[ColdNoMore]

Originally Posted by GoPacers

Let's take a look at what police brutality actually is:

"Police brutality or police violence is legally defined as a civil rights violation where officers exercise undue or excessive force against a subject. This includes, but is not limited to, physical or verbal harassment, physical or mental injury, property damage, and death."

You presented a series of data points to substantiate that police brutality is not that significant of a problem.

• Crime rates for white on black or black on white have nothing to do with police brutality.
  
• The number of police officers killed has nothing to do with police brutality.
  
• The number of people killed during the protests has nothing to do with police brutality.

Quantifying police brutality is actually very difficult. There are not any obvious and easy measures as each interaction between an officer and a civilian is somewhat unique and dependent on the circumstances of the interaction. In addition, the reporting is often dependent on the honesty/integrity of the officer(s) involved. This is one of the main reasons for bodycams. As we've seen in the last few weeks, if not for cameras many interactions between police and civilians would have been mistakenly reported (blatant lying).

Typical measures for police brutality attempt to measure the uses of force in various situations to see if a jurisdiction (or officers) have a greater prevelance to use various tactics in situations where those tactics may not have been warranted.

Here is a link to a very long and detailed article on the use of force by police in six different districts.

Measuring the Amount of Force Used By and Against the Police in Six Jurisdictions

Bottom line, the data you referenced has little to nothing to do with validating that police brutality does/does not exist. To your original post - I would therefore agree that you would see little evidence of police brutality in the numbers since the numbers quoted are random facts that are unrelated to police brutality.

However, my point is that substantiating that police brutality doesn't exist or is not the problem as you state is not a conclusion that can be drawn from the numbers proffered.

While those who will stick with their made up definition of police brutality/excessive force will never change their minds, as you so aptly point out...it CAN'T be judged solely by deaths.

Thanks for trying though.