1) The US has six times the population of South Africa.

2) A police officer killing someone, is not necessarily murder. You're going to have to break out how many of those are acts of self-defense, because it's a non-trivial number (likely the majority are in fact self-defense). [1] Some of America's inner cities are wildly violent, with murder rates on par with the worst areas of Latin America (ie some of the worst areas on earth for murder). Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years.

[1] http://www.newsweek.com/how-many-americans-do-cops-kill-each...

From your comment I'm not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me, but:

1)The US has six times the population of South Africa.

Absolutely, thats why I said South Africa currently has about twice the police killings rate the US has. So the math is: South Africa police killings = 409 to be comparable on a per capita basis with the US rate of between 900 - 1200 divide by 6 = 150 to 200 death per year if the US had the same population as South Africa, which is a rate your linked article also supports. Compare that with the apartheid rate of 518 deaths over 4 years, so about 130 deaths per year. (But ok I have not taken 20 years of population growth into account).

2) A police officer killing someone, is not necessarily murder. You're going to have to break out how many of those are acts of self-defense,

Absolutely, but that is a very difficult thing to do, especially only armed with google. Furthermore police statistics these days in South Africa is renowned to be of especially poor quality, so I have to work with what I have.

2) Some of America's inner cities are wildly violent, with murder rates on par with the worst areas of Latin America (ie some of the worst areas on earth for murder). Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years.

Your joking right. South Africa has an average murder rate of 34 / 100 000 [1], seven times worse than the USA. And if you want to compare the worst with the worst (Detroit), compare it with our farm murder rate of around 300 / 100 000 [2] which is actually worse than most war zones.

So in summary, police killings during the worst years of apartheid was less than or at least on par with police killings in the US currently and police killings in current day South Africa is about twice as bad as both.

>>Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years.

Yup...South Africa :D

[1] https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-south-africas-2...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_farm_attacks

So your point here is that systematic racism isn't so bad because when the whites ruled the blacks the statistics were better? I.e. you're saying white people are objectively superior?

No that's not my point at all, that's called setting up a straw man argument..., please don't do that.

My point being, I disagreed that in your very first point you mentioned that police killings were a very common occurrence during apartheid ("some of the most chilling stories from South Africa during Apartheid"), and I argued that it was less common than current day USA and much less common than current day South Africa.

Now there is one very interesting conclusion that you might have missed from my point, and that is that in terms of police killings, either currently the USA is as bad as apartheid South Africa was, or that apartheid South Africa wasn't as bad as you remember.

I didn't say anything about how common police killings were in Apartheid. If you could please also not engage in logical fallacies.

I bring up Apartheid because they were notorious for covering up some truly horrific things that police did and the modus operandi was suppressing opposition. When I see similarities in the kind of things they try to pass off to explain deaths in custody, I think that connection needs to be made.

What I take issue with is your dismissal of my negative remark about "big, bad Apartheid." Yeah, Apartheid was bad.

Apartheid was bad, absolutely. But then according to the stats, it was better than current day USA (which was perhaps the connection you wanted to make?) and much better than current day South Africa (at least insofar as police killings are concerned).

Jesus, what a rant because I used the word Apartheid. Yes, I got screwed over by later presidents too, but it doesn't make me afraid to condemn the system that existed before. Get over whatever issues you need to resolve. You say "big bad apartheid regime" like you could take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_Weerstandsbeweging and tell me it's all just a big misunderstanding.

Whats your point? You linked to an extremist movement who had marginal support and had no affiliation with the government that existed during apartheid and that somehow proves what exactly? I mean I could link back to KKK or alt-right movements and that somehow vilifies the current USA governments (past and current) just because these groups exists?

Truth be told, I've got no beef with you or an axe to grind on the subject, I just try to provide some perspective to the situation.

For interests sake, do you have a link to the story about suspects getting murdered and then the police report indicating the suspect "fell against a chair". That's certainly the first I've heard about it. There certainly were some atrocities committed by both sides (whites and blacks or goverment and ANC), so I am not denying it is possible. For a good account if you want, there is an excellent book written by the police commissioner Johan van der Merwe: Trou tot die dood toe. I am not sure if it is available in english, and you might question the integrity / truthfulness of the book, but in my opinion it gives a fairly even account of the events of that time from the perspective of the police commissioner, and the commissioner himself is highly regarded, even by Nelson Mandela so that counts for something...

See my other comment for the rest, but the "fell against chair" case was documented in Donald Woods' book. It wasn't Biko specifically (though I believe his official explanation was "hunger strike", which was even bigger bullshit), but I believe it was more or less a contemporary of his.

Thank you I know about Steve Biko, will have look at some time at Wood's book.