July 13, 2013. Mark that date in you mind, because that is the date that the movement #BlackLivesMatter began. It began when George Zimmerman was found not guilty for shooting unarmed 17-year-old black boy, Trayvon Martin, on Feb, 26, 2012. From there, media coverage of unarmed black men getting shot began to sky rocket.

This coverage helped highlight all the shootings that were happening by the police. In fact as of today in 2016 alone there have been 933 police shootings that have ended in death. This is just a few hundred short of last year which was 1146 police shootings.

Lets take a look at other countries though.

England and Wales together have a total of 61 police related fatalities, this number is from 1990 to 2016. In just 2015 - 2016 that number is 6.

Iceland has had exactly 1 police shooting which was in Dec. 2013. They've not had any police related fatalities since their independence in 1944.

Germany in 2010 had a total of 7 deaths by police.

Norway hasn't had a police fatality since 2006 and that was just 1 person.

Knowing the numbers of other countries makes me wonder why ours are so damn high now. One could say that population numbers is a key factor but when you look into it, I don't think so. When Iceland had their first fatal shooting in 2013, their entire population is 323, 764 which is far more than the city of Stockton, CA population 298,118. In 2015, Stockton had a total of 3 deaths in the first 5 months of that year. Obviously population doesn't matter.

So then whats the key difference between the police departments in other countries v.s ours?

Training

According The American Project police departments spend the majority of budget funds on salaries and equipment. That leads to a lack of funds on training and Maria Haberfeld, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has been talking about the lack of training for years, she says, "The majority of police officers are overwhelmingly trained with a focus on the technical part of use of force, and are not trained enough in the emotional, psychological, physiological aspects of use of force." That doesn't mean that training on the use of force isn't important but that it should be the main focus.

The other issue is the time of length that the training takes place. Maria goes on to say the utter lack of time the United States has, "An average training in the United States is fifteen weeks. Fifteen weeks is nothing. Police forces in other countries have twice, three times as long training as we have here." And she is right, that is nothing! Czech Repulic, Turkey, and Slovenia has span of 4 years for police training.

By not putting an importance on training the U.S is saying that it doesn't think it's that important. Maria goes on to say, "It's irresponsible in a democratic society to say that a profession that has the authority to use deadly force, we just should shorten the training because a longer training is too expensive," and goes in The American Project to say, "Basically, what we're doing is putting a dollar sign on people's lives, both police officers and members of the public." That is exactly what the American people are seeing too. The Black Lives Movement is saying how it's obvious what side has the biggest dollar sign and that this methodology needs to change.

Unfortunately this won't change unless police departments get a bigger budget and specifically for training. This can also be done by people voicing their opinions to their local government and state representatives. Hopefully if our country speaks up as a whole we can get things to start changing for the better.