> Isn't that at least partly because they arm themselves as if they were enemy combatants and treat the police as such. That certainly happens. According to ht

> Isn't that at least partly because they arm themselves as if they were enemy combatants and treat the police as such. That certainly happens. According to http://www.odmp.org/search/year http://www.odmp.org/search/year, 30 American police officers were killed by gunfire (not-accidental) in 2013. However, like most things, what's more important is how often it occurs. It turns out that there's somewhere between 750,000-800,000 police officers in the USA, so on the high end, that's 4 gunfire-related deaths per 100,000 officers. Compare that to jobs like fishing (127 per 100,000), roofing (34 per 100,000), and farming (26 per 100,000) (source: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/10-most-dangerous-jobs-us-9.aspx http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/10-most-dan...), being shot to death as a police officer doesn't seem especially likely. (Admittedly, gunfire-related deaths don't represent a majority of officer deaths in a given year, it seems, but gunfire is the main justification behind police militarization) Edit: To put it another way, being a police officer is 2.5 times safer (gunfire-wise, at least), than driving a car.