"You've beaten enough innocent people your premiums are going from $500/month to $50,000. Your choice."
Then taxpayers would pick up the bill for the higher salary demands of officers due to the cost of insurance, and then the police unions would lobby for targeted tort reform to limit their liability and insurance costs on the basis that it would save the taxpayers money, and succeed, and the structural problems that foster abuse would manage not to be dealt with at all, and the victims even worse off. That's what.
“Let’s absolve ourselves of liability”—which is what this amounts to unless it's a cop proposing it—is just an excuse to avoid addressing the problem.
(Doctor’s malpractice insurance is not instead of their private or public employer being liable as usual under principles like respondeat superior or just plain direct liability for acts aligned with bad policy or direction, and only covers professional negligence, not criminal acts. Mere police malpractice, is—while also an issue, to be sure—not the focus of concern here, and the acts involved are the kind for which it is generally illegal to insure liability for, for good reasons. Insurance for liability incurred through murder is not a thing, and I don't think anyone who has thought it through wants it to be a thing. Except maybe prospective murderers.)
The next step might be that departments have to publish their insurance rates, like the recent hospital bill law.
They already have to do this when the agency is liable and the cops aren't because of QI; which is equivalent to the agency self-insuring and managing risk through personnel policies and decisions.
Making the major crimes involved insurable would negate any benefit from making cops individually liable by eliminating or restricting the scope of QI.
> Then taxpayers would pick up the bill for the higher salary demands of officers due to the cost of insurance, and then the police unions would lobby for targeted tort reform to limit their liability and insurance costs on the basis that it would save the taxpayers money, and succeed, and the structural problems that foster abuse would manage not to be dealt with at all, and the victims even worse off. That's what.
Maybe that could be addressed by modifying the proposal to require that departments buy malpractice insurance individually for each of their officers, and make sure the cost of that insurance shows up on the budget of whatever department or team the officer is a member of. Basically make it more expensive (on a predicable, ongoing basis) to employ bad cops than good ones, which hopefully would then factor into personnel decisions.
BTW, I hate that America has become so neoliberalized that I end up needing to consider how to build a profit motive into having cops not violate constitutional rights.
It thus is always in everyone's individual best interest to try to identify incidents and report them as quickly as possible.
The sort of person who makes a good cop isn’t motivated by money. You don’t pay him to be a cop, you pay him so he can be a cop. So he can pay his bills while deriving job satisfaction from duty, honour, etc. The same way the really good programmers are in it for the love of the craft.
The instant you bring commercial incentives into it you drive away the people you really want. That’s why the military don’t do it. And why tech goes toxic when the techbros show up.
> The sort of person who makes a good cop isn’t motivated by money. You don’t pay him to be a cop, you pay him so he can be a cop. So he can pay his bills while deriving job satisfaction from...
That's likely also true of many classes of bad cops, as well (e.g. deriving job satisfaction from dominating others/exercising power over them).
I also think your kind of missing the point. I interpreted the comment on neoliberalism to be critiquing the idea that institutional solution to every problem has to be some kind of system involving money and markets. Basically, why dick around with insurance and budgets to dis-incentivize the employment of "cops who violate constitutional rights" when you should have an institution that's capable of just removing bad cops like that simply for the violations themselves.
For the bad cop they get paid a little more and pay a lot more for the insurance, so that it eats too much of their salary and they have to quit and find another job.
The people who are in it for honor and duty aren't going to be the ones paying the higher premiums, right?
I can't even find a life-insurance insurer that will measure my waist to add context to my BMI despite the clear predictive information that contains and I get penalized for having more lean body-mass despite the fact that it is also predictive of longevity.
Sure, cops should not benefit from QI, at least as currently constructed (a more limited form may be appropriate and arguably even Constitutionally necessary from a due process perspective), and that may make merely negligent acts something they can, and may even be required as a condition of employment, to cover with insurance. That isn't instead of their public employer being liable (the absence of QI for private employees doesn't negate respondeat superior), nor does it mean that the important acts (which are intentional crimes) at issue in the present discussion of police abuse would (without major and undesirable changes in public policy) be insurable. That would actually dilute the goal of effective cost to being a (deliberately) bad cop.
I don't have a problem with direct liability for cops.
I have a problem when what is proposed is that as an excuse for absolving public-agency liability, or when it is suggested that civil liability for the intentional violent crimes at the core of the abuse discussion should be made insurable (which has the same problem as QI with only public agency liability, since then the agency effectively is self-insuring the crimes and dealing with individual costs of employees in it's hiring and firing policies.)
Liability from criminal acts is generally legally uninsurable for very strong public policy reasons, even without a conviction of the crime, and deprivation of rights under color of law is already a federal crime. (And many of the other things at issue with police abuse—murder most obviously—are more specific state and/or federal crimes, as well.)
There's a space of insurable liability without QI, but it's not actually the space of most interest in the police abuse discussion.
OK, but cops are also subject to civil suits, as well as the legal fees themselves. It'd be a start.
Civil liability for ones own criminal acts (at least wilfull ones, and often wilfull rather than merely negligent acts more generally) is often prohibited (the exact boundaries differ by jurisdiction), for very strong public policy reasons, and the vast majority of the acts of concern with police abuse are (very frequently unprosecuted, but that's not material when it comes to whether the civil liability is insurable) both willful and crimes, not mere negligence in either the general or professional malpractice sense (almost always intentional deprivation of rights under color of law and/or conspiracy against rights, and very often wilfull/intentional violent crimes on the assault to voluntary manslaughter to murder spectrum.)
Drawing analogies to medical malpractice misses the fact that medical malpractice covers mistakes that fall short of the professional standard of care, but don't cover when someone who happens to be a doctor just decides to murder someone.
No, it is so accountability no longer, in practice, relies on public prosecutors choosing to file criminal charges. The acts of major concern are criminal acts, that are routinely unprosecuted (in some cases, this might be just because of the civil vs. criminal standard of proof differences, but it's very clear that there are a lot of cases of prosecutorial favoritism to law enforcement, whether because of the working relationship that the two institutions naturally have or for other reasons.)
In fact, there have been many such forces, technology being o a big one, which have driven many such improvements over the years. It just isn’t moving fast enough to save everyone.
I'd love to see all complaints of brutality and all deaths caused by police be investigated by a different organization (maybe a state level org) and if cops are found to be brutalizing/murdering people they are fired or arrested depending on the severity of their actions.
There needs to be consequences for bad behaviour, but I think beyond that the solutions are further down the roots, in terms of the institutional culture that attracts and protects bullies, brutalizers.
- the end of qualified immunity
These 2 would already help a lot.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/insuran...
Good. It's gone far too much in the opposite direction.
> They'd never admit to mistakes which could be used against them in the court of law.
Already the case.
> when successful suits impugn the integrity of officers' statements in criminal court (even after the fact)
As it should.
> The policy holders would settle to save money because court is more expensive on average.
Already the case. https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/09/04/police-lawsuit-settl...
> In other words, we'd expect them to stop policing in general.
Given current policing, that might be a positive.
Why not treat it as what it is, a criminal matter. If a non police officer would repeatedly beat up people the person would be in jail. And they would likely not get their job back. It's really as simple as treat police officer like everyone else.
Also doing this nationwide would require up to 18,000 different jurisdictions to write similar laws and change other law to homogenize the laws they already have. Police unions are extremely effective at watching legislators when they propose bills and have strong lobbying efforts (combination or money for election campaigns, money against election campaigns, public relations, and the ability to threaten strikes which scares citizens into pressuring politicians to back off their positions).
In short, there's a reason that we look to money to solve part of this problem and that's because it's far more likely that money will solve it in the US political system than good thoughtful legislation despite the pressure of 1.1 million law enforcement officers (and their families and their "blue line supporters" and their social media campaigns).
Even the monoline insurance wrappers around the various credit products were very atypically constructed insurance contracts.
Insurance rates are developed by financially-motivated actuaries that consider a whole bunch of variables in order to create market-efficient rates.
"That's fine. As long as you're not a smoke jumper." (parachute into isolated wildland fires to get ahead of the fire).
Almost getting killed tends to cause PTSD, but the tendency is stronger if someone intentionally tried to kill you.
And doing violence to another person is also potent cause of PTSD.
For those 2 reasons, I would expect rates of PTSD to be higher among cops than among the other 15 occupations you list.
I would also worry that the habit of suspicion needed to be effective as a cop would be bad for my marriage and other relationships. In other words, I would worry that the work might make me pathologically cynical.
Finally, some people really enjoy having power over others and using that power to inflict pain. Even if the other disadvantages of police work did not exist, it might be wise for me to avoid it just to pessimize the probability of my needing to work with someone like that. It is a complicated issue, but certainly I find such people distasteful and suspect that most adults in my country (the US) share my distaste.
It's because they are mourning their lost years, their failing health, their dead friends, their dead parents, their dead cousins and brothers and sisters. Oh, and their dead wives, girlfriends, and children. And probably more often than anything else, their fear that they will just go straight back to doing it all again when they get out, just like the last time they got out.
> It's because they are mourning their lost years, their failing health, their dead friends, their dead parents, their dead cousins and brothers and sisters. Oh, and their dead wives, girlfriends, and children. And probably more often than anything else, their fear that they will just go straight back to doing it all again when they get out, just like the last time they got out.
For a lot of drugs, it's not the drug that killed all those people and tore apart those connections, it's the illegal nature that causes violent black markets and heavy policing.
To be clear, those are not statistically significant events. In fact, they are insignificant at the population level, and there is no discrepancy across racial lines (as in, the numbers do not show Black Americans being targeted more than other demographic groups).
One of the challenges is that if a demographic group disproportionately engages in criminal activity (more or less), then it will necessarily have a disproportionate negative (or positive) interaction with the entire judicial system (police and courts) - but you cannot fix that with police reform. You can still make the case for Police reform and there are a lot of places of improvement (e.g. the practice of 'swatting' should NOT be a thing - police and judges that issue these warrants should be MORE discriminatory !!!), but that will not lessen the proportion of negative interactions.
>Families are torn apart by drug laws and prison pipelines.
That has NOTHING to do with police. Police enforce laws on the books - typically municipal and state laws. Most cities have progressive Democratic leadership (from mayor, to council, to police chiefs) and those cities also had the biggest issues with protests against police brutality.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-cap...
One needs to look at who the police are choosing to interact with to understand the denominator properly. The numbers seem to show that they are biased towards interacting with black people.
If an individual police officer is choosing who to frisk (or interact with), and the only things they have to go on are visible superficial characteristics (i.e. age, gender, ethnicity, clothing, etc.), and the global fact that those characteristics are statically correlated with more or less crime, that would be impossible for an individual to control their biases.
We know this is a painful exercise, because people are not just those superficial characteristics, and it's unfair for an individual to be singled out for those characteristics - but that's the ONLY information available to the officer.
The officer cannot control their bias, because if they try, they will either over or under compensate and because they are human. It's why we have double-blind trials and the scientific method - we know even well-meaning humans cannot control their biases. And this isn't an example of racism, because it could clothing or gender that trigger the frisk (I guarantee you that men are stopped more than women - WHY?!?!?), but aspect of human cognition. The only way to control for that is by introducing a non-biased random decision maker. For example, in airport security, there will be a device that will randomly flag passengers for extra screening. Perhaps something like that should be the case in these 'stop-and-frisk' policies? But even that has limited value. If a particular neighborhood with issues of crime, is dominated by an ethnic group, even random sample will involve disproportionate 'harassment'.
A while back Sam Harris had a debate with an airport security expert on profiling in airport security[1]. Sam Harris advocated for profiling and security expert was not. Sam Harris was 100% wrong and didn't admit it. The security expert talked about how proper airport security should work (and the problems with profiling and how to control for that). That debate has analogues to this conversation, because police should adopt some of those strategies because profiling is socially painful and breeds resentment and has limited success ... and individuals will not make the right decision in context.
Taking a step back to look at the historical context... The brutal wake of slavery and ingrained systemic racism are primary contributors to heightened criminal activity we see in some predominantly black neighborhoods. Black people didn’t collectively choose to live in worse conditions with high crime rates... After unlocking their literal chains, a savagely racist society pushed them in that direction.
But lets say this is true: it still means the whole police thing is a symptom, and not the cause. So the big question (and elephant in the room) is, what can be done.
Yes, I think the police thing is partially a symptom. But I would guess there are many complex feedback loops. So it is a cause as well.
What you're asking is "is it legitimate to discriminate against individuals because of the demographic group to which they belong".
I realize that it's not obvious that that's the question you're asking. But when reframed in that way, my answer is obviously no. You should engage with an individual if you have evidence of a crime or suspicious activity. Existing while black is neither.
I don't think "profiling" by itself quite captures what Harris was arguing for. He was arguing for profiling based on a characteristic--being a Muslim--that can't be directly observed. This was a key point of Schneier's rebuttal. So Harris's version of profiling isn't workable even if we admit that the characteristic in question does increase the probability of the person causing harm.
The profiling done by police does not have the same problem, because the characteristics involved are visible. However, visible characteristics are not limited to the ones you note: they also include behavior. So your statement that visible characteristics like age, gender, ethnicity are the ONLY ones available to the officer is not correct. The officer also sees what the people are doing and whether it looks suspicious, the people's body language, and so on. It is not unfair to single out people for their behavior.
I'd be more concerned about being the first on scene of traffic accidents, fires, etc, especially those involving kids. I have vivid visions of stories I've been told from first responders, so I can only imagine it is worse for them.
I'm sure this came from a salesman at a law enforcement expo who has been selling these to every community in the country. It suggests a national narrative where the police are convinced that people are plotting to kill them at every moment, and even if none actually have, it's only a matter of time.
Every encounter with police begins with hostility. You know they're armed. You know they're assuming you are, too. I can only imagine how that's magnified for people who "fit the profile" solely because of the color of their skin.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/jun/05/architect-of-c...
I mean look at Law and Order, or Chicago PD, or Blue Bloods. There's a token episode about police brutality or corruption that is "solved" by the "good apple" standing up to them.
I'd be willing to wager the source of violence in police|public interactions is the public in less than 5% of interactions, probably less than 1%.
Your comment only addresses dead, not almost killed as the comment you are replying to.
In all these cases, watching the amount of damage someone has taken can easily cause ptsd.
Data quality side note... Others have pointed out before that a primary work related risk for nearly all of these professions is transportation. That's why the only landscapers we see on this list are the supervisors: supervisors are on the clock while they're behind the wheel, the workers aren't. Reading this data in a meaningful way requires consideration of transportation related risks.
2019 median pay for a police officer/detective: $65,170[0]
2019 median pay for high school teachers (often cited as underpaid): $61,660[1]
[0]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/mobile/police-and...
[1]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobil...
OT in Chicago: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/1/14/18343141/editorial-re... :
"In 2017, a sergeant who apparently never sleeps made $279,612, which included $158,917 in overtime pay. A detective made $285,070, including $144,926 in OT. In all, according to a Sun-Times report on Sunday, rank-and-file police officers in 2017 pulled in about 60 percent of the city’s overall overtime pay."
Please point me to all the six-figure teaching opportunities.
Isn't that a public safety hazard? I'm not sure I'd want to trust the judgement of a sleep-deprived workaholic with a gun. Either that or if indeed his working hours are nigh super-human then maybe that sergeant isn't human at all and that salary in the budget is being embezzled.
http://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DCAA/SS...
In contrast, teachers start out at $46k, and are required to have a BA, plus teaching credential that they pay for themselves. The maximum a teacher can earn in the city is capped at $88K, and that requires a PhD plus 24 years of experience.
If teachers got paid overtime, they'd be the highest paid employees in the nation.
This year they added some building code enforcement officers to evict poor people; 95k/year plus benefits.
I think these small town cops are doing just fine with their community college associates' degree in "criminal justice".
Being a teacher requires at least a bachelors degree. The two jobs shouldn't even be comparable.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
[0]https://www.learnhowtobecome.org/detective/
[1]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/mobile/police-and...
The great thing about IQ tests if you are smart is it is easy to pretend to be stupid.
So I do think it is a quite dangerous job there to be honest. Moreso than the ones you mentioned. Some time ago deep sea fishing was the deadliest job. Would still prefer it from a risk assessment perspective.
About 50~ police officers die via guns per year. The police kill about 1,000 citizens per year via guns though[2].
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/leo/default.html
[1] https://nleomf.org/facts-figures/causes-of-law-enforcement-d...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
There's a KD ratio joke in here somewhere.
But there are other factors that I consider dangerous. Imagine you actually do have to shoot someone. Even worse if it is an accident where you panicked because your feared for your life.
I posit that cops have body armor, training, and generally are equipped to take bullets, so to speak. Only 50 officers might have died, but if 1500 were shot, that makes the 1000 civilian fatalities look different; civvies aren't wearing vests.
And going one step further, we've seen the stat for yearly police gun homicides but as far as I know there are no reliable statistics for how many people are killed by police by other methods. How many people are dying from chokeholds, from beatings, from having medical attention withheld?
... and how many times did the police miss the unarmed suspects they were shooting at and hit innocent bystanders?
https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/justice/times-square-police-s...
There's even a video of this incident that shows them using occupied civilian vehicles for cover.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice
> An FBI review by retired agent Kimberly Crawford found that Rice's death was justified and Loehmann's "response was a reasonable one."
One of their articles looked at every fatal police shooting in 2015 and looked at the circumstances. They found 30% occurred when the victim had pointed or brandished a gun, 28% when they had fired a gun and 16% when they had attacked some other way. They identified 5% to have occurred in a manner likely to cause public controversy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/10/24/o...
It’s a classic case of correlation != causation. Smart phones with video cameras in them became ubiquitous during Obama’s time in office. Similarly, bodycams became more commonly used by the police. That’s the difference.
This has been happening all along, we just couldn’t prove it until now.
And as others in the thread have said, it's actually really really hard to accurately shoot a target with a gun, and the number of non-fatal gun-related injuries probably far outweigh the fatal ones.
"The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate. “Oh, it’s a huge rush,” Franklin says. “Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.” Downing agrees. “It’s a rush. And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.” Jamie Haase, a former special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who went on multiple narcotics, money laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better. You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That’s the safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a lot of these cops are meatheads. They think this stuff is cool. And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get during a raid.”"
"Narcotics investigators had made a controlled drug buy a few hours earlier and were laying plans to raid the suspect’s home. “The drug buy was in town, not at the home,” Taylor says. “But they’d always raid the house anyway. They could never just arrest the guy on the street. They always had to kick down doors.”"
"The thing is, when law enforcement officials face suspects who present a genuine threat to officer safety, they do tend to be more creative. When the FBI finally located Whitey Bulger in 2010 after searching for him for sixteen years, the reputed mobster was suspected in nearly twenty murders and was thought to be armed with a huge arsenal of weapons. Of all the people who might meet the criteria for arrest by a SWAT team, you’d think Bulger would top the list. He was also aging, in poor physical health, and looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. If ever there was a candidate to go out in a blaze of cop-killing glory, it was Whitey Bulger. And yet instead of sending a tactical team in to tear down Bulger’s door, the FBI did some investigating and learned that Bulger rented a public storage locker. They called him up, pretending to be from the company that owned the facility, and told Bulger someone might have broken into his locker. When he went to the facility to investigate, he was arrested without incident. Why can’t investigators handle common drug offenders the same way? A big reason is a lack of resources. If your department is serving several drug warrants a day, you just aren’t going to have the personnel to come up with that sort of plan for each one. A second reason is that drug offenders simply aren’t all that likely to shoot at cops, and it’s easier to use violent tactics against people who aren’t going to fire back. It’s by no means a universal rule, but often when police do face a genuinely violent suspect like an escaped fugitive with a violent history, a suspect in a series of violent crimes, or a barricade or hostage situation, they don’t immediately storm the place. They set up a perimeter or try to figure out other ways to make the arrest safely. This again isn’t possible with drug warrants—there are just too many of them. But because drug dealers aren’t all that dangerous, it works out to raid them instead."
(all from Radley Balko's "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces")
This crime is in many ways the result of the violence of the police which means other citizens are afraid to call and cooperate with the police. Exactly what you need to reduce this crime.
Similar stuff happened in Iraq. When civilians could not trust the American occupying force then militias and terrorists filled the power vacuum.
Is that so? What counts as "unambiguously justified" to your eyes? I don't see how this squares. I mean... let's pick "the dead subject initiated lethal violence first" as a reasonable proxy for what you're talking about.
You're saying that in situations where someone attacks a police officer, the police are 1000/50 == twenty times more likely to win that deadly confrontation than lose? Really? They're well trained, they aren't that good shots.
I think the jury is very much out on that assertion. In this era of pervasive video, we're finally getting a look at a decent fraction of these confrontations, and a shocking number are not justified at all, much less "unambiguously". I don't see how you can reasonably assert that all the unmeasured ones must be...
What's been interesting to me is that the narrative that develops between the event and the video release almost always survives the video even though the video challenges the narrative.
For example, somewhat recently spd killed a man that was brandishing a knife. Reports indicated he was shot in the back, causing an uproar. The video footage shows that the suspect was twisting and lunging towards them when shot.
FWIW: I'm in the region, follow these things, and don't remember that episode. I'd be curious to follow a link to that video if you have it.
Edit: I found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8lebkOR_M4
You are deliberately misrepresenting that video! The shots are fired at 1:06, and the guy was, MAYBE in the process of stopping and turning toward the police. He was not facing them, at all. There is absolutely no "lunging" happening. His arms are tight to his sides, the knife isn't even visible, much less extended. And the shots are fired from WELL out of arms range, maybe 8-9 feet away. Hell, if you told me he was trying to surrender I'd half believe it. I'm looking at this and thinking... sorry, that killing was needless. He wasn't a threat. Or wasn't enough of a threat to make it worth killing him over.
Given he yells "you're going to have to fucking kill me" seconds prior to being shot it's hard to interpret any of that as a surrender.
The other controversial killing in recent memory is a non compliant armed man. The body cam footage is inconclusive on this one to me. The man certainly doesn't seem like a threat because he's on the ground. However, he was struggling and armed with a pistol. They gave him many opportunities to surrender.
He did not have to be killed. You're really telling me that we can't ask for three more seconds to let him drop the knife or actually approach an officer with it?
And that's the problem with this logic. You want to allow absolute hair trigger aggression by police officers. And when you allow that, you get innocent people killed. Because the cops can't make that decision correctly every time, and if you train them to shoot first, they will.
This guy didn't have to die. I don't know what was in his head, but I know he didn't have to die.
And, frankly, this "didn't need to die" perspective is alien to me, and I bet most people. If it was my life on the line, I wouldn't even allow a 1% increase in risk - the guy readying to, and obviously willing to, attack someone with a knife deserves to die. Does he "need" to die? No. Maybe event if he's literally in the process of stabbing someone, it would be wonderful if we could freeze time and just take him to a mental ward. But is it acceptable for him to be killed? Without a shred of doubt, yes.
Isn't that STILL a failure of policing? It's it STILL true that he didn't need to die? Why were the cops' "lives on the line" if they were the ones choosing to engage?
Are you claiming that it would be "more fair" if this ratio was different? Should it be 50/50? I think not, I assume that at least some members of this 1000 were indeed dangerous criminals, not innocent citizens murdered by cruel police officers?
So when must it happen? Well, when they need to defend themselves, I guess. So yeah, I think that kill ratio becomes an important point of evidence as to how dire the need for defense was. If you come to me and tell me that the police are dying as fast as the criminals, then OK, fine, I'll buy that those are just shootouts. If it's 2:1 in favor of the police, then I guess I'd be OK with that and rationalize it as the police being better trained and more worth preserving. Four to one? Maybe.
TWENTY to one? Come on. That's not reasonable on its face.
The inverse is true though. They are not supposed to kill any person that doesn't try to kill them.
If they were only killing every criminal that actually attempted to kill them and had the means to, there's no chance the defenders in that situation are coming out successful 20 to 1.
That is absolutely not the case. If so, there would be a bunch of very justifiably dead 2A protesters and some cheering hippies. You would NEVER say that about a white man holding a 5.56mm and yelling at someone outside your local state house.
Where exactly did you get that logic? Brandishing a weapon is a crime. Bearing one is not. The difference is squishy, and in neither case are you reasonably allowed to kill someone.
The only reason that makes sense to you is because you have a preconceived notion of whether the person "waving" the gun has a life worth preserving or not.
You can look at the reports. They don't usually leave local news, if they even make it there, because there is nothing remarkable about them. People have done aggregations of the data. I'm not saying it's going to convince you if you're already convinced otherwise.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/10/24/o...
"But only a small number of the shootings — roughly 5 percent — occurred under the kind of circumstances that raise doubt and draw public outcry, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. The vast majority of individuals shot and killed by police officers were, like Snyder, armed with guns and killed after attacking police officers or civilians or making other direct threats."
Yes this easily fits a lot of things said about politicians.
They can be obviously corrupt/"bad" without collusion or being somehow inherently evil.
The entire point of the article is to investigate why there's so much evidence of police colluding to hide misconduct.
Anecdotally, I know many of the bullies from my high school ended up being police. They enjoyed the power and feeling of beating and subjugating their classmates, and they found a job that pays well and gives them fulfillment.
Let me posit this: if you were that type of individual, what better job is there to have than being a cop? Also, if you had that job, would you incriminate yourself after abusing your power, or would you lie, knowing that police protect their own and are often given the benefit of the doubt?
I think it's extremely naive to assume that the situation isn't exactly as I described above. The real question is what is the ratio of abusers and bullies to helpers and law upholders.
And ignoring all the unsubstantiated claims you're making - it's completely compatible and most likely that the ratio is overwhelmingly good cops with a few abusers, and generally if/when present, concentrated in specific localities.
The generalization that cops are inherently predisposed to evil or something is bizarre, unhelpful and polarizing - not to mention inflammatory to all the cops that are in fact lawful and in many ways more honorable than most citizens in terms of sacrifice, risk, and social good.
> it's completely compatible and most likely that the ratio is overwhelmingly good cops with a few abusers, and generally if/when present, concentrated in specific localities.
What is your reasoning? Not only is this an unsubstantiated claim, but it also comes with no logical reasoning describing how you reached this conclusion, unlike my original post.
> The generalization that cops are inherently predisposed to evil or something is bizarre, unhelpful and polarizing - not to mention inflammatory to all the cops that are in fact lawful and in many ways more honorable than most citizens in terms of sacrifice, risk, and social good.
You call this idea bizarre, inflammatory, and state that cops are in fact lawful and more honorable than most citizens. You haven't given any evidence to support this, nor have you explained any type of reasoning or logic for how you arrived at this conclusion.
I find this very ironic and hypocritical, as you directly accused me of making unsubstantiated claims; I at the very least provide logical reasoning, while you fail to provide anything other than vacuous conclusions.
> I at the very least provide logical reasoning, while you fail to provide anything other than vacuous conclusions
At least you're admitting to a priori reasoning and using that to conclude generalizations about an entire profession.
A cursory search tells me there's around 1 million law enforcement officers in the US. Like all conspiracy theories - what are the chances there's widespread and indefensible corruption such that all of them are complicit but very little ever leaks?
Clearly we see cases of indefensible abuse (as we'd expect in law enforcement given a population of 300+ million people), but perceived prevalence of abuse seems to be hysterically skewed towards "ubiquitous evil" when social media, etc. broadcasts local incidents directly onto everyone's radar where people are primed to view everything in terms of their preconceived narratives and worldviews.
And if I was generalizing across an entire profession, I clearly did NOT state that the entire population of police is rampant with abuse. I extrapolated from well known understandings in economics that people who are attracted to the incentives provided by being a police officer indicate that some police officers will be amoral bullies who take pleasure in wielding unmitigated power over people, while others will be those who take pleasure in helping people and upholding the law. Feel free to reread my comments completely.
You still have provided no logical reasoning for your conclusions. I'd really like to hear why you think what you think.
> A cursory search tells me there's around 1 million law enforcement officers in the US. Like all conspiracy theories - what are the chances there's widespread and indefensible corruption such that all of them are complicit but very little ever leaks?
What are the chances that people who have immense power and immense protection from legal action will become corrupt? Quite high really.
Is your argument at this point summed up as "they haven't been caught misbehaving at scale, so let's generalize their entire profession with the benefit of the doubt"?
I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying that it's reasonable to assume that complete information suppression by a conspiracy of bad actors across independent localities is likely impossible. This is why most conspiracy theories are false. Information suppression is hard and even more rare is uniform behavior across many thousands of individual police departments.
It's definitely true that police act in their self-interest and corruptly sometimes. But sometimes is a term that represents vastly different circumstances with tons of different causations, effects, etc. Just saying "cops are unaccountable power-abusers" is simplistic, unproductive, offensive and wrong. There's an opportunity for conversation about reform, but the rampant groupthink, stereotyping and dogmatism is killing it.
The only one in this thread that has mentioned either conspiracy theories or complete information suppression is you. You responded to this comment:
"Frankly, that’s incredibly difficult to believe. When the cameras are off, police lie about the circumstances to make their violence seem justified. (Or even when the cameras are on — for example, the NYC police union has opposed the firing of Eric Garner’s murderer.)"
With the following:
"This is technically a conspiracy theory right?"
I don't know how you arrived at "complete information suppression" from the first comment. I think that most cops, like most drivers, would lie to protect themselves. I also think that some portion of cops don't NEED to lie to protect themselves, because they aren't people who abuse their powers. There is some unknown portion, however, that became police because they enjoy the opportunities for power and domination over others, and use their power to abuse others.
> It's definitely true that police act in their self-interest and corruptly sometimes. But sometimes is a term that represents vastly different circumstances with tons of different causations, effects, etc.
This sentence is in line with my conclusions throughout this discussion. It is something we agree on. This is an argument along a spectrum; I've given solid logical reasoning for why I think there is some percentage of police that are amoral and abusive, namely that it is the MOST attractive job for people of that persuasion, and I am a first-hand witness of it with n=~7.
What I am still waiting for is any sort of logic behind claims you've made that are of this ilk:
"most likely that the ratio is overwhelmingly good cops with a few abusers, and generally if/when present, concentrated in specific localities."
Where's your reasoning for why cops are overwhelmingly good? You keep blasting a message without providing your reasoning. You've seen my reasoning, as I've repeated it several times now, but provided none for your claims. Please do so now.
The ratio is tilted heavily in favor of abusers and there has been ample evidence showing this since the dawn of modern policing. Modern policing descended from slave patrols and it shows. The militarization of police is a more recent abomination, but not the root cause.
There is a third category beyond abusers and "law upholders": those who stand by and do nothing, thereby enabling the abusers and silently endorsing their behavior.
This has been my personal experience, but I don't know of any statistics that capture this, so I don't think we can make that conclusion at this moment.
However, from my time in the Marine Corps, which also attracts some people who are amoral dominators, I can say it very much depends on the culture. The Corps pushes personal accountability and camaraderie very strongly in its culture. I witnessed people who were professed racists change in just a few months to accepting all skin colors, people who were completely self-centered narcissists turn into strong team players. It didn't work all the time, and wasn't uniform across the service, but a strong, zero tolerance culture can mold people into it.
> There is a third category beyond abusers and "law upholders": those who stand by and do nothing, thereby enabling the abusers and silently endorsing their behavior.
When I listed categories, I should have made it more clear that it's really a spectrum with opposing values on either end. People who stand by and do nothing would lie more towards the middle, not having a strong enough valuation of justice to step in and stop it, but not a strong enough desire for power abuse to join in. A random person on the street could have a strong sense of justice but still not condone police brutality by standing idly, but I think you are right that a police officer is responsible for violence by not attempting to circumvent it; stopping violence like that is the REASON they have special legal protections.
IDK I consider blanket generalizations about policing in the US as the mafia or something to be trolling...
> Kind of like the Illuminati. Or Bill Clinton's criticizers - speak up and he orders a hit! /s
No argument, but references to the Illuminati and assassinations. Not a whole lot of credibility to stand on, and definitely no reasonable discussion.
Not very likely, I believe they will find themselves on the wrong team any day now.
It was never about protecting and serving the people, the whole thing is a lie.
Specifically in London the regular police are not armed. Armed police patrol the city in cars - if you're in the city you can identify these cars as they have a big yellow spot on the windows and there is an officer in the back seat. The aim is to be able to respond to a request within 8 minutes.
During the London bridge attack the attackers were shot dead by armed police 9 minutes after the first call to the police.
Recently they've been sneakily expanding the use of armed police though. In Dublin, I see more and more cars marked "Armed Response Unit" which have regular cops with guns. And just last week a detective was shot and killed with his own gun while doing a traffic stop. There's been a massive PR blitz about how good a guy this cop was, but zero discussion about why the duties of armed police have now been extended to include road traffic policing. I suspect it's planned to arm more and more of them and I wouldn't be surprised if the British followed the same slippery slope.
Have to agree, so, that a gun not carried cannot be used.
Just out of curiosity, is police violence and discrimination a problem in Ireland? Outside of Northern Ireland, off course.
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2017 https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2018
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Now, do some division. That's ~1 assault on a LEO per 2990 people in the US and ~1 assault on a LEO per 2100 people in the UK.
So assaults on LEO per capita are 26% greater in the UK.
Of course, it is also important to look at the number of LEOs in each state (in the sense of country, not US state).
From [0] there are ~686000 LEO in the US, or 1 per 479 people. From [1], there are ~123000 LEO in the UK, or 1 per 512 people.
So there are 6% fewer LEO per capita in the UK than the US, but the assaults on LEOs happen 26% more often per capita.
So how is it more dangerous in the US again?
[Edit: forgot sources! my bad.]
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enf... Actually, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detect... suggests 808,000 LEO in the US, which makes the per-capita LEO even higher in the US. Population data is hard.
Of those assaults, what impact did the police officer's gun have on the situation?
You can imagine an example where the gun is an asset - for example if the officer encounters an ongoing potentially deadly assault and then can shoot the perpetrator.
But I feel like more often the gun is a liability, an unarmed person is held at gunpoint and becomes violent - the police officer is left with the option of shooting the person or letting them get away. If they were using a batton/cs spray/taser (options available to regular British police) they then have many more options available to them.
(this feels off to me.. am I doing my math wrong?)
They can own rocket launchers the same way they can own private jets. They're comparatively rare, expensive as hell, and utterly unrealistic for the average person. It's a bad analogy.
Meanwhile, regular long-arm firearms and handguns are insanely common in the US, comparatively cheap, and often very practical to carry or store in vehicles. The US has a crazy level of per capita gun ownership, like 120 guns for every 100 people. Gun ownership isn't rare, and disarmed police are going to get killed haggling after heavily armed civilians.
I suppose it could work if 95% of the police were engaged in something other than apprehending violent criminals...
I would be surprised if apprehending violent criminals was more that 5% of the job, personally. Wouldn't you?
To the downvoters; it is your right to do so, but think about it - Police are on patrol, taking reports of crimes that happened previously, they guard things, they help keep order at sporting events, they're on hand for political events. They're being traffic cops, white collar cops, they appear in court, all sorts of activities. And there's paperwork.
I would be very surprised if at any one time more than 5% of cops, or for a cop on average, more than 5% of their time was directly "apprehending violent criminals". It's important they do so, of course.
https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard...
[murder suspect] + [doesn't fight] = [life in prison], [no chance of escaping]
[murder suspect] + [does fight] = [life in prison], [non-zero chance of escaping]
This is actually a reason we might want to reduce sentences for some crimes. 'Tough on crime' laws make criminals more brazen.
Watch this video. The cops don't see a gun, they think he has one because of the call, but they don't see one. The minute his hand goes towards his waste, they blast him...
https://www.abqjournal.com/1380152/apd-man-shot-by-officers-...
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4700838/#!po=19...
Edit: It looks like the non-fatal firearm injury rate for officers is actually 23.6 per 100k. I had the wrong number in the denominator because not all police stations responded to the FBI survey.
Trying to shove a police officer and miss? Assault. Stepping on their shoe while being arrested? Battery, and also probably assault. Spitting on a police officer? Battery, and probably aggravated assault.
It's very misleading to claim that 10% of police officers were assaulted in 2018. That might be true in a strict legal sense, but most of them probably walked away from their "assault" without so much as a bruise.
This would only seem relevant if your knowledge of weapons came from movies or video games where "bigger = better".
If I know you don't have a gun because you're one of these unarmed cops, I can completely dominate the situation. I can make you stand on one leg and do a recital.
> By analogy, people are allowed to own rocket launchers as well (it's true!) but that doesn't mean every beat cop should carry one.
Rocket launchers are not anti-personnel weapons and no ordinary criminal carries them or would be expected to carry them. The best weapon to neutralize a threat wielding a rocket launcher is not another rocket launcher, it's a rifle.
Should we arrive at the situation where criminals routinely arrive in armored personnel carriers or tanks, then we can talk about arming the police with rocket launchers.
You're no threat whatsoever. You have no power in the situation, you can't get it under control, mitigate the threat, and so on.
A shortcomming I see here is that the danger is reduced to fatalities as average over the whole profession.
There certainly are areas in the US where policing is extremely safe, everyone knows you by name, sponsors you a donut from time to time and is happy to see you. I would do it without a problem and this is probably true for most officers. But allow me to specify, I wouldn't want to be a police officer in urban areas with focal points in crime.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-...
"disband the police" fits on a sign, but it's an incomplete statement.
Iceland has a fairly high guns-per-capita number, with about one gun for every third person. An odd choice to use as an example of a country safe due to an unarmed populace.
> So I do think it is a quite dangerous job there to be honest. Moreso than the ones you mentioned. Some time ago deep sea fishing was the deadliest job. Would still prefer it from a risk assessment perspective.
"I see your data, and I willfully ignore it."
I would suspect it's a high rate of long guns, not hand guns.
It's an important distinction, as something on the order of 80-85% of gun violence in the US -- rape, murder, robbery, suicide, etc. -- are with handguns.
Attempts to ban handguns have met stiff resistance, though, e.g. Heller v DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
Maybe that comes into play. With deep sea fishing , if you're careful enough, you can drastically lower the death rate - it's in your hands. Not so with policing.
You can't control how long you've been awake. You can't control a rogue wave the sweeps you off the tail of the boat. Professional fisherman have enormous respect for the sea.
You can improve your odds of not being overswept by using your tethers appropriately and wearing proper protective gear which many people forego because it's less comfortable to work in.
From what I've seen it looks highly likely that their behavior is a big part of the problem.
I honestly have no idea if policing has gotten more violent or if it's just more visible now. I would guess both. But it doesn't really matter, does it? It's still a major issue that we need to fix somehow.
Lots of cops work essentially desk jobs. Lots of cops work in safe, quiet jurisdictions. They're pulling down the average, while cops who are responders to 911 calls in high violent crime areas pull it up.
Often enough situations escalate because of that. I believe many situations would be much saver if the officers would not carry guns. Call the armed units for cases where it's warrented, like e.g. in New Zealand.
Think about why many people are fine with driving but fear flying, despite flying being significantly statistically safer. The difference is that when you're driving, you feel in control.
The same is true of all the professions listed as more dangerous than police here. If you're following your training and the safety protocols that go with it, safety isn't a huge concern with any of them.
For police, they respond to 911 calls and serve arrest warrants. A huge part of their job is getting called to potentially dangerous scenes with people who may or may not be armed, may be violent, may fire at them, may ambush them, etc.
This is a recent national story from my hometown that illustrates it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/us/south-carolina-police-...
I can't imagine being more fearful about logging than worrying that something like this would be on the other end of one of the dozens of 911 calls I'm asked to respond to each day.
This ends up altering your worldview as an "Us versus Them" where there are cops and there are criminals. Everyone else is a potential criminal. Everyone is given side eye. The system is rigged, so why not put in for extra overtime. Bump up your salary the last three years so that your pension goes from a $90k/year basis to $175K.
And if you think cops are out to protect you? What a joke. Cops are out to protect themselves first. They've been glamorized since the 1980s as "foot soldiers in the war on crime." Their unions have fought to protect the "few" bad apples, when the bunch is rotten.
They go through the motions of "protecting" us, but that's just paperwork. Showing up and taking some notes. If you've ever had anything stolen, you'll know what I mean. The cop will write down some information, maybe give you his biz card, then that's the last you'll hear of it. They never do any leg work/investigation, unless it's something mandated by their bosses.
Defund needs to happen soon. Spend the money on drug rehab, mental health, etc. We need less than half the cops we have, and no damn PD needs an MRAP.
Eventually, my dad got very injured on the job and had to quit. The mental part is what injured him the most.
Big cities, yes. Small towns and rural areas, not so much. National average is around $60k/year - but the variance is high (from $30k to $120k - depending on the area).
>But how dangerous is it?
The numbers don't tell the entire story. There's a difference between danger coming from negligence vs from a chance of murder by another human. Soldiers coming back from Iraq suffered high numbers of PTSD, even though the mortality rate would probably be similar to one of the dangerous jobs you listed. Not only that Police have to deal with the darkest sides of society, including scenes of murder, rape and violence even against the most innocent of our society - like children.
'Police' is a type of job that is closer to the military example I gave, than to a logger or fisherman.
How about we account assults? In 2018, 10.8% of sworn officers faced assult. Of them, 30.6% sustained injuries. In 13.2% of the incident, the attacker was prosecuted.[1] But the rate of aggravated assult against regular people is 0.2%. Clearance rate is 52.5%. Prosecution rate is much lower.[2] I really don't care about your ideology or anything, but saying police is a safe job is just stupid. 10.8% of sworn officers faced assult while armed. Let's see how things changes when police is forced not to be armed.
Only ~1/10 of these “assaults” are even prosecuted. If prosecutors aren’t even willing to charge someone with assaulting an officer, it probably wasn’t worth calling an “assault”.
There was one famous case from Ferguson, where a guy was charged with destruction of property, because he bled on the uniform of the four officers who were beating him in the cell they've just thrown him in, after he complained about conditions.
(The reason why the victim was in jail in the first place was because they arrested him after incorrectly identifying him as a target of an outstanding arrest warrant. Filing the property damage charges allowed them to keep him in cell for another week, until he could procure the bond money.)
Several issues with that statistic.
1. Police are much more likely to report an assault than average citizen is. Just by the nature of their job, very nearly every single assault against a police officer is likely to be reported.
2. Once reported, an assault against a police officer is much more likely to be prosecuted because courts, prosecutors, and juries place much more weight on the testimony of a police officer than an average citizen.
3. "Assault" is a very broadly defined crime. Generally assault doesn't actually require a physical attack, so using it as a metric for "danger" is dubious.
Assault usually only requires someone to do something that makes the victim think they were in danger of being physically attacked. Police officers are trained to be hyper aware of threats, and they know that the legal definition of assault is different than the colloquial definition, so the police (and prosecutors) have a much broader view of what qualifies an "assault" than the general public does.
It's easy to get a drastically lower personal chance of being murdered in the US through simple steps like not being part of a gang.
Most Americans on HN aren't going to be murdered at 5.6/100000, or even 3.0
I don't think it's helpful to say police don't actually have a dangerous job. It is perhaps helpful to consider other HNer comments like "You couldn't pay me enough to be a cop". That might explain the pay difference.
More importantly, the entire framing is the problem. As soon as you're looking for reasons to cut officers slack, you're on the wrong side. Being a police officer should have at least the same seriousness, responsibility, training, & consequences (if not more) as being a lawyer, judge, doctor, etc. Probably more since they have greater training and capability to end a life and put themselves in such situations more frequently (& often instigate/escalate such situations whether through their own actions or their association with police).
They don't even make the list, obviously. The majority of the military is non combat for every branch, and only a small minority is deployed at any particular time. This isn't WW2, soldiers rarely die.
Over the 8 years of the Iraq war 4.5k US soldiers died out of 1.4 million troops (300k deployed). That's 40 per 100k, compared to 97 for pilots, 64 for metalworkers, and 46 for taxi drivers.
The list in op is for the current year. The number of troops killed this year was far lower than any point during the Iraq war, and they don't come anywhere near the top of the list.
Without doing any research, I'm guessing it's one of two possibilities:
- They're not in the top 25 because death rate among soldiers is low overall. The vast majority of soldiers are clerks, mechanics, and other support personnel, many of whom will never even deploy. Of those who do, many will spend their time on a large base in minimal danger. Those who are in danger from combat and IEDs are those who venture outside the base frequently (infantry, drivers, combat engineers, etc). These are a small fraction of what would be considered "soldiers" on a list like this, which brings the overall mortality rate down significantly.
- This list doesn't account for soldiers at all because, to put it bluntly, calculating this for the military is a pain in the ass. Doing it properly would likely require an entirely separate and more detailed study and breakdown of the data. One reason is because of the variance in jobs. Another is because the danger varies wildly depending on whether we're actually in a war. Being an infantryman during WWII, Vietnam, or in a place like Fallujah circa 2004 was risky business. Right now, not so much. It's worth noting that the military has its own government-funded life insurance program (SGLI) rather than contracting it out to a civilian agency. I suspect this is because no civilian insurers are willing deal with the unpredictability.
"{REDACTED}, age 31, was injured during training at Naval Air Station North Island, Calif., when an auxiliary fuel tank fell off the HH-60H Sea Hawk helicopter he was inspecting. Clement and another sailor were struck by the tank. {REDACTED} died from head injuries sustained in the accident."
I think the rate of death and injury where they weren't back to work in a couple of days for US troops in Iraq was a bit less than 2 in 100. *
Note that most soldiers work in supply, administration, artillery, cooking, running the mail system, and things like that, and aren't exposed to any combat at all at any point in the careers.
I can imagine refuse collector being more dangerous than that.
* Death and Injury Rates of U.S. Military Personnel in Iraq , Goldberg, 2010
Also of note, the primary reason police are even this high is for the same reason as truck drivers -- traffic accidents.
For police the danger comes in spikes with mostly non-dangerous work. For a lumberjack the danger is evenly distributed.
So I think for police, it’s the constant low probability of great danger.
Now, they are more likely (I think) to use a machine that clips the tree off (like scissors) and takes the branches off.
The title is conditional risk. The characters reason that since very few people die of thunderstorms, they don't need to take any precautions.
The point is of course, that the reason that so few people die of lightning is that people are sensible and avoid danger. And that if you are reckless then you will be at much higher risk than the average person.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case here. But it's a hypothesis that I think needs refutation.
But how dangerous is it?
1 Logging workers
2 Fishers and related fishing workers
3 Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
4 Roofers
5 Refuse and recyclable material collectors
6 Driver/sales workers and truck drivers
7 Farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers
8 Structural iron and steel workers
9 First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction workers
10 First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service and groundskeeping workers
11 Electrical power-line installers and repairers
12 Grounds maintenance workers
13 Miscellaneous agricultural workers
14 Helpers, construction trades
15 First-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers
16 Police and sheriff’s patrol officers
Source: https://www.ajc.com/business/employment/these-are-the-most-d...
EDIT: Be nice to your fellow HNer's. Also, no one could pay me enough to be a policeman.