. Why is that? Why don't we demand better?
Don't get me wrong - these numbers seem pretty low already, so I don't think this is the epidemic that some people believe. It seems like this is just what you get in a large enough sample size, but that doesn't mean that we all just need to accept that shooting people is justified because a cop feels threatened. If we keep doing that, then these numbers are going to increase for sure.
I feel like there was a time when everyone could have agreed that this isn't too bad, but it still needs to be better. And, the cops doing the killing better be able to justify it or face severe consequences. Now, you either "back the blue" or you're some kind of filthy, stinking, hippy, bleeding heart librul.
To be fair; I'm sure a good number of these incidents result from the person being shot being determined to be unarmed ex post facto. There are many well documented cases of people reaching for "something" and it turns out to be innocuous. I'm not sure how many of these unarmed shootings remain once persons "thought to be/possibly armed" are excluded. The numbers are remarkably low given the prevalence of "warrior cops," rank amateurs/rookies, and the general ubiquity of firearms etc.
That might be true as far as it goes, but then, why is the rate so much higher for black suspects compared to Hispanic or white suspects? Is there a reason the black suspects are more likely to be "thought to be/possibly armed"? Other than the obvious reason?
FrankM - my point was a simple one.
Not all unarmed shootings are bad decisions. Similarly, not all shooting of armed suspects are wise choices.
Fair enough. My point was also simple: Bad decisions seem to disproportionately affect black men.
All unarmed shootings ARE bad decisions.
Can you explain?
For example, what about a case where someone has attacked a police officer and is attempting to get his gun?
Taser, pepper spray, baton, or simply grapple.
If the obvious reason is that black people have a disproportionate number of contacts with law enforcement, then it's probably the obvious reason. Offered without context/comment.
Well, there are more black suspects because there are more black criminals.
As soon as Kevin norms to population he is guaranteed to see disproportionate black deaths, arrests, convictions, and imprisonment. You may argue that the highest black crime rate is due to racism but it exists and it's upstream of police shootings.
Norm to crime rates and see if police shootings of unarmed men are still disproportionate by race.
On the other hand, if we are supposed to ignore differences in criminality then why aren't we concerned about the incredibly disproportionate police shootings of unarmed men as opposed to unarmed women?
That's not how that works, except for a racist.
Got it. Then what about the even more disproportionate shootings of men vs women? Why isn't that a problem? Are you a sexist?
Noted, instead of trying to prove your lie that blacks are more criminal, you instead went on to another lie...
1. What lie? Are you claiming that the police shoot roughly proportionate numbers of men and women?
2. Are you seriously claiming that blacks are NOT responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in the US? Is all our data on crime and race wrong?
There is no way that "he reached for something" or "I thought I saw a gun" should be accepted as sufficient excuse for a cop to shoot. Officer safety should NOT be a police officer's first priority; public safety should always be the higher priority. Cops should be required to take chances if necessary in order to minimize the risk of shooting a member of the public unnecessarily. "He had a gun" is not reason to shoot; "he pulled a gun and was in the process of pointing it in my direction" is reason to shoot.
Legally a police officer cannot shot someone just because he is armed.
A police officer can shoot someone who seems to be reaching for a gun. And yes, it may turn out to be keys out a wallet.
We could certainly change the rules to require the police to verify that what is in the suspects hand is really a gun. In poor light and from a distance while people are running that will probably require waiting for the first shot.
Good luck on hiring police officers if you do that.
Noted, your case B contradicts your case A.
If 'police cannot shoot someone for having a gun' they also cannot shoot because someone might reach for one.
That is incorrect.
For example, if I am open carrying a rifle with the muzzle pointed down and not apparently trying to reach for it it anything a police officer cannot legally shoot me.
On the other hand, if I am wearing a jacket but not caring a weapon and in a confrontation with police I quickly put my hand under my jacket as if to draw a gun from a shoulder holster then the police can legally shoot me.
You may disagree with the law on this, but this is current law.
Noted, instead of proving your point, you decided to use a very specific situation in which you posit there's a gun.
This is because you're innately dishonest.
You claimed that if police cannot shoot someone for having a gun they also cannot shoot someone because he might reach for one.
I explained that yes, police actually are not allowed to shoot someone for having a gun but they are allowed to shoot someone who is not confirmed to have a gun if they appear to be teaching for what may be a gun.
Police lives are neither more nor less valuable than anybody else's lives. If having one police officer shot means that more than one citizen doesn't get shot, it's worth the trade-off. It's quite clear that the current police trigger happiness does NOT minimize the total number of casualties; instead, it saves one police life at the cost of maybe ten citizen lives.
Police lives are more valuable than criminals' lives. To take an extreme example, let's say you have the assassin from No Country for Old Men about to flip a coin to decide whether or not to kill a cop and a police sniper has what is probably a one off chance to shoot him in the head. By your argument he shouldn't do it because we should prefer a 50% chance of a police officer dying to a 100% chance of a killer dying.
I also question your ratio. How did you get your numbers?
Noted you decided to go to a dishonest description of a situation positing they're already bad.
You will have to explain the dishonesty.
Many of the people, especially the unarmed people, shot by cops are NOT criminals.
Easy for you to say...you're not the one facing the barrel of a gun. Just putting on the uniform puts them at risk. That's enough. Things happen fast and I would not expect any police officer to martyr himself in the name of public safety.
That said, I agree that a suspect just having a gun is not a reason to shoot and there is no police department anywhere that would officially disagree. The problem is the unofficial actions. We've all seen coverups where the officer(s) clearly didn't act correctly (Laquan McDonald comes to mind). But as I said, things happen fast and an officer has to make decisions in fractions of a second. I would tend to give him the benefit of the doubt in most cases, but that doubt doesn't stretch to infinity.
They get paid money to do this.
Of course it's easy for me to say: Because an officer shot my father in the back, killing him.
I don't quite expect police to martyr themselves. I do expect them to accept very serious risks to their own lives in order to preserve citizen lives. That's their job.
d34df4n - I am a large male.
IF the police came to my house and I was choking my wife, and refused to stop, the police might shot me. I would be unarmed: yet, I was threatening another person's life.
You can be pepper sprayed or Tasered or simply bonked with a baton. Deadly force can only be justified when lesser force will not work.
We all know that pepper spray Ave tasers frequently fail to stop people.
If you want to require cops to go mano a mano with criminals then you need the cop to be a mano. We could just hire WWE want to bes as cops. Very few women. Plenty of female cops would end up getting their batons taken away and shoved where the sun doesn't shine in a situation like that.
We all know guns fail to stop people.
Or maybe we don't.
Gun shots are not like in the movies.
Can you find a case of someone continuing an attack on police for an appreciable amount of time after being shot?
Find me something like this with bullets: https://www.yahoo.com/news/man-shakes-off-five-taser-171109758.html
''Can you find a case of someone continuing an attack on police for an appreciable amount of time after being shot?"
To take an extreme example, let's say you have the assassin from No Country for Old Men, where Anton Chigurh is hit by a fucking car and it doesn't stop him!
Plainly, police need to be armed with grenade launchers or at least elephant guns, to be absolutely certain that today's supercriminals will be stopped by the first measure tried.
That's a movie. You are claiming bullets do not always stop criminals. Objectively, they sometimes do not - if you miss or the bullet just grazes the person. But how many cases can you find of criminals with bullets in them continuing to fight the way some criminals who are tased or pepper sprayed continue to fight?
You brought up the movie back at uhh.. yesterday, bot.
No, I don't know that pepper spray or Tasers "frequently" fail to stop people. Pepper spray and Tasers OCCASIONALLY fail to stop people, very occasionally.
Even the biggest strongest man is vulnerable to a good whack with a baton, and if he's busy choking his wife he can't even defend himself from the whack.
Are you suggesting that the officer hit the suspect in the head with the baton? Those strikes are banned by most police departments.
If you are going to hit him in the side, on the arm, on the leg, then yes, plenty of big strong men can throw the wife across the room, take two steps, pick up a smaller officer, take their baton away, and then do pretty much anything they want to the officer.
Good point. The officer should shoot the suspect, the wife, and maybe set the house on fire, because maybe if they don't, there is some small lurid imaginary chance that maybe, just maybe, the suspect will overpower the officer, steal their baton, and be able to "stick it where the sun don't shine"/rape the officer with it, before the officer (or the officer's partner) could intervene with another weapon.
"If you want to require cops to go mano a mano with criminals then you need the cop to be a mano."
Mano a mano means hand to hand, not man to man, you bigoted piece of shit. Bigoted and stupid is no way to go through life.
Sigh... bilingual puns are obviously over your head.
It's not a bilingual pun when your argument is bigoted.
"...If they aren't armed, what exactly is the threat? ..."
In some cases to take the officer's gun away from him and shoot him with it. See the Michael Brown case for example.
Michael Brown didn't take the officer's gun away from him. Wilson claimed he tried (but did not succeed), but was this contradicted by a witness. In any case, the shooting took place after Brown fled and Wilson chased him and was at some distance.
Please do not lie.
The shooting started when Brown attacked Wilson in his car. The second set of shots occurred when Brown turned ande charged Wilson.
Brown's DNA was on Wilson's gun so we know he grabbed it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Michael_Brown
That is not how DNA evidence works.
That is not how linear time works.
You are going to have to explain more.
Unless you think someone took Wilson's gun after the incident and rubbed it on Brown or dipped it in his blood?
DNA evidence only shows proximity, it doesn't show that someone touched something. DNA will transfer as dust, oil, blood, hair, and can be transmitted by smudged rubbing, splattering, falling. It can cling onto surface A which is touched by hand B and transferred by B to object C.
Since the officer used the weapon and then tackled his dying corpse, there's no way to determine when the DNA evidence was deposited.
Lastly, Brown was fatally shot from a distance, which means at that point neither had the weapon nor was a threat to take it away. The DNA doesn't, in fact, give Brown teleportation or time travel powers.
That is a thing that did not happen, though.
Don't lie.
Brown's DNA was on Wilson's gun and on the inside of his car door.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Michael_Brown
...that's not how dna evidence works.
That's not now time works.
How did the officer shoot someone in the back from twenty feet away if that someone had the officer's weapon?
You are the one lying here. Your own citation shows Brown was killed from further away.
You were supporting claims that Brown did not try to take Wilson's gun and that the shooting was from 20 feet away.
That is untrue. Brown tried to take Wilson's gun. The first set of shots were fired at point blank range during that struggle. The second set, which killed Brown, were fired at 20 feet when he charged Wilson after first running a bit away.
Repeated:
DNA evidence only shows proximity, it doesn't show that DNA source touched something. DNA will transfer as dust, oil, blood, hair, and can be transmitted by smudged rubbing, splattering, falling. It can cling onto surface A which is touched by hand B and transferred by B to object C.
Since the officer used the weapon and then tackled his dying corpse, there's no way to determine when the DNA evidence was deposited.
Lastly, Brown was fatally shot from a distance, which means at that point neither had the weapon nor was a threat to take it away. The DNA doesn't, in fact, give Brown teleportation or time travel powers.
Last week, a man (white, unarmed) was shot & wounded by police outside my office window. Turns out he was a suspect in a robbery/kidnapping up the street.
According to state statutes, whether he was armed or not was immaterial. My state allows peace officers (but not citizens generally) to use deadly force to stop a suspect in a violent felony. I didn't know that before.
The phrase "Stop or I will shoot" becomes an important step, in that scenario.
That violates Tennessee v Gardner, though.
Incorrect.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_v._Garner
Your own citation shows that your statement is incorrect.
I wonder fucking why, Mr 'most suspects are black' bigoted liar.
Read past the word ”unless".
Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985), is a civil case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that, under the Fourth Amendment, when a law enforcement officer is pursuing a fleeing suspect, the officer may not use deadly force to prevent escape unless "the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others."[1]
Noted, you are leaving out 'imminent'
And merely being a suspect in a felony does not make that imminent.
Noted you lied about your source, you lied about the situation described in the state law, and lied about the supreme court case.
I cut and pasted from Wikipedia. The article dies not say "imminent". If they f got it wrong that's on them.
What lie are you claiming I said about my source?
“ Apparently all the protests around George Floyd had no effect.”
non sequitur. it could be that the number would have gone back up without the protest. you can’t know what would have happened.
Well, we do know the protests had an effect. They are what is driving the Trump enthusiasm for using the military to gun down protesters. They were a flash point that drove a further wedge between left and right.
Enthusiasm for gunning down black folk pre-dates the Floyd protests by about 100 years. Possibly more.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tulsa-race-massacre-probe-finds-1921-horror-coordinated/story?id=117581090
Frankly, when dealing with numbers this small, statistically analyzing things becomes unenlightening. I mean, when whether a single incident in where someone was or was unable to get the shooting victim to the hospital in time to save their life results in a 10% difference in the result... well, it doesn't mean much.
And further, with numbers this low, well, there are other problems involving race and gunfire and policing and violence etc. that are worth more of our attention than this one.
The problem is the number isn't this low. It's about a hundred times higher.
This is only cases that were reported as unarmed, as opposed to all officer weapon discharges.
I'd still love for a reporter to dig into the income of unarmed shooting victims. I'm sure the correlation to income will be higher than race (which is its own problem). But I feel like there is a real missed opportunity for class solidarity on this issue, rather than racial division.
To the extent it correlates with income that is mostly going to be because criminality correlates with income.
However, if the true causative factor is criminality then the correlation with race will still be higher because criminality correlates more with race than income.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
"The sons of black families from the top 1 percent had about the same chance of being incarcerated on a given day as the sons of white families earning $36,000."
Your citation shows it's racism.
Really? Where? Quote please.
The income data is actually hard to explain.
Black women do not significantly lag white women so the difference is unlikely to be intellectual ability.
The authors argue it must be racism and black men are more discriminated against than women. You could make that argument for crime but does anyone really believe that a racist at a law firm who doesn't want to hire a black male law school graduate would be fine hiring a black woman?
The authors reject culture as an argument because black men and women have the same culture. Is that really true? Don't we all teach boys and girls different rules of behavior?
If you reject racial inferiority and culture as explanations and agree with me that discrimination would not be sex specific then the only other idea I have is to reach back to old stereotypes and hypothesize that black men have more testosterone and therefore more aggression than white men so they have worse outcomes (but presumably superior masculinity). As a white man I am not prepared to concede superior masculinity to blacks without decent evidence 🤣. I am not aware of such evidence.
does anyone really believe that a racist at a law firm who doesn't want to hire a black male law school graduate would be fine hiring a black woman?
Yes, it's possible that a racist would consider black women less threatening than black men -- they're probably sexist as well, after all.
It is a pretty strange racist who treats black women and white women equally, prefers Asians (especially those whose parents were not born in the US) to whites, and only discriminates against black men.
Ahh, yes, the 'it's not racism, we have black men in the factory, and white women in the secretary pool' argument.
Well, white women and black women in the secretary pool.
The argument against racism being the issue is that black women do not seem to suffer from whatever the issue is. Racists who only discriminate against black men but not black women seem rather unlikely.
How many armed people did they shoot? How many shot at them?
WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 7, 2025) – – The number of law enforcement professionals nationwide who died in the line of duty in 2024 increased 25% compared to the previous year, according to preliminary data provided by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), the leading authority on officer fatalities. As reported in their official 2024 End-of-Year Preliminary Law Enforcement Officers Fatalities Report, the NLEOMF data shows that 147 federal, state, county, municipal, military, tribal, and campus officers have died in the line of duty in 2024, representing a 25% increase compared to the 118 officers who died in the line of duty in 2023.
I believe “line of duty” includes all deaths not just those by guns and includes auto accidents and other deaths such as heart attack while on duty. The one I used to look at (paywalled now), the “Officer Down Memorial Page”, Includes Covid deaths and people who die of 9//11 illnesses.
Yes, it includes all officer deaths by disease and accidents even some of those at home.
When you're looking at numbers, the ratio of citizens shot by police to police shot by citizens would be helpful. In general, cops are only supposed to shoot in self-defence or defence of another. In principle, this gives the criminals the advantage of initiative; being criminals, they aren't constrained to shoot only in self-defence.
By my logic, this means that cops should be shot by citizens more often than citizens are shot by cops. As far as I know, every year the cops shoot citizens at a multiple, typically at least four or five to one, of the rate at which citizens shoot cops. This strongly suggests to me that the cops are much too trigger happy.
Or maybe that the cops have advantages like training, numbers, bullet proof vests, etc.
Maybe cops just shoot more people than they should.
Depends on what you mean by "should".
In an ideal world cops would shoot no one and there would be no crime.
In the real world, can you provide any evidence that assuming reasonable capabilities for police and a strong preference for killing criminals over letting criminals kill police, that the number of people killed by police is too high? It could even be lower than optimum.
"In the real world, can you provide any evidence that assuming reasonable capabilities for police and a strong preference for killing criminals over letting criminals kill police, that the number of people killed by police is too high?"
Police in England don't seem to kill many people at all (and that's even when you beef up the numbers by including car accidents involving police cars). Nor do Canadian police. So, yeah, there is evidence that the number of people killed by police in the US is too high.
However, police in England and Canada also almost never get shot at.
Clearly they are operating in different policing environments.
Your argument only works if police only shot when someone else shot first.
No, it's just that the cops tend to shoot first, which they shouldn't be doing.
Hmmm... is this a new proposed rule - that police officers cannot shoot criminals who point weapons at them until after the criminal shoots first?
That's a great rule.
Would you be willing to be a police officers under that rule?
Do you think police departments might have a problem recruiting officers if that were the rule?
Given that the criminal has the initiative, if the criminal actually intends to shoot rather than just brandish the criminal WILL get the first shot. So yes, the rule should be that cops can't shoot unless shot at.
This statistic is people who were shot and killed, not just shot.:
‘The Post is not tracking deaths of people in police custody, fatal shootings by off-duty officers or non-shooting deaths.“
So an unarmed person who was killed by, say, strangulation, is not counted. And an unarmed person who was shot but didn’t die is also not counted.
Also, I don’t know what exactly “armed” means. For instance was Tamir Rice (a child with a “pellet gun”) armed or not? (I’m not sure what “pellet gun” means either. When I was a kid I had a “Fanner 50” toy cap gun that shot plastic bullets. Was that a “pellet gun”?)
My father was 'armed' with a car that wasn't traveling towards the officer. (He shot my father in the back. Good shoot according to the officials of the time.)
Another friend of mine was 'armed' with a phillips screwdriver, shot at a distance over 20 feet on her stoop while the officers were responding to a domestic violence call in the apartment complex.
They're pretty loosy-goosie with 'armed'.
Rice was not armed but no ordinary human being could have known that at the time the offices shot him.
The open question is whether the shooting was justified if Rice had a gun. Did he point it at the officers or indicate in some way that he intended to do so?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tamir_Rice
Police dispatch clearly screwed up. Loehman (who shot Rice) probably should not have been a police officer. That said, given what Loehman knew and saw it appears to have been a legitimate shooting.
Rice had something that looked like a gun. That is NOT sufficient reason to shoot.
If, as Loehman claimed, he appeared to be trying to draw the gun, then it was a legal shooting.
Rice appears to move his hand, an action police experts concluded was Rice reaching for his waist band but disputed by expert reports released by Rice family attorneys, before Loehmann jumps out of the car and immediately shoots Rice from a distance of less than 10 feet (3.0 m).
Rice may or may not have moved his hand toward his toy but he did something that certainly looked like that from at least some angles.
"Moved his hand" is NOT sufficient reason to shoot.
That may be the rule you advocate. It is not current law.
Under current US law, however, if you are in a confrontation with the police and you move your hand in a way that looks to a reasonable person as if you are trying to draw a hidden gun the police officer can shoot you.
If we change that, then at what point would you allow the police officer to shoot? Also, under those rules of engagement, are you willing to take a job as a police officer?
When your argument 'but the law protects it' when they want to change the law...
...maybe this is you admitting defeat.
I'm too old to be a police officer. Police can shoot when and if shot at.
"Rice was not armed but no ordinary human being could have known that at the time the offices shot him."
Any ordinary human being would have known that he was not armed had the officers not shot him within seconds of hurriedly parking their car right in front, and stupidly exiting the car opening fire.
That's the problem of the shoot first, figure things out later chickenshit stupid mentality that too many police departments instill in their police officers.
Good, I see iamr4man has beaten me to most of my comments. In particular, WTF do they mean by armed? How about the fellow walking around the Walmart with the BB gun with a price tag hanging from it that he picked up in the store? How about the guy walking away from four armed police holding a couple of paring knives that the Albuquerque police shot in the back? If the police successful plant a weapon on a dead man, as the North Charleston policeman tried to do with a taser, I guess he becomes armed too.
Here's a link to Justin's source from what sounds like a partisan organization: https://nleomf.org/2024-law-enforcement-fatalities-report-reveals-law-enforcement-deaths-increased/ They show deaths from gunfire increasing by about 13% (6 officers) over the previous year's 46. 3 died due to accidental shootings. (By family, friends, other officers, or themselves?) Perhaps those skilled in statistics can weigh in, but this sounds like year to year scatter to me.
second lawnorder's comments too
"¹Adjusted for population, the rate of unarmed Black shootings in 2024 was 2x higher than Hispanics and 8x higher than whites."
Adjusting by population makes about as much sense as adjusting by sex would. According to the FBI in 2018:
When the race of the offender was known, 54.9 percent were Black or African American, 42.4 percent were White, and 2.7 percent were of other races. The race was unknown for 4,821 offenders. (Based on Expanded Homicide Data Table 3.)
Police in the UK killed a total of four people last year, and one of those was a car accident with a police cruiser. Police in the US kill over 1,000 people per year.
I agree that the racial disparity in American police shootings is bad, but permit me to suggest that that isn't the biggest issue here.
To be fair, police in this country have to face a very heavily armed populace and must, for their own safety, assume everyone they meet is armed with a firearm. Of course, generally speaking, police in this country support laws allowing a heavily armed populace.
Trigger-happy police are a side effect of the 2nd Amendment.
It is a very different world here. Police in the UK are rarely killed on duty, and almost never shot. The last time a UK officer was shot and killed was 2020. In the US it was yesterday.
Both, and.
In the late 1960s or early 1970s American police began to be subjected to indoctrination that led to militarization of police attitudes and practices. It encouraged police to shoot first and keep shooting until the suspected suspect was neutralized (dead or dying). Given what they've been taught and the culture in many departments, it is almost a wonder that it isn't worse.
Then we had SCOTUS decisions about qualified immunity which basically make it nearly impossible to hold a police officer accountable thru civil lawsuit. It seems to be law wholly invented by Republican courts.
Qualified immunity is not wholly made up - it's the immunity which applies when they're doing something they're supposed to be doing.
Republicans changed it to 'the individual official must know this action isn't allowed'. Which is basically impossible to prove.
"In the late 1960s or early 1970s American police began to be subjected to indoctrination that led to militarization of police attitudes and practices. .."
In 1971 the New York Police Department shot 221 people killing 93. In 2010 they shot 16 people killing 8. See here . That doesn't look like a change for the worse to me.
It's not.
But it's also a difference that doesn't match the crime data.