Jeralyn, while 40M is unquestionably a shocker even for me, 2000 arrest related deaths a year is rather huge by western standards.

Take the UK. The number there  is typically a few deaths a year (10 is unusual) and that's everything, arrests, jails, prisons, etc.

Given the population difference we should be around 50 at the most, instead we are 2000, 2000!, forty times higher and that is just arrests, with jails, prisons and non arrest related killings the number of people the "law enforcement" kills every year in this country is easily above 5000 a year I think. 100 higher (per capita) than in Western Europe.

National shame  however you look at. The government whose agents are far more deadly that in the rest of the civilized world.

But what should we expect in the country where police is permitted to behave routinely like a occupation force, Blackwater wise, where citizens are dragged before courts in shackles, where parading defendants before jeering media/public is a common practice, where detainees and prisoners are routinely deprived of  human dignity in jails and courts, where laws often seem written by people with lynching mob mentality, where courts delight in imposing mediaeval sentences, etc, etc.

on the other hand, 40 million arrests may well represent multiple arrests of the same individuals, quite a different scenario altogether.

The problem is the lack of gun control. If a suspect has a gun in his hand and waving it, an officer probably has little choice but to use deadly force.

I don't think a high percentage of individuals are arrested. The 40M probably includes a lot of repeated arrest. The prison population is less than 3M in the US. Either a lot of the arrests are a) repeated offenders, b) for misdemeanors, or c) wrongful arrests.

1. one policemen killed every 57 hrs, for 22 years, would be 3,381 ((22x365x24)/57), not 1800. the correct figure is 1 every 107hrs. if they can't get basic math correct, why should i take anything else they say with less than a sack of salt?

2. on the other hand, 2002 in-custody deaths in 3 years represents 1 death every 13hrs ((3x365x24)/2002), or put another way, you are 8 times more likely to die while in police custody, than they are to be killed in the line of duty.

before you get your knickers in a twist, i'm not suggesting (absent additional empirical data) that the police are indiscriminately killing people, just that your numbers are wrong. they may be doing that, but so far, the evidence wouldn't seem to support such an assertion.

what can be reasonably concluded, from all this, is that being involved in the criminal justice system, in this country, involves a much higher degree of risk, regardless of what side you're on, than being an accountant does.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_29.html

Offenses with more than a million arrests were