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Law Enforcement Differences Between Britain And The USA

Posted on 23rd August 2015

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This BBC report gives me some hope: it shows that Britain has not yet become completely like the USA.

The report describes am incident in Clapham South (a suburb of South London) in which a man was shot by police. The key differences that struck me are:

  • The initial police visit was by unarmed officers, and when a problem was identified which might require armed officers, they had to be sent for (pretty much all police are armed in America);
  • There is no suggestion (at least so far) that inappropriate force was used by the police (every case of police shooting a suspect in the USA seems to result in accusations of police violence);
  • There is no mention, nor even a clue, of the person's ethnicity (in the USA you usually know).

My only concern is, how are we supposed to know if the police used inappropriate levels of force of we don't know whether the suspect was black or not?