I was talking to someone on Facebook who posted an article saying how serious the threat from Islamic terrorism is. I pointed out that 60 million babies have been aborted, and I would bet that police have murdered more Americans than terrorists (about 3000).

Obviously 60 million dead babies dwarfs the 3000, by a factor of 20,000. If you’re worried about anything, you should be 20,000 times more worried about that than terrorism. He didn’t care to discuss that obvious refutation of his idea, but we had a long debate about how many people the police have killed.

I admitted that I don’t have hard data on how many people have been murdered by police versus how many have been justifiably killed. He had hard data showing how few cops are convicted of murder. He thought that was meaningful, but ultimately admitted that a country that has warped the definition of murder to the point that the murder of 60 million babies has gone unpunished, might have a warped definition of murder for its revenue collection agents as well.

So I decided to try to determine that number by seeing how many people were murdered in September 2016. Is that an average month? I don’t know. An interesting question is whether police murders have gone up over the decades, or do we just have more information, because ordinary people have been walking around with video cameras in their pockets for the last few years? I wouldn’t be surprised if more people were murdered by police in the past (like in the 80s and 90s), but who knows? I would think the militarization of police was a smaller factor, but cops working in inner cities probably had an even better chance of committing murder without any consequences. Maybe that will be my next area of study.

So what are the results of my study for the month of September? You can check out each case here, but there were 18 people murdered that month, as best I can tell by a biblical definition of murder. There are issues I’ve run into with compiling that number as I’ve discussed here and here, but I’m confident that those 18 were murdered by the biblical definition.

Assuming that is an average month, how long before police would have murdered more than terrorists? Three thousand divided by 18 would be 166 2/3 months, which is less than 14 years. So, since approximately November 1, 2002, three thousand people have been murdered by police.

The obvious issue is that I’ve only done this with one month, and one month could be far from average, maybe high or maybe low. I acknowledge that.

But it is interesting that since September 11, more Americans have been murdered by cops than by Islamic terrorists.