ABC (Australia) Article here worth reading or at least considering the following excerpt:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-21/justine-damond-mohamed-noor-police-officer-charges/9573122
US shootings dwarf Australia's
US police officers are routinely armed. So are Australian police. But there is a marked difference between these countries in relation to fatal outcomes.
No one can be certain exactly how many people are killed by police firearms each year in the US because there is
no single repository for this information.
The Washington Post newspaper
counted 963 fatalities in 2016. A public interest group,
Fatal Encounters, estimated 1,500 people were shot by police each year from 2013 to 2015.
Let's take a conservative approach and agree the number to be 1,200 deaths per year. The US has a
population of about 326 million.
In Australia, on average, around six to eight people are
killed by police firearms each year. We have a population of 24 million.
This means that a civilian is about 12 times more likely to be shot and killed by a police firearm in the US than by a police firearm in Australia.
Why such a marked difference?
The literature tells us the number of civilian deaths caused by police firearms varies according to the standard of police firearms training, the rules that pertain to the police use of lethal force, and the gun culture in the society in which officers operate, including the level of militarisation of police forces.
There is little doubt that firearms training
suffers when there are multiple providers and the lack of a common centralised provider.
This is important in the US context, given that there are some 15,000 police commands in that nation.
In contrast, we have only eight police commands across Australia, namely the police departments of the six states, the Northern Territory Police, and the Australian Federal Police.
Also, the rules pertaining to the deployment of police firearms in Australia are
extremely demanding. In contrast, American police officers
need only have a "reasonable belief" that a firearm should be deployed.
Finally, there is little doubt that the gun culture of the US is a factor in police shootings of civilians.
Officers in the US are primed to expect a gun on any routine encounter, given US citizens'
ready access to firearms.
Indeed, a significant percentage — perhaps as high as a third — of US households
has access to a gun. Only about 6 per cent of Australian householders
own a firearm.
