“This level of police violence in the United States is an extraordinary aberration among wealthy democratic countries,” Karabel goes on to say. “In Germany in 2011, there were six police killings; in England in 2013, there were none. To be sure, the United States is a much more violent society than Germany and England; in 2013 the American murder rate was five to six times higher. But this disparity hardly explains a rate of killings that the Economist estimates is 100 times greater than in Britain.”
An award-winning author whose books include The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, Karabel has published pieces in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times and Le Monde Diplomatique. He is currently working on a comparative study of 20 wealthy democratic countries called Outlier Nation: The Roots and Consequences of American Distinctiveness.