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A statistic published today states that, in the year 2011, German police fired 49 warning shots and 36 shots "in earnest", resulting in 6 persons dead and 15 injured.

That's less than the year before that (59 warning shots, 37 shots "in earnest", 7 dead, 17 injured).

Now, I'm curious, and would like to double-check the image given by movies and the general media: Does anyone have corresponding numbers for other countries?

I found one source reading 29 injured and 5 dead over 30 incidents involving officer fire last year.

The definitions are a bit vague, and there are no counts on warning shots or references to government material so there might be some bias in there.

Found this one for the USA:

Nationally, police killed 1,553 people between 2003 and 2006, the latest federal figures available.

That would be ~388 killed / year...

Solar wrote:That would be ~388 killed / year...

Honestly I expected the figure to be higher.

With regards to your original question, this link doesn't provide that specific statistic but gives a pretty good overview of crime and punishment statistics by nation.

I don't know about firearms as such, but here in Australia the furore is over "non-lethal" weapons such as tasers, which the New South Wales (a state of Australia) police have killed two people with in the last year, if my memory serves me right. The media go on about "police brutality" a lot here.

berkus wrote:And still, over 7 billion of inhabitants on the planet.

A very good portion of them, probably well over thousands a year, probably aren't caught for what they did and deserve the punishment.

VolTeK wrote:A very good portion of them, probably well over thousands a year, probably aren't caught for what they did and deserve the punishment.

Sentence has to be dealt by a judge in court after a public trial in which the defendant has the opportunity to have himself defended by an attorney - not a policeman on the street that's acting on what he's seen. And virtually every western civilization has abolished the death penalty.

I believe that China has over 400 executions per year. They probably will not release the stats on the number of shots fired.

An execution is a very different thing, isn't it?