It's not, or shouldn't be, "willing to die". It's "willing to accept a heightened risk of death or injury" that every cop should be ok saying "yes, that's my j

It's not, or shouldn't be, "willing to die". It's "willing to accept a heightened risk of death or injury" that every cop should be ok saying "yes, that's my job." Because time and again when you look at SWAT tactics or other situations where a cop kills someone, they were being pre-emptive. They were taking no risk at all of being hurt or killed. They pulled the trigger at the first ambiguous sign of threat, resistance, or something going wrong. They've created and valorized a mindset of taking no risk, of making sure they go home at night, of winning every encounter that always has death lurking somewhere. They've made cops chickenshit, is what they've done. Some of that is internal cop culture, "warrior cop" mentality, etc. Some of that is us having built up a lot of drama around policing and police deaths making us all think that it's a terribly dangerous job. And some of it is just a refusal to hold police accountable for mistakes, which makes erring on the side of a dead civilian preferable.