Police and guns [Norway, Sweden, Denmark, UK, USA]

[Cheetah]

Norway does not have a generally armed police force. When the situation requires it, police can request to be armed, and there are also guns locked inside patrol cars which can be used with permission.

Because of a fear of terrorists [I.e.: the terrorists won?] and a trend of more armed criminals, we are currently debating whether or not we should move to an armed police force.

Related to this, a news story comparing the consequences of this in a few countries compiled some statistics (unfortunately not complete for all topics):

Armed police policy:
Norway: Officers armed only when necessary
Sweden: Always
Denmark: Officers armed only when necessary
England and Wales: Only specialist firearms officers armed
USA: Always

Shots fired by police (2013):

Norway: 3
Sweden: 30 (warning shots or aimed at humans*)
Denmark: 58
England and Wales: 3*

Police drew weapons (2013):

Norway: 58
Sweden: 189

Killed by police (2013):

Norway: 0 (since 2006)
Sweden: 4 (3 so far in 2014)
Denmark: 1 (1 so far in 2014)
England and Wales: 0 (1 in 2012)
USA (2012 numbers): 410 (409 with guns) killed "justifiably" by police

* Norwegian and Danish numbers include all instances of shots fired. UK number does not include shots fired at animals.

[Sources: Politidirektoratet, Rikspolisstyrelsen, Rigspolitiet, Politiklagemyndigheden, Home Office, The Economist (for US numbers)]

Some other statistics to put the numbers in perspective:

Populations:
Norway: 5.1 million
Sweden: 9.7 million
Denmark: 5.6 million
England and Wales: 56 million
USA: 318 million

GDP [IMF] (and Gini number):
Norway: $100,000 (0.633)
Sweden: $58,000 (0.742)
Denmark: $59,000 (0.808)
UK (I'm lazy!): $40,000 (0.697)
USA: $53,000 (0.801)

My conclusion:
It seems that a general arming of the police force is a good way to get more people killed, regardless of wealth or wealth distribution. So it's probably a stupid thing to start doing in Norway. But because Terrorists!!, we'll probably get it in the near future...

 

[metatron]

Feel free to add:

FRG:

cops armed: (virtually) always
shots fired by police on persons (2013): 104 (54 warning shots, 14 on held items, 36 on persons themselves)
fatalities due to the above (2013): 8
population: 80.7 millions
gdp: 45k per capita
wealth gini: 0.667​

 

[Wolfbeckett]

It's a cultural decision and really depends a lot on a nation's independent circumstances. In the US, for example, the police almost certainly cannot be disarmed, because it's too easy for violent criminals to get access to guns themselves, and that would significantly reduce police effectiveness against those people. In countries where getting access to firearms is very difficult for criminals, it makes more sense that the police shouldn't need lethal armaments except in rare circumstances. As a US citizen I'd feel a lot less safe if the police weren't armed than I do with the police being armed. Yeah, they wrongly shoot people sometimes. Armed criminals shoot a lot more people and an armed police force is one of the factors keeping that from getting even worse.

 

[Tigranes]

Norway does not have a generally armed police force. When the situation requires it, police can request to be armed, and there are also guns locked inside patrol cars which can be used with permission.

Really? Police without a gun on the belt? Worth to be quoted in TIL thread!

 

[metatron]

It's a cultural decision and really depends a lot on a nation's independent circumstances. In the US, for example, the police almost certainly cannot be disarmed, because it's too easy for violent criminals to get access to guns themselves, and that would significantly reduce police effectiveness against those people. In countries where getting access to firearms is very difficult for criminals, it makes more sense that the police shouldn't need lethal armaments except in rare circumstances. As a US citizen I'd feel a lot less safe if the police weren't armed than I do with the police being armed. Yeah, they wrongly shoot people sometimes. Armed criminals shoot a lot more people and an armed police force is one of the factors keeping that from getting even worse.

Feel free to look up data on gun ownership in general.
Feel free to look up data on illegal gun ownership in particular.
Get yourself the nearest map and ponder how impressed the Russian mob is with Swedes and Germans having only one fecal ton of iillegal guns instead of, say, three fecal tons of illegal guns.

The gun availability argument is old...and very dubious..

Oh, and then there's the most heavily armed people on the planet:

Spoiler :

 

[Borachio]

Seems to me like an armed police force is a police force that's let things get out of hand. Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, kind of thing.

Still, what else can you do?

 

[metatron]

Seems to me like an armed police force is a police force that's let things get out of hand. Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, kind of thing.

Still, what else can you do?

You can have police interact with criminals in a way that doesn't prompt the criminals to all in on the situation.
It's not about the cops having guns or not per se. But i can see how that'd help.

 

[luiz]

While Norway may have no reason to have always armed cops, the thought of disarming the police in a country like the US is just bizarre, which is why nobody debates it.

Now, considering the much more populous and complex UK manages without an armed police, I fail to see why Norway would need to arm theirs.

 

[Arwon]

Australian cops are also armed.

 

[luiz]

As they are in Brazil. And last year they killed 1,890 people officially - the real number is almost certainly much bigger.

And considering our population is only 2/3 of the USA, our cops are far more trigger happy. That said, if the police was disarmed in Brazil chaos would reign. Syria would look like Disneyland.

 

[Arwon]

In Australia it's an average of about 5 a year shot by police. (That's 5 out of 23 million, equivalent to 70 shootings in the USA or 43 in Brazil or 2 in Sweden or 1 in Norway)

In Australia it's 10-ish a year die by gunshot in "custody related" incidents with roughly half of gunshot victims shooting themselves, and the other half shot by cops. (Vehuicular pursuit is the leading cause of "custody-related" death in Australia, an average of around 10 per year)

Courts have labelled essentially all (98 of 104) police shootings as justifiable homicide in the last 20 years. One was unlawful homicide, 5 were "other", whatever that means. This of course merely means the homicides confirmed to the rules the police are operating under, it doesn't mean those rules are appropriate. I know in Victoria after a spate of police shootings those rules were investigated and changed a bit.

 

[Cutlass]

We don't actually know how many people are killed by cops in the US. The national statistics are wrong.

 

[Arwon]

They're a baseline, though, and that baseline still compares pretty unfavourably to other OECD countries.

 

[Labtec600]

410 killed out of 318,000,000.....

We better stop that...in another 760,000 years there will be no one left.

 

[gay_Aleks]

410 killed out of 318,000,000.....

We better stop that...in another 760,000 years there will be no one left.

Of course, discounting population rises during the said 760,000 years.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Homo Sapiens will probably develop a natural immunity to bullets by 762014 CE.

In countries where getting access to firearms is very difficult for criminals.

I'm skeptical that such a place actually exists. Antarctica maybe.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Fortunately, by then, police will be robots and rectal probing will replace bullet or laser-related injuries by far.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

My conclusion:
It seems that a general arming of the police force is a good way to get more people killed, regardless of wealth or wealth distribution. So it's probably a stupid thing to start doing in Norway. But because Terrorists!!, we'll probably get it in the near future...

The last two years in Sweden have been somewhat exceptional. Perhaps we can expect these higher numbers, but it's been approximately one dead per year earlier. I'd say that's acceptable for better security.

 

[warpus]

Gunless police would never work in a country with such a huge emphasis in gun culture and gun ownership.

As such I prefer to live in a country that isn't crazy about guns. We have a lot of guns per capita, but mostly for hunting I believe. Our founding drunks never considered inserting anything that crazy into our constitution or sets of laws phew.

 

[Flying Pig]

I'm skeptical that such a place actually exists. Antarctica maybe.

Bear in mind that the vast majority of criminals commit only one offence, and are just like anyone else before that - yes, it'll probably always be possible for the Godfathers of this world to find guns for their minions, but the police in a country with strict firearms legislation are unlikely to be shot at when they attend a drunk and disorderly call in a house, a bar fight or a robbery. If legal guns are difficult to find then illegal guns are expensive by definition. Most criminals in most places aren't all that organised, and even in places where organised criminals do exist they're not usually the ones actively causing 'trouble' - successful gangsters are primarily businessmen, and obvious crime and the consequent attention is bad for business. Even then, most 'organised' criminals are woefully amateur.

Gunless police would never work in a country with such a huge emphasis in gun culture and gun ownership.

Perhaps - working from the above, if you're walking into a routine call knowing that it's quite likely that the angry drunk man throwing things also has a gun, you're going to want one yourself! That said, part of the problem in America is that the police have the weapons and culture of a military operation but not its training. In other words, they're given so many weapons that they go about their business expecting to have to use them - as a result, they often end up using hideously excessive force. It's understandable to an extent: when an incident hits the headlines protestations like 'I thought he was armed so I shot him' usually seem hollow (and often are), but your threshold of danger decreases massively when you have to try your luck in those situations on a regular basis. For the British police, calling in armed officers is something of a big deal, so officers are much more likely to try other methods before shooting. Even then, you get the same problem - once the armed men are surrounding somebody, they know that this incident has been considered dangerous and there's a lot of shouting and tension going on, so that's the environment where you need a huge amount of training and discipline to make sure that nobody shoots anybody unnecessarily. Ordinary policemen simply can't have that - they have to be actual policemen. The time and effort that being properly trained with firearms and maintaining that level of training - as soldiers and SFOs are - is huge and totally inappropriate to the amount of time that non-SFO policemen spend needing it, and it's ridiculous to ask them to cut into already-packed work schedules to have it.

EDIT: I note the use of 'justifiably killed' in the US statistics in the OP - in the British police, you're more likely to hear 'unavoidably'. That perhaps gives an idea as to the difference in culture.