People killed by police in the USA

The problem for the most part is the CULTURE, officers believe they are untouchable because admittedly they have a tough job. But then they fall into the trap of believing their own propaganda, fostering excessive recourse to violent and lethal methods. Certain departments are better than others at curtailing the excesses, but many go overboard defending their officers. We always have to deal with the political issue when we try to settle; after all, how many city council officials are willing to pay money for police misconduct and risk being tagged as not backing up their officers.

You guys are framing the issue as if ALL "killings" at the hands of cops are bad. Just because a cop killed someone, the cop must be doing something wrong.

Criminals who are members of La Raza are a very bad type of criminal indeed. The type that destroys nations if there are too many.

On the contrary, Mr. Donini is making baseless comments and being rude to the hard working cops out there. No apology.

Defenders of police militarization, such as that on display in Ferguson, Missouri, often claim that it’s necessary to provide military gear to cops, given how dangerous law enforcement has become.

But has policing really become so dangerous that we need to arm peace officers like an invading army? The answer is no. It's never been safer to be a cop.

To start with, few police officers die in the line of duty. Since 1900, only 18,781 police officers have died from any work-related injury. That's an average of 164 a year. In absolute terms, officer fatalities peaked in 1930 (during alcohol prohibition) at 297, spiking again in the 1970s before steadily declining since.

If you look at police fatalities adjusted for the US population, the decline is even starker. 2013 was the safest year for American policing since 1875.

In 2013, out of approximately 900,000 sworn officers, just 100 died from a job-related injury. That's about 11.1 per 100,000, or a rate of 0.01%.

Policing doesn't even make it into the top 10 most dangerous American professions.

**Logging has a fatality rate 11 times higher, at 127.8 per 100,000. Fishing: 117 per 100,000. Pilot/flight engineer: 53.4 per 100,000. It's twice as dangerous to be a truck driver as a cop—at 22.1 per 100,000.
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Another point to bear in mind is that not all officer fatalities are homicides. Out of the 100 deaths in 2013, 31 were shot, 11 were struck by a vehicle, 2 were stabbed, and 1 died in a "bomb-related incident." Other causes of death were: aircraft accident (1), automobile accident (28), motorcycle accident (4), falling (6), drowning (2), electrocution (1), and job-related illness (13).

Even assuming that half these deaths were homicides, policing would have a murder rate of 5.55 per 100,000, comparable to the average murder rate of U.S. cities: 5.6 per 100,000. It's more dangerous to live in Baltimore (35.01 murders per 100,000 residents) than to be a cop in 2014.

"The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed -- where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."