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The use of deadly force by police officers is the subject of long-standing concern in the United States, and the internet is often the venue for debates about the causes of fatal encounters between law enforcement agents and members of the public. In September 2018, a meme shared on Facebook pointed the finger at one cause in particular for the relatively high rate of police killings in the United States: the length of time required to become a police officer. The meme compared the duration of police academy training and the number of police killings in recent years, in each of three Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, and Iceland) and the United States: This is our overview of the accuracy of those claims: Candidates become police officers in Norway after completing a three-year Bachelor's degree in Police Studies, administered centrally by the Norwegian Police University College in the capital city Oslo. The college's web site describes the training as follows: In order to be accepted into training, the applicant must meet certain requirements: must be a Norwegian citizen, speak good Norwegian, have a high school degree, and be physically fit and healthy. According to multiple sources, Norwegian police fatally shot four people between 2002 and 2016. In their 2014 annual report, the Norwegian Bureau for the Investigation of Police Affairs wrote that: A further two fatal shootings took place in 2015 and 2016, as detailed by the English-language news website The Local in November 2016: We did not find any evidence of another police killing in Norway since November 2016. In fact, a three-year Bachelor's degree is required to become a police officer in Finland. The country's Police University College (Poliisiammattikorkeakoulu in Finnish) outlines the course of study on their web site: Although this particular claim in the meme is not fully true, the reality (i.e., a three-year college degree is required, not just a two-year course) even more strongly supports the underlying argument in the meme, that police officers in the Nordic countries undergo longer training programs than their American counterparts. A spokesperson for the National Police Board in Finland provided us a list of nine fatalities attributed to police actions between 2000 and 2018. However, one of those nine deaths involved a tazer, and another involved a police officer's accidentally shooting a prison guard, so seven members of the public were killed (all shot dead) due to actions taken by police since 2000 in Finland. The National Police Board spokesperson also provided somewhat extraordinary figures for the use of firearms in Finland in recent years: Between 2003 and 2013, there were a total of 385 gunfire situations where 122 rounds where fired altogether. The number of weapon use situations ranged from 26 to 44 on an annual basis. So in the decade between 2003 and 2013, the entire national police force in Finland fired an average of 12 bullets per year, between them. Up until 2016, police training in Iceland was conducted at the country's police academy, but for the past two years becoming a member of the Icelandic police requires a two-year college diploma in Police Science from a program run exclusively by the University of Akureyri in the northern part of the island. The university's web site describes the two-year program as follows: Multiple news articles corroborate this claim, that only one person in Iceland has ever been killed by police there. The English-language Iceland Review reported in 2013 that Icelandic police had shot dead a member of the public for the first time on record, citing the Dagblaðið Vísir newspaper. Of that death, the Guardian wrote: We could find no record of Icelandic police having killed anyone else since 2013. Unlike the centralized national training and accreditation used in Norway, Finland, and Iceland, policing in the United States is broken up into semi-autonomous federal, state, and local forces, with training length and requirements varying across the country. However, according to data compiled by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the average basic training for a police officer in the U.S. in 2013 was 843 hours, or around 21 weeks (based on a 40-hour work week). However, this figure encompasses only classroom instruction, with the average field training consisting of another 521 hours, or about 13 weeks. This means that, on average, the training time required to become a police officer in the United States in 2013 was 34 weeks, or just short of eight months. The figure of 21 weeks training appears to derive from the classroom instruction component, but that measurement misses field training, which increases the total training time required significantly. Furthermore, it's unclear whether these numbers have changed significantly since 2013, which is the most recent year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics has data. The U.S. does not maintain an official national database of incidents in which police officers' actions have led to the death of civilians, so we can't know for certain the number of people killed by police between 2001 and 2018, as Vox noted in 2015: However, commendable and methodologically rigorous efforts have been undertaken to create an unofficial database, notably by the Fatal Encounters website, which has been used as a data source in academic research. According to the Fatal Encounters database, 23,977 deaths took place at the hands of police between 2001 and 2018, which suggests that the figure of more than 8,000 may be a significant underestimation. The factual claims in the meme are mostly accurate, but the underlying implication behind the meme, that shorter training programs cause the relatively high number of police killings in the United States, is questionable. Several unmentioned factors are likely to be more relevant and prominent as causes. According to a 2015 article by the sociologist and criminal justice professor Paul Hirschfield, these include: the arming of police (which is not routine in Norway and Iceland, though it is in Finland), a higher prevalence of guns among the general public (American police are primed to expect guns), decentralized and under-resourced police training (although Hirschfield does not mention the duration of training as a factor), and racial biases (whether conscious or unconscious) among law enforcement officers. Although it's true that the United States has a vastly higher population than any of the Nordic countries mentioned in the meme, it has a much higher prevalence of police killings, even when population is taken into account. We counted the total number of police killings in each country between 2002 and 2017 (using Fatal Encounters' data for the U.S.), then adjusted for each country's average population over the course of that 16-year period. That method equated to 71 police killings per million people in the U.S., over that time period; 3.2 per million people in Iceland; 1.5 per million people in Finland, and 0.8 police killings per million people in Norway.
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