WASHINGTON DC — With Americans being killed by police every day, one begins to wonder what the country would be like if cops were trained differently and stopped resorting to lethal force so quickly.

One country we can look to is Norway.

In Norway, cops have shot only one person to death. That was nearly a decade ago.

Since then there have been no other fatal shootings by Norwegian police.

Norwegian police are trained to actually de-escalate conflicts and engage with people respectfully, eye-to eye.

Contrast that with the United States.

In just the first eight months since January 1, 2015, over 600 Americans have been killed by police.

100 of those Americans were killed in just the month of March alone.

We can look even further back before January.

Consider the fact that cops have killed well over 5,000 Americans since 9/11.

Many of these killings have occurred during no-knock raids, which have risen by 4000% since the 1980s.

To put that in perspective, Iraqi insurgents have killed around 3,500 Americans in Iraq since 9/11 in Operation Iraqi “Freedom.” That’s to say, Americans killed by cops now outnumber Americans killed in the Iraq war.

You are eight times more likely to be killed by a cop than by an actual “terrorist.”

Domestic violence is two-four times more common among police families than American families in general.

As of 2010 the compared data lifted from Cato’s NPMSRP shows that the reports of police committing sexual assault amounted to more than 2 times the reports in the entire general population.

If officer-involved killings were prosecuted as murder, the murder rate for law enforcement officers would exceed the general population murder rate by at least 472%.

And here is something crucial to keep in mind: these statistics account only for the reported incidents. The vast majority of police misconduct and abuse is unreported.

In Norway, it was all the back in 2006 when the last person was shot by police.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Cops in the US kill more people in one day than Norwegian cops kill in an entire decade.

Something has got to change about the way cops in the US are behaving themselves.

They constantly blame the “training” or the “fearing for their lives” — but the reality of the situation is that cops are individuals, and individuals are responsible for their actions.

We can no longer accept such excuses.

What we are dealing with here is a relatively tiny gang of individuals who have little to no accountability. The sooner we accept that reality, the sooner we can think of ways to take effective action — and the sooner we can correct the problem.

