Reality Check
Police work comes in around 15th for dangerous jobs. Lumberjacks, fisherman, farmers, and driving garbage trucks are much more dangerous. But if you are still concerned there are some things you can do to reduce the number of active duty deaths.
1. Teach police officers how to drive and maintain the tires and brakes on police vehicles. If you really know how to drive you can avoid running into things or losing control.
2. Make cardiovascular exercises and good nutritional choices mandatory. If you are fit you can actually catch people who run away from you without having a heart attack.
3. Make officers qualify with the firearm they carry at a minimum of every 6 months. If you are in an active shooter situation you chances of survival really go up if you can hit what you should be aiming at instead of spraying a dozen rounds in a general direction.
If you look at the statistics for officers killed while on duty you will see auto accidents, heart attacks/strokes, and firearms are the major causes.
2 comments
And the chance of dying of murder on the job as a police officer is less than half that of being murdered as an average citizen of Oakland, California. I’ve worked those numbers twice in the past decade using the data from the Officer Down Memorial Page which purports to gather data on every police officer who dies in the line of duty, including using the year that was the deadliest for cops in the past twenty years, and you’re 2x to 4x more likely to be murdered as an average citizen of Oakland than you are to be murdered as a cop.
I think part of the problem is that training for police officers is a joke in much of the United States. The state of California requires a total of 664 hours of instruction and a high school diploma to become a police officer. Most jurisdictions require more, but none require more than 1000 hours of training. Hairdressers, btw, require 1600 hours of training in California before they’re allowed to wield scissors. Yet we require less than 2/3rds that before we allow officers to wield deadly weapons. WTF?
And the nature of that training is also pretty suspect. Today they watch film after film after film of cops being murdered via dash cam and body cam footage. Dead cop. Dead cop. Dead cop. Dead cop. I’ve watched *one* of those training videos and it was enough to give me nightmares for a week even though the officer died off-camera, just the *sound* of a man dying was enough to do that. Do that with impressionable 21 year olds and the impression they get is that everybody is out to kill them and their only choice is to kill anybody who makes the slightest wrong move before that person kills them. And 21 year old males being 21 year old males, the inevitable result is false bravado and brutality, since they feel brutalizing people is the only way to keep themselves safe. Thus the lawsuit by 10% of the cops in Seattle, who sued the city saying they had a constitutional right to violate the constitutional rights of citizens in order to protect themselves.
Of course the numbers don’t support that assertion, nor does the Constitution, but if all you’ve seen is video after video after video of cops being murdered and you’re not exactly well educated to begin with, well.
I did the job for a decade. Vehicle accidents and heart attacks/strokes were the killers. If you want a dangerous job work the night shift at a convenience store.
While everyone on the right was warning about the mythical “antifa”, an Air Force Staff Sergeant stationed at Travis AFB associated with the Boogaloo Bois was wondering around Northern California shooting cops. He was apparently trying to start a race war. In order to “prevent bus loads of antifa from raping and pillaging” in Oregon and Ohio local “militias” and bikers gangs are taking up arms and clogging the streets of small towns.
It is odd how the local police were able to arrest a white man who was armed and shot a protestor without killing him, but black men who are sleeping in their cars in Wendy’s parking lots have to be gunned down.