No it actually doesn't. This is anecdotal but... my father in law is a police officer in a city with 1.2 million people and the way he talks you'd think officers were dropping like flies. I looked it up and in the last 150 years 20 officers have died while on duty in his police department. Many were traffic accidents. One was a heart attack.

I found it disturbing to discover that my local cemetery has a memorial already up for local officers killed in the line of duty. The only name on it is a police dog. There is a lot of empty space.

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.

The sources of that narrative are very prominent. Here's one.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/jun/05/architect-of-c...

The police have been made good by decades of "good cop" "bad guy" TV dramas.

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.

Good apples get fired, harassed, and stripped of pension for breaking the code of silence.

I often (disgustedly) hear "it's a war out there". The only "war" that is equivalent to the current policing in the US is the occupation of the axis post WWII. It's absolutely a war, but it's a war where the natives are being raped and pillaged by the occupying force with no recourse because they already lost.

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%.

> Police officers getting "almost killed"?

Your comment only addresses dead, not almost killed as the comment you are replying to.

You don’t have to almost die to get ptsd. You can get it from * responding to a bad domestic violence call * responding to a bad child abuse call * getting attacked by someone on PCP where you ended up shooting him five times because he wouldn’t stop coming until you physically blew out his knees * any situation where death feels possible, but unlikely, in the way that car accidents can cause ptsd because you thought you would die, but car technology makes it unlikely for that type of accident.

In all these cases, watching the amount of damage someone has taken can easily cause ptsd.

This is undoubtedly true. But EMTs, firemen and emergency physicians encounter trauma every day on the job and we don't hear them taking it out on wives, children and the general public. What gives?

Good points. PTSD stressors can come from minor traffic stops too, since while it may be rare, they can turn into a lethal situation in a blink of an eye.