> I mean, I don't know that I've ever heard a fireman, or a doctor, a rescuer, a lifeguard, etc, say that sort of thing - "my first priority is to go home safel

> I mean, I don't know that I've ever heard a fireman, or a doctor, a rescuer, a lifeguard, etc, say that sort of thing - "my first priority is to go home safely tonight". I mean, I've definitely heard firemen say that or express a similar sentiment. Much of their training involves not taking risks even to rescue someone because cowboy fireman tend to turn one casualty into two. I've heard similar things from lifeguards, but it's usually stated that the idea that their goal is for everyone go home safely. Lifeguards typically carry the buoy because they train to save people by giving them that. They train not to swim up and grab someone in distress, but to give them a buoy. That prevents the victim from attacking the lifeguard or clinging to them and drowning both of them (which happens when people panic during a rescue). Don't get me wrong; I 100% agree that a police need to de-escalate more often instead of immediately resorting to physical or violent responses. I agree that militarization of police only serves to emphasize police vs citizen mentality that leads to escalation. I think they should use better judgement with high speed chases as well as confronting individuals. But to argue that "keep yourself safe" is something that only police teach is complete nonsense. > I should also probably point out that I think this is a peculiarly US thing. It's also relatively irrelevant. The US has a lot of peculiarities due to it's culture and history that make it difficult to compare it to the average western European country which is almost universally what this comment means. That's why it's always followed up with some comment about "the developed world" or "the first world." "Why can't you be more like Sweden/England/Germany/France?" Because we're not any of those countries. Yes, the US has problems with violence. It's not a secret. Our violent crime rates are very high even though our non-violent crime rates are typically much lower than other developed countries. No, we're not happy about it. This is not something we can magically fix by changing a few laws. Crime is a culture problem and an economic problem, and those are both very hard to fix. Think of it like this. Have you ever seen the streets in China or India? How chaotic and out of control all the drivers seem with no respect for more regimented and safer driving? You don't fix that by copying Germany's driving laws and signage and applying them to the roads. That won't actually change anything. To change that, you have to change the driving culture. You've got to get people to believe that they need to change. That's extremely difficult to do because you've got to get everybody or nearly everybody to do it. It takes a very long time to change culture like this, and the larger the culture, the longer it takes to change. And changing something like driving laws or whether or not you use a recycling program for waste is much easier to change than fixing endemic crime or endemic violence.