> If the murder rate is 4 per 100k in the US, and there are a million police officers in the US, shouldn't I expect something like 40+ police officers murdering a year?
Right now, police in the US kill about 1000 people each year. That amounts to about one in 15-20 non-suicide deaths caused by gun violence. You can argue that 40 is too many, but it's two orders of magnitude lower than the current number. 40 is the number of people killed by the Chicago police alone every 2-3 years.
You're conflating police murder with police homicide. The difference is that some (hopefully almost all) of the time the police kill someone, they are justified in doing so. 40 is what we should expect for murders - i.e completely unjustifiable killings.
This is also blurred a bit further because we can imagine a class of killing that's "kind of justified" that we'd expect the police to sometimes engage in. Something like killing through negligence or incompetence. A certain fraction of people are likely negligent or incompetent. If you're an incompetent plumber, pipes may burst. If you're an incompetent, lazy, whatever police officer you may cause someone to die. We should also expect some level of this too.
Right now, police in the US kill about 1000 people each year. That amounts to about one in 15-20 non-suicide deaths caused by gun violence. You can argue that 40 is too many, but it's two orders of magnitude lower than the current number. 40 is the number of people killed by the Chicago police alone every 2-3 years.
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