Last week's depraved proposal to live stream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of fatally shooting 13 unarmed US soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in 2009; the botched attempted execution of Christina Pike in Tennessee; and yet another mass shooting, this time in Pennsylvania, are just the recent, albeit graphic illustrations of what is wrong with crime and punishment in the US and how easily it could be fixed if anyone had the moral spine to stand up to the corporate and political interests that profit from no change.

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The mass shooting is a good start because mass shootings are common in the US and they get a disproportionate amount of media coverage. A man fatally shot eight people, including a pregnant woman and children, in Erie, Pennsylvannia, before killing himself. It was a handgun and all eight were dead before first responders could get there. That tells us a lot.

There are too many myths about gun violence in the US. Let's start with the police. Los Angeles has 8600 police officers for its about four million people. Now I would like you to pause and guess how many police officers Berlin (population also four million) has.

If you guessed fewer than Los Angeles, you were wrong. Berlin has more than double the number of cops as Los Angeles, at 18,073.

The myth is that the US is over-policed. People on the left have even called for police de-funding, perpetrating the idiotic idea that fewer police will mean fewer black people killed. The US is in fact chronically under-policed. Most cities have half the number of most European or Australian cities of the same size.

Erie, for example, has just 173 cops for 263,000 people, or 0.6 per thousand. Canberra at 731 cops, has about three times as many per head.

The results of under-policing are deadly for public safety. Essentially, police are confined to patrol cars with lots of guns and rifles. They are not part of the community. There are not enough of them to engage people at street level and hear about trouble before it escalates. They are seen as enemies, not friends.

But increasing police numbers meets resistance in a nation that prefers lower taxes to greater government services.

Fewer cops lowers the chance of criminals being caught. Unless criminals are caught quickly, the chance of getting away with it increases as there are too few cops following up........

© Canberra Times