How to Survive a Police Stop
Programs that teach young people how to interact with police are popping up around the country. But they're often exercises in victim-blaming — shifting the responsibility for avoiding lethal stops from cops to the very civilians they brutalize.
Chicago police officers attend a graduation and promotion ceremony at Navy Pier on November 19, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois. Scott Olson / Getty
Violence is inherent to policing. As critic Kristian Williams notes, “In the field of social control, police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force . . . Violence as well as the law is what they represent.”
Still, American police are particularly violent. In 2015, an article in the Guardian stunned many with its side-by-side comparisons of police violence in America relative to other countries. Iceland had one fatal police shooting in seventy-one years; Stockton, California had three in six months. Australia had ninety-four fatal police shootings between 1992 and 2011; the US had ninety-seven in March 2015.
And the numbers have not improved since then. When adjusted for population, American police killed over two hundred times more people than UK police did in 2018. In Germany, where police are far more violent than in the UK, police killed twenty-seven times fewer people than their American counterparts.
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