> It's a pretty sad realization that perhaps the reason we have such violent police is, in part, because we have such a violent society.
In terms of violent crime overall the US isn't an outlier, it is located at the median of the OECD in terms of violent crime. The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.
This has been written about for decades and remains true today.
"America doesn’t have more crime than other rich countries. It just has more guns."
"The seminal work here is a 1999 book by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, called Crime Is Not the Problem. Zimring and Hawkins set out to examine what was, at the time, the conventional wisdom: that America had a uniquely terrible crime problem, one without any parallel in other developed democracies.
"They found, pretty definitively, that the conventional wisdom was wrong. "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher," they write."
... "A landmark 1997 study actually tried to answer this question. Its findings — which scholars say still hold up — are that America doesn't really have a significantly higher rate of crime compared to similar countries. But that crime is much likelier to be lethal: American criminals just kill more people than do their counterparts in other developed countries. And guns appear to be a big part of what makes this difference."
> The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.
Emphasis mine.
Most people miss that part and just blame people having guns in general, when law-abiding citizens with legally registered guns is not part of the overall problem.
Each of the three factions has a blindspot that it taboos and finds impossible to understand. Each faction is held in the thrall. I'll describe a Left wing version where their hero lives in Right wing world and a Liberal version.
So - our Society in caricature.
Left
Suppose you were studying economics or sociology and everybody had a odd paradox they couldn't solve. There were these different groups of people. Some lead long healthy lives and have most quality of life indicators in their favour. The other group has dire outcomes - nasty brutish and short. Nobody can figure it out. The same pattern plays out in different countries and in different centuries. Everybody would like for the people suffering not to suffer but we're perplexed and the newspapers report on a regular basis the status of these people, great people and intellectuals write books about it, classes are held in universities all over the country in the search for the solution.
Then one day some autistic figures it out. It's because some are poor and others are rich. It can be confirmed by checking bank balances. Surprisingly this person does not receive a round of applause and confetti in the streets - he is promptly fired from his job, his friends avert their eyes. Soon he is homeless and is found proclaiming his Truth under a bridge - to find him just turn Left on James Damore St.
Liberal
The Liberals believe in Robots, AGI and similar ideas for artificial humans - have so for centuries. Their fable is the Android - the dream of the artificial human that coincidentally replaces all forms of blue collar labour. The root of the word Robot literally means slave. Their nemesis is the Computer - the information processing machine that works best at replacing their own human generated information processing. Of course they try to use this machine to replace blue collar labour instead. They invest incredible energies here but ignore that each of their schemes for technological and economic improvement is based on some type of forced transfer or even slavery. While technologies not based on theft or slavery exist - these are ignored. They are mostly preoccupied with schemes to move groups of people around the surface of the planet to disrupt their foreign and domestic competitors in the name of social improvement - which it is for them.
I can pass the idealogical Turing test - can't say the same of the people who inhabit Reddit, Metafilter and HN - and I think most of the Right's intellectual firepower remains subtext in our society unless you read old books to find plot holes or the exchange between other civilizations and ours opens up in a way that cannot be censored by the information organs of the West.
In terms of violent crime overall the US isn't an outlier, it is located at the median of the OECD in terms of violent crime. The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.
This has been written about for decades and remains true today.
"America doesn’t have more crime than other rich countries. It just has more guns."
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europe
"The seminal work here is a 1999 book by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, called Crime Is Not the Problem. Zimring and Hawkins set out to examine what was, at the time, the conventional wisdom: that America had a uniquely terrible crime problem, one without any parallel in other developed democracies.
"They found, pretty definitively, that the conventional wisdom was wrong. "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher," they write."
... "A landmark 1997 study actually tried to answer this question. Its findings — which scholars say still hold up — are that America doesn't really have a significantly higher rate of crime compared to similar countries. But that crime is much likelier to be lethal: American criminals just kill more people than do their counterparts in other developed countries. And guns appear to be a big part of what makes this difference."