Two recent police encounters, the first with Caron Nazario and the second with Daunte Wright, which resulted in his death, have prompted a question: Why do police officers so frequently seem to approach encounters with the public as if they might be their last? Just how dangerous are police encounters, anyway?
There are lots of ways to measure this, but the simplest—and the one with reliable data going back the farthest—is to calculate officer fatalities per contact. Here it is:
With the exception of 9/11 and a mysterious spike in 2007, officer fatalities averaged about 4 per million encounters through 2008. Then it dropped to 3 per million in 2009 and has stayed there ever since.
This counts all fatalities and all encounters with police. Data on traffic stops alone is more difficult to estimate, but a study by Jordan Blair Woods of traffic stops in Florida over a ten-year period puts the number at 0.15 per million for "routine" stops (i.e., those initiated solely because of traffic violations).
Overall, according to data from the Department of Labor, police officers are killed on the job at the rate of 140 per million. This is much higher than the national average of 34 per million, but still places them in only 22nd place, behind airline pilots, roofers, farmers, and crossing guards.
POSTSCRIPT: This is all aggregate data, and it's worth noting that there's a limit to what it can tell us. It can't, for example, tell us how dangerous night stops are. Or stops of men vs. women. Or stops of different kinds of vehicles, or of individuals with outstanding warrants. The aggregate data is worthwhile, but it's not the whole story.
If the implication here is that being a police officer is overall not that dangerous and that they should therefore not be so trigger happy (something I agree with), there's a catch: that maybe they are relatively safe in their jobs *because* they are trigger happy.
I don't believe that is true, but there's no way to disprove it from this data (or any similar dataset you could consider)
There's only one comment, but it makes the same point I was going to make.
I will add, if we want the police to be less trigger happy, we need to get guns out of the hands of anyone who would use them.
Agree on both points.
Yup litterally anyone they stop could whip out an ar-15 or a flamethrower (except in Maryland). That is just not the case in say, Australia.
Exactly. If it wasn't for that high degree of caution officers have the death rate would undoubtedly be much higher. Just like if airline pilots didn't go through a pre-flight checklist or spend hours in simulators their death rate would be higher.
Caution? Like yelling commands liberally loaded with the f word at the top of their voice? Like pepper spraying a nonviolent suspect through the car window? Like grabbing their gun by mistake instead of their taser? Like spending an extra 10 minutes with their knee on a suspect's neck? There are lotsa good cops out there, but also way too many who were not trained like airline pilots to slow things down in an emergency and act with care lest they make things worse, but rather to go with the adrenaline panic and seize control at any cost.
The officer who shot Wright was "screaming". Either her emotions were out of control, or she'd been trained to pretend they were. Either way, I can't think of a more effective way to cause the target of the screaming to panic and do something foolish.
Prove it. Because you would never make such a bald claim before doing the research first, amirite 😉
So show us this research that you've supposedly done.
Sure, in many cases death doesn't happen.
But why are we excusing the cases which are not 'cautious'?
This implies that police officers are often in gun battles with suspects. Which doesn't seem to me to be a frequent occurrence.
Yeah, yeah ... except you forgot to mention one thing: Burden of proof requirements. Which makes it _all_ on the police that they are safer because they are trigger-happy. Have they produced any such evidence. No, no they have not.
So until they produce that evidence to the contrary, policing is not that dangerous; certainly less dangerous than other, lesser-paid professions.
[quote]Why do police officers so frequently seem to approach encounters with the public as if they might be their last?[/quote]
Because they're trained to think that way. See Silverman's remarks here
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2021/04/12/a-quick-word-on-what-we-know-about-the-police-shooting-of-daunte-wright/
about "Killology" courses and the Force Science Institute.
Too many cops think that their job is to "catch bad guys" (and protect themselves and fellow officers), and not to keep the public safe.
So they all too often become a threat to the public they are meant to serve, and become the "bad guys".
As for how dangerous the job is - I'd add some context to the to the statistics above. During the 2010s, only about 1/3 of duty deaths were from guns. Another 1/3 were vehicle-related.
An astonishing number (most of the reamaining 1/3) were work-related illness - and in 2021 to date, by far the leading cause of death is the 'Rona.
If police training focused on protection in general rather than on assaulting people arbitrarily and conveniently assumed to be a threat it would make all the difference.
About the on the job death rate of 140 per million for polide officers, nearly half of the deaths are due to traffic accidents.
And a bunch of them are hearth disease.
Anyone else find it alarming that the rate of airline pilots killed on the job is that high?
The statistic is not just for airline pilots, it's for aircraft pilots in general. As the report says:
"The majority of aircraft pilot fatalities occur in crashes of privately owned planes and helicopters rather than on regularly scheduled commercial jet aircraft."
Thank you, I can relax back to my ordinary level of acute, crippling anxiety over flying.
According to an ex-cop posting on another forum the biggest danger to traffic cops is, unsurprisingly, traffic. If a cop pulls someone over, their driver's door is on the traffic side. That puts a cop approaching that door in serious danger of being hit by passing vehicles. I believe you will find that police fatalities resulting from traffic stops are overwhelmingly "hit by a passing vehicle" rather than "shot by an occupant of the stopped vehicle".
It really isn't about safety. That's just the excuse no matter how supported or not it is by any facts. The problem with police forces in the US is their mindset and the lack of accountability. A long time ago police departments stopped seeing themselves as part of a community they must protect and put over themselves, and more as an occupying force that must constantly be vigilant about potential threats at every corner, where the only people you can trust are those also part of the police. That's why they are so quick to escalate things when there is absolutely no need to do so, particularly when dealing with certain communities.
The whole "killology" training that's so popular among many departments and police unions, the constant upgrading of equipment and weapons in many police departments that puts to shame actual military forces from many nations, the never standing up to fellow "bad apples" no matter how atrociously they behave is the result of that us vs them mindset.
It becomes worse when police forces are the only profession were no matter how gross your mistake (or often intentional actions), it is always extremely hard for any type of meaningful repercussions to take place.
If a rig driver out of the blue swerves onto the curve and runs over some pedestrians, that driver would be guaranteed to lose his job immediately, and almost certain to be facing jail time and monetary penalties for his actions. The driver saying that he swerved because he noticed the driver in the opposite oncoming traffic lane seemed distracted and thus he feared that the oncoming vehicle might jump lanes and hit him, thus making him afraid for his life would hold little weight, because here, like in every other profession except police work, being in fear for yourself is not an excuse to harm others unnecessarily, or to act in ways that put others at risk. Only police officers are allowed to "guess" what will happen and act in a way that puts others at risk of severe injury or death instead of being required to first let things play out before deciding what to do like every other profession, even those far more riskier than theirs.
Until there is some accountability things will never improve because as we've seen time and time again, even getting dismissed from the job is not a given, criminal penalties are incredibly rare and only when there are mountains of evidence and witnesses (and sometimes not even this is enough), and any monetary penalties are nonexistent, since when they happen those get paid by the city, not the officer or the department.
Officers are often killed at a lower rate than black Americans, too.
Which I think is the more telling rate.
The answer is David Grossman and the Warrior Cop training.