If only we could make maps of the abuse of police powers.
So, are these ugly encounters between police and civilians becoming more common, or is technology simply making them easier to capture? It's surprisingly difficult to tell — there's no comprehensive national database on either police use of force or on police-related deaths....
From 2003 to 2009, the Justice Department found that 4,813 people died while a member of law enforcement was trying to arrest or restrain them, or shortly thereafter. How you look at those (again, imperfect) numbers is largely a matter of framing, as we've previously reported:
"If you're looking at the universe of all arrests, it feels like arrest-related deaths are exceedingly rare. The report noted that those 4,800 arrest-related deaths came during a period in which the FBI estimated that there were nearly 98 million arrests made nationally. That's .005 percent of all arrests, some of which will be deemed justifiable homicides.
"But if you consider these numbers simply as a tally of arrest-related deaths by themselves, it happens frequently enough that any such case might make a headline every single day. A measure compiled by Colorlines and the Chicago Reporter in 2007 found that nearly 9,500 people across the country were shot by the police between 1980 and 2005 — 'an average of nearly one fatal shooting per day.' "
And while we still don't know much about police-related deaths, we do know a good deal more about traffic stops like the one that preceded the fatal encounter between Scott and Slager. For black drivers, those stops often appear to be pretext for police to search for some other presumed crime.
The map below is just a sliver of the reach of Germany’s network of enslavement under the rule of Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1945. Based on the work of historians at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it shows the locations (in grey) of 1,096 out of 1,150 ghettos they’ve identified in Nazi-occupied Eastern-Europe. The locations in black represent 868 of the 1,094 concentration camps they’ve documented. (Locations in yellow were filmed in Memory of the Camps.)
In the five years after the Nazis seized power in January 1933, Himmler built an unassailable position for the SS by taking control of the German police forces. On March 9, 1933, he was appointed provisional president of police in Munich. Three weeks later, he was named Commander of the Bavarian Political Police. By late 1934, Himmler sought and obtained command of each of the state political police departments in Germany, and had centralized them within a single new agency in Berlin, the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei; Gestapo).
After Hitler appointed him Reichsführer SS and Chief of German Police on June 17, 1936, Himmler centralized the various criminal police detective forces in Germany into the Reich Criminal Police Office (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt) and united the Gestapo and Criminal Police in the Security Police Main Office (Hauptamt Sicherheitspolizei). In September 1939, Himmler fused the Security Police and the SD into the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt; RSHA), the agency that would be tasked with implementing the Holocaust in 1941-1942. Himmler also unified and centralized the uniformed police forces (Ordnungspolizei; Orpo) in Germany.