What 16 Months Of Police Killings In The U.S. Looks Like: 1,500 people in the US gunned down by police since January 1, 2014 - Those are combat statistics - Solution: Privatize community security/police (stops targeting citizens for revenue) - Texas Town Experiences 61% Drop in Crime After Firing Their Police Department - Opinion: It's time to consider privatized policing?

This article appeared 
at vocativ

By Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

May 06, 2015

The high profile deaths of men and women at the hands of law enforcement officials in the last year—including Freddie Gray, Michael Brown and Eric Garner—have thrust the issue of police-involved killings into the national spotlight. But comprehensive data on the topic remains elusive. Even the FBI failed to count at least half the number of people killed by state and local law enforcement officers in the past decade, according to a government report released in March.

In attempt to capture a fuller picture of police killings in the U.S., citizen and activist groups have started compiling their own statistics through crime and media reports. One of the most comprehensive projects to date is a website called Killed By Police. The site logged nearly 1,500 police-involved deaths between January 1, 2014 and April 30, 2015 and included documentation for each incident.

This is what 16 months of police killings in the United States looks like.

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This article appeared 
at The Free Thought

Texas Town Experiences 61% Drop in Crime After Firing Their Police Department

March 6, 2015

Sharpstown, TX — Sharpstown is a Texas community, located just southwest of Houston, and the way they maintain security in this community has gotten our attention.

In 2012, they fired their cops.

The Sharpstown Civic Association then hired S.E.A.L. Security Solutions, a private firm, to patrol their streets.

The statist fearmongers will have you believe that "privatizing" anything would result in mass chaos and a Mad Max scenarios of warlords and rampant crime. But they are wrong.

"Since we've been in there, an independent crime study that they’ve had done [indicates] we’ve reduced the crime by 61%" in just 20 months, says James Alexander, Director of Operations for SEAL.

Government police, despite not acting like it, are still part of the government. This means that any progressive change for the better takes ten times longer than it would in the private sector; if it happens at all. Government police are not driven by efficiency and threats from liability, as neither one of these things are needed when you have a tax farm to rob when things get tight.

Contrary to the government apparatus, private police, must be efficient as well as safe, for one small mistake or claim could end their entire operation. If an inefficiency is spotted within the system, changes must be implemented swiftly to avoid the loss of revenue.

The reason for the success rate of SEAL Security is that they can see a problem and quickly adapt versus trying to spin the rusty cogs of the bureaucratic process. And that is exactly what SEAL did in Sharpstown.

According to guns.com, Alexander cites the continuous patrol of SEAL's officers in their assigned neighborhoods as opposed to the strategy of intermittent presence that the constable embraced. "On a constable patrol contract, it's either a 70/30 or an 80/20. Meaning they say they patrol your community 70 percent of the time, [while] 30 percent of the time they use for running calls out of your area or writing reports."