The use of deadly force by police officers has been a long-standing concern in the United States, and the Internet is often a place for debate about the causes of deadly confrontations between law enforcement officers and members of the public.

In September 2018, a meme posted on Facebook pointed the finger at one reason in particular, the relatively high rate of police homicides in the United States: the length of time it takes to become a police officer.

The meme compared the length of police Academy training and the number of police killings in recent years in each of the three Nordic countries (Norway, Finland and Iceland) and the United States:

Here is our review of the accuracy of these statements:

Candidates become police officers in Norway after receiving a three-year bachelor’s degree in police studies, centrally conducted by the Norwegian University College of police in the capital Oslo. The College’s website describes the training as follows:

The training is professionally orientated and is intended to provide a broad theoretical and practical foundation for police work. The training is based on the principle that all newly qualified policemen/women must be generalists. A generalist is a policeman/woman who possesses basic knowledge and skills pertaining to the police’s preventative, crime prevention and civil order work. In solving assignments, generalists shall be able to perform basic police duties, make overall assessments of situations, view their work in a broader social context and engage relevant specialist expertise and partners as required. Generalists shall acquire a basis for continued learning and development through the execution of their profession.

In order to be accepted into the training, the applicant must meet certain requirements: must be a Norwegian citizen, speak Norwegian, have a higher education, and be physically fit and healthy.

According to several sources, Norwegian police shot and killed four people between 2002 and 2016.

In its 2014 annual report, the Norwegian police investigation Bureau wrote that:

Two more fatal shootings occurred in 2015 and 2016, as detailed by the English-language news site The Local in November 2016:

Norwegian police have shot dead a 35-year-old man in Kristiansand, an incredibly rare case in a country where fatal police shootings are almost non-existent … The incident was only the fourth time police in Norway have been involved in a fatal shooting since 2002. The latest incident occurred in September 2015, when police killed a man in the municipality of Stange who was shooting at police officers. This marked the end of a nine-year period without any murders being stamped by police.

We have not found any evidence of another police murder in Norway since November 2016.

In fact, it takes a three-year bachelor’s degree to become a police officer in Finland. The University College of police of the country (Poliisiammattikorkeakoulu” in Finnish) outlines the course of study on its website:

A qualification of 180 credit points qualifies a person for the position of a police officer, such as a senior constable. It takes about three years to complete the study. Students learn practical knowledge and skills needed in police work. After graduation, the student has the skills to act as an expert in police work both independently and as a member of multi-professional groups and has the necessary skills to develop police operations.

While 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 main argument in the meme that police officers in Nordic countries undergo longer training programs than their American counterparts.

A representative of the national police authority of Finland presented us with a list of nine deaths attributed to police actions between 2000 and 2018. However, one of these nine deaths is related to a Taser and the other is related to the accidental shooting of a police officer at a prison guard, so seven members of the public have been killed (all shot) as a result of actions taken by police since 2000 in Finland.

Thus, in the decade from 2003 to 2013, all national police forces in Finland dropped an average of 12 bullets per year.

Up until 2016, police training in Iceland was conducted at the country’s police Academy, but in the past two years, becoming a member of the Icelandic police requires a two-year College diploma in police science in a program run exclusively by Akureyri University in the Northern part of the island.

The University’s website describes the two-year program as follows:

Police Science is a practical academic discipline that studies the basics, nature and practice of policing. Students will learn about the sources of consensus, conflict, and crime; personal freedom, diversity, and human rights; ethics, social control, and laws; the structure of the criminal justice system and its relationship to other agencies; police goals, organizations, and tasks; knowledge-based police approaches and methods; police investigations; the prioritization of day-to-day tasks; and communications with other rapid response services and suspects, victims, witnesses, and the public.

In addition, prospective police officers receive extensive practical training with the Centre for Police Training and Professional Development in cooperation with the University of Akureyri. The practical training involves, among other things, learning how to deal with difficult and dangerous individuals, unarmed police tactics and arrest techniques, the use of firearms and other police equipment, first on scene help and emergency driving of police vehicles. The training also involves fieldwork where students become familiar with the day-to-day work of the police under the guidance of tutors who are also active police officers.

Numerous news articles support this claim that only one person in Iceland has ever been killed by police there. In 2013, the Iceland Review newspaper, which was known in English, reported that the Icelandic police had forgotten to observe it for the first time, citing the newspaper “Dagblachi” Wazir. About death, the Guardian writes:

A 59-year-old man was reportedly shot dead after opening fire on police as they entered a building in the East of the Icelandic capital Reykjavik. Initially, Teargas canisters were fired through the Windows, after the man continued to shoot, and two police officers reportedly suffered minor injuries after they entered.

The gunman was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead there around 10am local time. The case will be investigated by the public Prosecutor of Iceland. The country’s national police chief, Haraldur Johannessen, told a news conference in Reykjavik that the incident was ” unprecedented.”

Unlike the centralized national training and accreditation used in Norway, Finland, and Iceland, police in the United States are split into semi-Autonomous Federal, state, and local forces, with training duration and requirements varying across the country.

However, according to data compiled by the Federal Bureau of justice statistics, the average basic police training in the United States in 2013 was 843 hours, or about 21 weeks (based on a 40-hour workweek). However, this figure only includes classroom instruction, with the average training time being another 521 hours, or about 13 weeks. That means the average training time needed to become a police officer in the United States in 2013 was 34 weeks, or just under nine months.

The training figure of “21 weeks” appears to derive from the classroom learning component, however this measurement skips field training, which greatly increases the total learning time. It is also unclear whether these figures have changed significantly since 2013, which is the last year for which the Bureau of justice statistics has data.

“The available data (FBI, vital statistics, Bureau of justice statistics) is worse than miserable,” David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of Missouri St. Louis, wrote in an email. “They suck and no one should do any analysis with them for their use to say we have some sex (regarding) the shooting and maybe note that there Are all kinds of circumstances involved when the shooting happens.”

However, commendable and methodologically rigorous efforts have been made to establish an informal database, in particular the Fatal Encounters website, which has been used as a data source in research.

According to the Fatal Encounters database, there were 23,977 deaths at the hands of the police between 2001 and 2018, suggesting that the figure of 8,000 may be a significant underestimate.

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.

While it is true that the United States has a much larger population than any of the Nordic countries mentioned in the meme, it has a much higher prevalence of police killings, even if the population is taken into account.

We calculated the total number of police killings in each country between 2002 and 2017 (using Fatal Encounters data for the US) and then adjusted for the average population of each country over that 16-year period. This method equates to 71 police murders per million people in the US during this period; 3.2 per million people in Iceland; 1.5 per million people in Finland and 0.8 police murders per million people in Norway.

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