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.
https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...