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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (124681)	2/18/2004 8:03:36 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 281500

If you'd made the calculation, then why aren't you showing us the numbers? " DC has about 3500 police officers in 2001 they killed 17 people. The US population is about 80,000 times bigger then the DC police force. 17 times 80000 is 1.36 million a year. That's close to 1/4th of your calculation and its in an area where there is no armed insurrection. Also its the actual number for an actual year of the city closes to me rather then a projection from 3 days of data." Message 19765846 Here, let me work them out for you, LOL Iraq war: 160,000 US troops killed 10,000 Iraqis over a period of 10 months. Kill rate: 1/160 per month. You more recent way of working them out makes more sense then your earlier method or my example (quoted above) using the same method. Of course the number of deaths is somewhat uncertain but even if it off by a factor of 3 in either direction it would still be a lot more then the example you give for the NYC police force. I used the DC police force as an example rather then the NYC force but still the people killed per member of the force per month is still far lower then the US military in Iraq. Of course many of those killed in Iraq where killed by bombs or missiles and never directly seen by the person who killed them. Also most of the death was done in the initial invasion. The current level of killing is much lower, although I still wouldn't be surprised if it was noticeably higher then that of most police forces. If the rate is currently about 2700 per year (from your earlier calculations based on three days of Iraqi deaths), it would be .0168 Iraqi deaths per American soldier or marine per year (assuming all those deaths where caused by Americans not allies, and assuming none of them where caused by shots coming from the Iraqis when they where fighting Americans or allied forces). The equivalent for the DC police in 2001 would be .0048. So the killings per soldier per year in Iraq would only be 3.5 times larger then the killings per cop per year in DC. Of course 3.5 isn't an insignificant figure, but it isn't massive. Also, I was talking about what my original source called a record year so typically the disparity would be greater. Edit - Some more data - "What it leaves out is the data showing that, compared to other large urban police departments, the NYPD had the lowest rate of fatal shootings per 1,000 officers." usccr.gov I can't fined my original source for the DC 2001 numbers but I found a solid source for 16 fatal shootings by DC police in 1995 and that's only 1 less. washingtonpost.com washingtonpost.com The average number of fatal shootings per 1000 officers (and other info) can be found at washingtonpost.com DC's average is 2.15, another local police for near me is PG county MD with 3.37. If Americans are killing 2700 per year in Iraq that level would be 16.875. Which would as I said before be 3.5 DC's peak rate and it would also be 5 times PG counties average rate. But then maybe I'm getting too bogged down in statistics and details esp. since the number of Iraq deaths is unknown. So I'll just sum up and ask people who are still with me to at least pay attention to the next paragraph even if they ignore the rest of the post. My main original point was simply that the odd method of calculating the "death rate" you used before didn't make any sense. Since then you seemed to have backed away from that method and substituted a more direct and logical way of calculating the number of people killed by each American soldier. That number is highly uncertain because the data going in to it is highly uncertain, and your calculation using it ignores the fact that most of the Iraq deaths where from the early period of the war not ongoing operations, but your new method still makes some sense. Figuring out killings per solider from ongoing operations (from the very sketchy data you posted earlier because I have no better source of data) would indicate that US soldiers are killing at a per person rate that is 5 times that of the average of the worst of the 50 biggest local police forces in the US. Tim