https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...
Further compounding the issue is that law enforcement is not the job that the police are often tasked with. Some of the job hazards they are exposed to are due to making inappropriate demands of law enforcement officials.
Death is penultimate to... what?
It is common to consider some situations as being worse than death.
I suspect that most reasonable readers of that classification manual would be able to identify a selection of situations that could lead to being considered worse than death.
Lumber harvesting is the most dangerous profession in the US but I imagine that most deaths would be described as "accidents". For example, someone cuts a leg with a chainsaw, a tree snaps in a weird way, someone gets pushed off a cliff.
Police officers, on the other hand, usually due to violence while interacting with other people.
In other words, a lumberjack, roofer, etc could think that they won't die today on the job because they are being careful, because there are safety protocols set by OHSA, etc. The same might not be true for police officers because there is little that they can do to address how others will interact with them.
In a sense, police officers might process their job more closely to how a soldier process their job than a lumberjack/roofer.
> Police officers, on the other hand, usually due to violence while interacting with other people.
Incorrect. It's mostly traffic accidents. https://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132441719/Traffic-Accidents-L...
In 2020, it was mostly COVID. https://thedaily.case.edu/study-finds-more-active-duty-polic...
Don't police generally get training in conflict de-escalation?
The training documents that I’ve seen publicly available on the internet explicitly incorporate de-escalation techniques as the first and preferred option.
Is this individual representative of the mainstream?
http://jaapl.org/content/jaapl/33/1/50.full.pdf
Of note, the remaining 55% of the departments in that study did not have a formal policy at the time (2005).
edit: additionally, in that paper they discuss the notably high proportion of police officers expressing interest in mental health training - almost all of them
In tabular form:
CIT 3%
police-based specialized mental health response 12%
mental- health-based specialized mental health response 30%
no formal policy 55%
> CIT officers make up about 15 to 20 percent of patrol officers and receive 40 hours of training that focuses on scenarios derived from actual incidents. Officers receive extensive training in de-escalation techniques.
It's ambiguous whether "officers" in the second sentence refers to all officers or only CIT officers (I read it as the latter). Regardless, according to this analysis only 0.45–3% of all patrol officers receive this training that is specifically with regard to people with mental illness.
Edit in case my math is unclear: according to this research, 3% of all department use CIT or similar. Assuming 100% of officers in those departments receive the training, that works out to 3% of all patrol officers. Assuming only the ~15% of CIT officers receive the training, that works out to 0.45% of all patrol officers.
I did read it as if it were written: 15-20% of Memphis Police patrol officers are also CIT officers
edit: I’d highlight that the authors did emphasize the intensive nature of de-escalation techniques for CIT training and that perhaps they were singling out Memphis as “state-of-the-art” police policy, at that time, with regard to law enforcement officers being tasked with mental health care.
Can dig into the research to find out if anyone has empirically studied the attitudes of the trainers, themselves.
There is no reason to believe that de-escalation training is less normative than that disturbing seminar, either.
So in a sense you're right but not really for the reasons you might think.
roofers don't have to worry about making a split-second decision about whether or not they have to kill someone before they kill you.
There's also a TED talk about suicide among veterinarians: https://youtu.be/objP3E625Xo
Teachers are not, however. Why do veterinarians and police kill themselves more than teachers do?
Stress like you mentioned, yes, but the psychology research seems to point to suicide as a poor coping skill, so it could be argued that a failure in supporting employees in building their coping skills is a contributing factor.
Edit: Even better: the chance of being shot is way lower for an LEO than the average US citizen: Its .000122 for the average person vs. .000066 for an LEO.
(2017 numbers: 1/32510000039773=.000122 for the average vs. 1/80000053=.000066 for LEOs, gun deaths from here https://time.com/5476998/risk-of-guns-america/ and LEO deaths from the source above)
If you do the math, it does appear to exceed the number of incidences of being shot on the job.
Additionally the claim wasn’t, ‘exceed the number of incidences of being shot on the job’ it was, ‘majority of [deaths] are traffic accidents’
The most neutral reading of the presented data is that police are equally likely to be shot, have a moving-vehicle accident, and have a job related illness.
The remainder of job related hazards are extremely marginal in comparison to those three.
Guns, vehicles, and illness compose the near totality of incidents and those incidents are distributed nearly equally between the three hazards.
> SOURCE: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 1995.
Notably from 1995.
Doesn't your source say that only 47% of police deaths are homicide? That's less than half of the statistic used for this ranking. Am I reading that table correctly?
I don't have my own stats or sources; I don't particularly have a dog in this hunt. This seems like not a useful source at all in my opinion.
Living every single moment with PTSD, physical pain, anxiety, and so on shouldn't be diminished because it isn't as romantic and easily captured as death is.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5516a4.htm
> Floodwater contact with the nose, mouth, or eye was reported by 51% of firefighters (254 of 500) and 30% of police officers (258 of 864); 52% of police officers (473 of 910) and 63% of firefighters (330 of 524) reported rescuing citizens from flooded areas.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=Acc...
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=Acc...
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=rel...
> There is little information available that shows the relative values of stress across different occupations, which would enable the direct comparison of stress levels. This paper reports the rank order of 26 different occupations on stress and job satisfaction levels.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
> One of the main tenets of GST, the introduction of noxious stimuli (i.e., experiencing violent events) correlates with negative coping strategies.
The original post has been edited to no longer make the claim about policing being the most dangerous, but a direct refutation is not whataboutism.
On the long tail of possible professions, #22 is pretty damn close to the top.
There was no direct refutation made and the comment is CERTAINLY a Whataboutism.
Imagine getting a JIRA ticket thinking, "fucking Java bug, again. Only way to fix this is to yank the power cord out."
Honestly, delivery people have to put up with way more shit and don't have weapons, the law, nor even a union that has their back. That's a tough job.
But if you're on the business end of society's failures on a daily basis I can imagine how this changes one's opinion.
I've worked as a technical support agent and I really started to be afraid of our company's products, being confronted with the worst that could happen to them every day. The knowledge that the calls I was getting were only about 0.1% of products in the field was easy to forget.
It's not just that offenders are from minority groups... Consider that police are going out into minority groups looking for offenders.
So police aren’t just looking for offenders in minority communities. They’re going where the communities are asking them to be.
There's also evidence to show that all else held equal, police respond with more force when dealing with minorities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_....
Do you have a source for the stat that you mentioned.
For example, white drivers carrying drugs is higher, but Black folks are more likely to get stopped and searched for drugs.
So it's not that Black folks commit more of these crimes, they are just monitored more closely than their white counterparts regardless of outcome or reality. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...
Reasonable people living in different places or with different skin colors (as a specific differentiator) in the same place have vastly different experiences with the same individuals or police forces. This creates a fundamental conflict in the discussion/debate because both sides are speaking about it (usually) as if their experience is the experience.
Live in many southern US towns and you'll see very different treatment of people based on race which has a natural result that white people view cops as reasonable and polite (their experience) and black or Hispanic people view cops as unreasonable and oppressive (their experience).
However, I did experience profiling several times when I was younger and drove a mini-truck in the Bay Area. I have slightly darker skin and am routinely mistaken for hispanic. In the couple of years I owned the mini-truck, I was pulled over several times for things like a tail light out (it wasn’t), or “reports of stolen trucks that fit this description”. While unfair from a profiling perspective, I was compliant and polite, and the cops were professional (outside of the initial profiling). After running my license and registration they always let me on my way without any harassment. Now, I’m not saying my experience is indicative of other’s experience with cops but just that I’ve glimpsed the other side a bit.
doesn't jibe with this... "let me on my way without any harassment."
You must not have worked with a lot of support staff
Ah yes, the crime trajectory of 2020, which is different from the crime trajectory of 2000-2019. And we both know why.
I’ve heard that ex-military make the best cops because they are used to dangerous situations without panicking. I fully support this because they know that they aren’t GI Joe.
This is a good point and one I think is missed. Police really do need more training. When departments started phasing out choke holds I think it was a mistake. The hold itself was not the problem, but lack of proper training.
I've read some proposals that want every police officer to be at a minimum a blue belt in BJJ. For perspective, that's a year or so of training. Someone going 3x/week means they will have 20-30 simulated fights PER week. That's how you get someone to stay relaxed in a stressful and physical situation.
Of course, when weapons are involved it's a different situation. But, in unarmed situation a person with a year+ of BJJ training will easily control the other person with little danger to either of them. And the LEO, knowing this, will not reach for their weapon first.
Population: white 197M, black 40M. https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Race-and-Ethnicit...
Per-capita: close to 3 times as many black people shot. I couldn't find clear statistics for unarmed victims. Please post if they're much different.
One of the most pernicious myths about police shootings is that officers shoot unarmed black men at an alarming rate, when in fact just 2% of the people who were killed by an officer were unarmed and black. Since the beginning of 2015, law enforcement officers across the country have actually killed 33 more unarmed white people than unarmed black people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
https://policeviolencereport.org/
US police departments are not required to provide this information. It must be collected ad hoc by outside orgs.
Many reports will (I kid you not) list sickle cell disease as cause of death during a police stop.
Unfortunately that site shut down, someone else got the name, and it now redirects to RoBarGuns.com, a gun review and buying guides site.
You can still get the data from archive.org here [1]. That has all the 2020 shootings up through July 20th, and has links for prior years back to 2014, and the last month of 2013.
I remember a couple years ago going through the then previous year and picking something like 50 at random (via a random number generator) and looking into the details, but I don't remember if I specifically took note of armed vs. unarmed.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200723033637/https://killedbyp...
https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-cle...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123070/police-shootings...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
> Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 371 civilians having been shot, 71 of whom were Black, in the first five months of 2021. In 2020, there were 1,021 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 there were 999 fatal shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 36 fatal shootings per million of the population as of May 2021.
I don't have a source supporting or disproving that claim, I'm just pointing out that the source you provided doesn't address the claim they are making.
The police are very powerful voices in local governments. They have too much power. I consider the number of police officers to be inversely proportional to how civilized a place is.
On a police-per-capita basis, that would make US East Coast urban areas substantially less civilized than either Middle America or the West Coast.
https://www.governing.com/archive/police-officers-per-capita...
Trust me, a lot of them are not really that good of people. They’re often more broken and problematic than your random person. Substance abuse is very common and acting outside the law is also extremely common. I’ve seen many LEO’s beat their wives and drive drunk while having to go out and work on the same calls. Always a bit awkward when they have to respond to a call for one of their own - I should know, I was there.
As far as I can tell - most aren’t really that upstanding of citizens and the standards are pretty lax for what gets in. Some are genuinely nice and good people but I don’t see them last for very long because they move onto better things.
Unfortunately I still have experiences which prove to me that some police have nothing better to do than annoy otherwise law abiding people. It's like any group of people, there are good cops and there are bad cops.
Could be a case where better awareness of the statistics would actually improve the problem.
Also though, danger resulting from your own stupidity, from other peoples stupidity, and from other peoples malicious activities, hit different psychologically IME. I'm willing to bet consturction workers get a lot less of the third and a lot more of the first.
Maybe something that better training could help with a bit, but probably not fix. Also selecting people who are well suited for that sort of environment.
But, the dangers, though present, are IMO largely overstated. There are 700 thousand officers in US and on any given day some of them must necessarily come into trouble. The statistics list about 360 officers getting killed in line of duty, annually. That is 1/700000 chance of getting killed every day, over 30 year career that would amount to 1 in 70 chance of getting killed on duty or about similar as dying from all other types of accidents, including car accidents.
Is that small? No, I don't think so, that is nothing to sneeze at. But is still a lot less than dying from some easily preventable diseases. So if you are Police officer and keep eating shit food it might be that the shit food is actually more dangerous to you than your job.
Going through Covid is statistically more dangerous than lifetime of being police officer. At least as an officer you are doing this (hopefully) for public good and you know and accept risks.
It is also less than probability of dying on some other types of duties.
The difference being, that policing is typically done when something already interesting happens with potentially a lot of cameras present on scene, then being investigated.
If you go to be a police officer or fireman or military, you understand your choices and the dangers you are facing. It should not be a surprise, nor it should be a reason to kill any person not to your liking, on sight.
If that’s the case, objectively, many other jobs deserve more respect first.
This can be seen in police shootings vs armed militias at protests.. If police approached every suspect as if the suspect were open carrying a high powered semi auto pistol, they'd be much less likely to approach suspects as they do. They'd be much more respectful, keep a vehicle between them, and focus on de-escalation as opposed to confrontation.
And in a country with 44% of suspects owning a fire arm, to confront someone is the wrong move.
... and the ability (in many/most? places) to retire after 20 years with ~50% pay. SO many of these people give zero fucks about the communities they're policing because they don't actually live in them and, generally, aren't incentivized to do so. They take these jobs because it's the best of a limited number of options. They then adopt a siege/deployment mentality and bulldoze their way through 20 years of service in order to retire early and open a bar, fuck off to Florida, hang out on their boat, etc.
I'm guessing "our modern society" refers to the United States and not modern society as a whole.
As far as I can tell, in my country, only two police officers have died on the job between the years 2000 and 2016. There also seems to be a wide disparity in people who get killed by a police officer. It seems more like it's just inherently more dangerous to be American, whether or not you're a police officer or not.
If programmers were resulting in deaths in my community, I'd be picketting right with them with "I'm a programmer. Please hold me accountable. End qualified immunity for programmers."
assert great_power == great_resposibility
Etc
I'm not saying all or even most cops are bastards. But there's a non-trivial number of bastards, and the harm they've done to the communities they police (and to other cops, honestly) is immense.
Won’t lie, I’d probably hop outside and join them.
That's the reality for a huge amount of people.
Bad cops are extremely rarely seriously punished, and its ever rarer for other cops to finger them for it.
[Addendum: And you're being promoted based on arrests, while sharing frustration with management about compliance, and likely seeing other cowboy coder style actions]
Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis.
I've always had respect for cops because it's one of those jobs that I just know I could never ever do, props to those in our society that do that work.