To Protect and Serve

Prague, CZ
30 July 2013
Thomas Secrest

To Protect and Serve

I was digging around on the internet today and ran across an article about how the police used a taser and then a bean bag gun to subdue a 95 year old man, who was resisting being taken to the hospital, apparently without his consent.

To defend himself, from what sounds like a medical kidnapping, he used his cane and a shoehorn. After the police were called, he further armed himself with a kitchen knife.

After the taser failed to produce the level of compliance the police wanted, they shot him with a bean bag gun. A bean bag sounds like a child's toy, however, it is fired from a 12 gauge shotgun at 300 ft/sec. The round has a surface area of 1 square inch and weighs about 1.5 oz.

These rounds kill on average 1 person per year and the dangers of their use are widely know. This section is taken from Wikipedia.

A bean bag round can severely injure or kill in a wide variety of ways. They have caused around a death a year since their introduction in the U.S. A round can hit the chest, break the ribs and send the broken ribs into the heart. A shot to the head can break the nose, crush the larynx or even break the neck or skull of the subject. This is why many officers are taught to aim for the extremities when using a bean bag round. A strike in the abdominal area can cause internal bleeding or strike the solar plexus which can disrupt breathing or heartbeat, but such a hit is generally safer than most other areas as well as presenting a larger target than an extremity.

 In this case, the old man was hit in the abdomen and died of internal bleeding. After surviving for 95 years, I can't help but wonder, if in all his imagination it ever crossed his mind that he would die after being gunned down by the police.

All of this made me curious; I wanted to find out how many other people the police kill each year. I also wanted to compare the US to Canada. In a 15 year period (1995 - 2010) there were 33 deaths caused by Canadian police. In that same 15 year period, there were 1,200 people killed by US police.

If you are saying that the populations are different you are, of course, correct. When we adjust for population differences, the Canadians killed one person per 1,000,000 of population, while the US police killed 4 people per 1,000,000 of population.

It means that US police kill 4 times as many people per year as the Canadian police. All that's left to ask now is -- why?