Every 28 Hours! IceLand 1 in 70 Years

Quote: In December of 2013, Iceland’s police force killed a citizen for the first time in the country’s history. The first time. Let’s include all of the facts for fairness: Iceland has been an independent nation for only 70 years (as opposed to the United States’ 238-year history), and its population (325,671) is merely a fraction of that of the United States (313,900,000). But these statistics don’t account for the fact that Icelandic police have killed one person, and American police have killed thousands.How can we explain that?
First, let’s talk about the fact that the number of people killed by police in the United States is mostly unquantifiable. Despite a 1994 congressional act that requires the Attorney General to “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” and “publish and annual summary of the data acquired,” only a few police departments nationally report statistics on deaths by police firearms.

Quote: What we do know is disheartening. We know that in 2011, the Los Angeles County Police Department shot and killed 54 people. We know that the following year, New York City police shot and killed 16 and Philadelphia police shot and killed 52. We know that a disproportionate number of people killed are people of color, especially black people; some estimates indicate that a black man is killed every 28 hours in the United States. We also know that guns are not the only weaponthat police use against the public.
We can learn many things from the Michael Brown shooting case. We can examine and condemn the public perception of young black males, and the way the media portrays them after their deaths. We can open up the history of racial tension in a town where two-thirds of the population is black, but the governing bodies and the majority of the police department is white. We can also look at this incident as one in a series—a series that includes Rodney King, Sean Bell, Eric Garner, James Boyd, Ezell Ford, and a myriad of others—in which police used unreasonable and excessive force against a citizen.
Why is this happening? And more importantly, what can we do to stop it