Aqueilas t1_iwkwj5b wrote on November 16, 2022 at 11:55 AM

I think it would be much more telling to compare cross-national

tommytornado OP t1_iwkzwto wrote on November 16, 2022 at 12:31 PM

When you say cross-national do you mean various countries?

Aqueilas t1_iwl7dg0 wrote on November 16, 2022 at 1:41 PM

Yes. I think even 1200 hours of training is pretty low for a police officer, and way below what's required to learn the necessary skills to handle difficult situations as well as learning all the other police training, like the rights of citizens, self-defence training, firearm training etc.

What would be much more interesting is to compare the data with European countries where it takes much longer to become a cop.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56834733

It's hard though, because to properly compare, you need to have a lot of control variables simply because the US and EU are very different.

There are a few ways to tackle the problem in question - The effect of police training have on shooting incidents - does more training = less shootings?

E.g. using a most similar systems design to compare two or more states in the US, that are very similar in demographic, GINI, poverty, mental illness, gun ownership etc. but differs in police training hours.

I think you don't get any meaningful correlation here because you are comparing every state without controlling for other variables.

MantisBePraised t1_iwlfz2q wrote on November 16, 2022 at 2:49 PM

I like the thought of comparing countries, but I don’t think using broad data for training is a good idea. The main reason I do not think it is wise is because I think the term training is different enough in countries such that European “training” and American “training” do not come from the same population. However, that led me to the realization that if someone could find or create a data set specifically looking at the number of hours in deescalation training for various states and countries valuable results could be produced.

Neutronenster t1_iwm3zme wrote on November 16, 2022 at 5:34 PM

The US is quite unique as far as gun ownership and gun usage is concerned, so it would be impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from a comparison between the US and Europe.

I live in Belgium and gun ownership is rare, but gun usage by the police is rare too and strictly regulated. For example, the police are not allowed to draw a gun on someone wielding a knife in Belgium, because that would be a disproportionate amount of violence. Because it’s a rare occurrence, every death by the police is covered in the news and from the past decade I can only remember 3 deaths by the police in the past decade, of which only one was by guns. There could have been more of course, but our number of fatal police shootings is almost negligible when compared to the US.