“19 nations, including Norway and the UK, do not arm their police officers or only arm select officers. The difference these practices have on loss of life is staggering: no one died from police violence in Norway in 2019, and three people were recorded to have died in England and Wales from police violence between 2018 and 2019.” - Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression, The Lancet (2021)
Here are the 19 countries referenced in the above quote:
Notice that most of these countries with unarmed police are island nations with small populations. There are just six with populations greater than one million: UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Malawi and Botswana. The remaining 13 nations have a combined population of 2,640,660, an average of 203,128 per nation. Now let’s pretend the US has 1500 police killings per year. That translates to one police killing for every 220,000 Americans, which is more than the average population of the 13 nations that don’t arm their police.
Notice also that the authors of Fatal Police Violence attribute the low rate of police killings in these countries to the fact that their police are not routinely armed, referring to the difference this practice makes on loss of life as “staggering”. It’s actually not surprising at all that unarmed police are less likely to kill than armed police. But that’s not what the authors are saying. They’re saying that police killings inevitably happen more in countries with armed police, simply because the police are armed. They do not acknowledge that police killings are also rare in several countries that do arm their police. For instance*:
A reasonable conclusion from all this is that arming the police may or may not lead to increased police killings, depending on a myriad of interacting factors left unmentioned by the authors of Fatal Police Violence. Not very exciting but there you have it.
Updated October 18, 2021
—
* Botswana and Malawi are not in the table because I could not find information on police killings there, so I subbed in Iceland, for which there was information. Also, although Northern Ireland is part of the UK, it does have an armed police. Per the use-of-force stats provided by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), no “discharge of firearm” incidents were documented from May 2017 through March 2021 (the last month for which statistics are currently available). https://www.psni.police.uk/inside-psni/Statistics/statistics-on-police-use-of-force/
—
Reference:
Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression, authored by the GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators. The Lancet, Volume 398, Issue 10307, 2–8 October 2021, Pages 1239-1255 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)01609-3