There is an article on CNN, “American police shoot, kill and imprison more people than other developed countries. Here’s the data,” and the data are shocking. 

The data showing the disproportionate violent treatment of black citizens by police is frightening. Any fool who wants to deny that there is not systemic racism among the American police should look at these data and wake up. 

A couple of other especially dreadful stats: 

Police shootings: in 2018 the American police shot and killed about 1,000 people. The comparable figures for Germany 11, Australia 8, UK 3, and New Zealand 1 per 1000 people. I’m sure that the American police are more heavily armed than those in these other countries, just as I’m sure that criminals are much more heavily armed that criminals in other countries. Are our cops so much less reliable or our criminals so much more vicious? I don’t think so. We are different from other countries, I think, because they are not steeped in gun culture and gun violence. 

We Americans have more guns than anybody. A “Small Arms Survey” of 2017 found that in the U.S. we have 120.5 guns for every 100 persons. Of these, 1,073,743 guns are registered and 392,273,257 are not — so much for gun control. The countries that come closest to us in number of firearms have only half our number, and these are Yemen at 52.8 per 100,000, Montenegro 39.1, and Serbia 39.1. So we are far ahead of any violence-torn country. Conclusion: Yes, the U.S. is violence torn and this is due to gun-culture and racism.

The other set of statistics that amazed me was the size of prison populations: Here are the figures for the number imprisoned per 100,000 people: UK 140 per 100,000, Canada 114, France 100, Italy 98, Germany 75, Japan 41, and the United States of America 655 per 100k. We have 4.6 times more people in prison than any country in the free world. It is Russia that comes closest to us with 615 per 100k while China lags far, far behind with 118 per 100k So some questions arise: 

Are our places of confinement prisons or concentration camps? 

Can any other statistic so well portray the dysfunctionality of the United States?

And what are the causes of this dysfunctionality? 

Among them are these three: 

1) racism,

2) unjust distribution of wealth and opportunity, 

3) our propensity to violence.