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In 2014, according to killedbypolice.net, the number of recorded killings by the police was 1111 [1], which would mean you have about _21 times_ the odds of bei

In 2014, according to killedbypolice.net, the number of recorded killings by the police was 1111 [1], which would mean you have about _21 times_ the odds of being killed by police in a given interaction than they have of being killed by you. I haven't found any statistics on assaults from the police, so its hard to compare apples to apples there. I'm not saying it's not more dangerous to be a police officer than the average occupation (I think it goes without saying that we expect it to be a dangerous job). But it's important to put these numbers in global terms as well. The assault rate according to those stats was 9%, with a 28.3% injury rate from assaults. To put that in perspective, assuming injury rate remains constant (which doesn't appear to be the trend, it appears to be going down), that means you have about a 39.7% chance of serving 20 years and ever receiving an injury from a criminal. For a normal occupation that would be high, but for the police that doesn't seem especially dangerous. Especially considering that about 80% of those injuries are from "Personal Weapons" (aka, getting punched). Weather or not its an explanatory factor in a statistical sense, I don't know, but personally I can't see how that justifies some of these incidents. [1] http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2014.html http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2014.html

pixl97 10y ago
>which would mean you have about twice the odds of being killed by police in a given interaction than they have of being killed by you Why would that not be expected? They are both armed and trained. That statistic alone says nothing about the police being the perpetrators of the violence, only the party ending the violence.
- knucklesandwich 10y ago
  Agreed, but this is the same argument you can make about police deaths. And it does say something about danger in an absolute sense (threat of death, at least). The threat of death is much higher to the person being engaged by police. Is that because of training, greater reliance on lethality, etc.? Agreed that this data isn't enough to substantiate an opinion. It's also unrelated to _perceived_ danger, which is arguably what the causal factor would be anyways. Only providing counter fodder to the appeal to police deaths as being indicative of danger of the job. If that's all we're going on, its more dangerous to be someone talking to the police.
Mao_Zedang 10y ago
~ the stats are much worse than that it suggests that one police officer is murdered per week and 6 are injured by a firearm (PER DAY). To suggest that those arent alarming rates and just part of the job is very ungenerous to those we trust with keeping us safe from belligerents. Imagine if it was someone in your family who was killed on duty. Sometimes "fuck the police" goes too far, some of us actually like law and order.
- mhuffman 10y ago
  There are nearly 1 million police officers -- these are not high numbers! Certainly every individual one is a tragedy, and I wouldn't want it to be me, but overall these are not alarming numbers, taken in context.
  - Mao_Zedang 10y ago
    Out of the 1208 people killed by police last year (2015) how many where unjust? I am just wondering because, 50 in 1 million is 0.005% and 1208 in 320 million is 0.00037% so it would appear more police die per population (total police) vs per population (total people) you are 10 times more likely to die as a police officer than you are to die from a police officer.
    - mhuffman 10y ago
      More dangerous still are garbage collectors.[1] What is your point exactly? My point is that being a police officer is not as deadly of a job as they insinuate (note that most police officers die of heart attacks and car accidents). [1] http://time.com/4326676/dangerous-jobs-america/ http://time.com/4326676/dangerous-jobs-america/
      - Mao_Zedang 10y ago
        My point is police die at the hands of the public more often than the public dies at the hands of the police.
- 10y ago
tzs 10y ago
For comparing the danger of jobs, shouldn't the metric be odds of dying in a year, not odds of dying per encounter? Police officers will tend to have more encounters per year than the average person, so even if the odds of the office dying in a typical encounter or lower than the odds of the non-officer dying, the officer could have a much higher chance of dying over the course of a year just from having more encounters.
- knucklesandwich 10y ago
  Agreed, they likely will. I probably wasn't clear, I wasn't making a claim about the danger to the average person, only to the danger for an average person given they have an interaction with the police vs the danger to the average police officer given an interaction w/ a person. Odds of dying per year would still need a probability of a police encounter to multiply against. i.e. P(K | E) * P(E). For police this would just be P(E) = 1.

pixl97 10y ago

>which would mean you have about twice the odds of being killed by police in a given interaction than they have of being killed by you Why would that not be expected? They are both armed and trained. That statistic alone says nothing about the police being the perpetrators of the violence, only the party ending the violence.

knucklesandwich 10y ago
Agreed, but this is the same argument you can make about police deaths. And it does say something about danger in an absolute sense (threat of death, at least). The threat of death is much higher to the person being engaged by police. Is that because of training, greater reliance on lethality, etc.? Agreed that this data isn't enough to substantiate an opinion. It's also unrelated to _perceived_ danger, which is arguably what the causal factor would be anyways. Only providing counter fodder to the appeal to police deaths as being indicative of danger of the job. If that's all we're going on, its more dangerous to be someone talking to the police.

Mao_Zedang 10y ago

~ the stats are much worse than that it suggests that one police officer is murdered per week and 6 are injured by a firearm (PER DAY). To suggest that those arent alarming rates and just part of the job is very ungenerous to those we trust with keeping us safe from belligerents. Imagine if it was someone in your family who was killed on duty. Sometimes "fuck the police" goes too far, some of us actually like law and order.

mhuffman 10y ago
There are nearly 1 million police officers -- these are not high numbers! Certainly every individual one is a tragedy, and I wouldn't want it to be me, but overall these are not alarming numbers, taken in context.
- Mao_Zedang 10y ago
  Out of the 1208 people killed by police last year (2015) how many where unjust? I am just wondering because, 50 in 1 million is 0.005% and 1208 in 320 million is 0.00037% so it would appear more police die per population (total police) vs per population (total people) you are 10 times more likely to die as a police officer than you are to die from a police officer.
  - mhuffman 10y ago
    More dangerous still are garbage collectors.[1] What is your point exactly? My point is that being a police officer is not as deadly of a job as they insinuate (note that most police officers die of heart attacks and car accidents). [1] http://time.com/4326676/dangerous-jobs-america/ http://time.com/4326676/dangerous-jobs-america/
    - Mao_Zedang 10y ago
      My point is police die at the hands of the public more often than the public dies at the hands of the police.
10y ago

tzs 10y ago

For comparing the danger of jobs, shouldn't the metric be odds of dying in a year, not odds of dying per encounter? Police officers will tend to have more encounters per year than the average person, so even if the odds of the office dying in a typical encounter or lower than the odds of the non-officer dying, the officer could have a much higher chance of dying over the course of a year just from having more encounters.

knucklesandwich 10y ago
Agreed, they likely will. I probably wasn't clear, I wasn't making a claim about the danger to the average person, only to the danger for an average person given they have an interaction with the police vs the danger to the average police officer given an interaction w/ a person. Odds of dying per year would still need a probability of a police encounter to multiply against. i.e. P(K | E) * P(E). For police this would just be P(E) = 1.