• Sordid@beehaw.org
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    4 months ago

    More people were killed by US Customs and Border Patrol in 2022 than died at the Berlin Wall in its entire 28-year existence.

    Maybe the fact that the US border is almost 80 times longer than the Berlin Wall has something to do with that?

    • zea@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 months ago

      Densely populated area vs sparsely populated area. We should really be comparing deaths per attempted crossing.

      This source claims over 100000 people tried to cross the Berlin Wall, and CBP says about 3 million attempted crossings in 2022

      That’s about 1400 per million killed in Berlin and about 60 per million killed in the US. Considering one had shoot-to-kill orders and the other is supposed to be a upstanding country, only 20x better really isn’t that impressive.

      If anyone can find better numbers, please do recalculate my results, my numbers are what I could find in a few minutes on mobile.

      EDIT: corrected Berlin number, I read the wrong one initially

      • Sordid@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        That’s about 1400 per million killed in Berlin and about 60 per million killed in the US. Considering one had shoot-to-kill orders and the other is supposed to be a upstanding country, only 20x better really isn’t that impressive.

        Some percentage of people are always going to whip out a gun and start blasting when authorities try to detain them, so you’re never going to get that number down to zero.

        According to these numbers, the US police arrested a total of just over ten million people in 2019, and the total number of people fatally shot by cops that year was a thousand. So that’s a fatality rate of 100 per million arrests, almost double the rate of fatalities per attempted border crossing. So, y’know, I think the US Border Patrol is doing relatively well.

          • Sordid@beehaw.org
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            4 months ago

            I mean… yes, that’s true, but my point is that it’s disingenuous to imply the US is “the baddies” by comparing the number of people killed at its enormous border to the tiny Berlin Wall. Especially when, based on the numbers, the US law enforcement seems to handle border security with kid gloves compared to policing its own citizens.