But… but… the police!?
I work one of those jobs. And I keep forwarding this list to my bosses.
They kill more than being killed themselves.
Coming soon to Discovery Channel.
This topic has been vigorously debated in quite a few threads here at the BoingBoing forums, usually in response to some police-apologist-new-account-single-thread poster.
It will be especially nice to be able to just link back to this thread, to save all the re-inventing the wheel that goes on every time the topic comes up again.
Edit to add: I especially like that the fatalities are listed in the form of rates, rather than in absolute numbers.
I’ve gotten pretty efficient at finding the DOL stats in a few seconds, but yeah, this is wonderfully convenient.
I wish they’d include numbers for jobs that aren’t necessarily reported on taxes, like prostitution and drug dealing. I imagine those are much more dangerous jobs than some of these.
It’s probably hard to get concrete stats on jobs like “career criminal” or “mob flunky” since we don’t usually enter those descriptions on official forms, but they have to be ahead of pilots.
Ooh! How about Game of Thrones extra? Red shirt landing party guy?
How about Game of Thrones main cast?
Statistical analysis of redshirt deaths:
“The red-shirted members of security were only 20.9% of the entire crew, but there is a 61.9% chance that the next casualty is in a redshirt and 64.5% chance this red-shirted victim is a member of the security department.”
Police are number 14 on the list, below taxi drivers and above managers of construction trades. Not safe, but not anywhere near the hyper-excessive peril of fishing, logging, or flying aircraft. The level of mortal danger associated with police work is comparable to that of maintenance men–further proof of the heroism inherent in my former job as a lightbulb changer. Bringing light where once was darkness.
And another thing–how many times have you heard that planes are safer than automobiles? Yet aircraft pilots die at almost 3 times the rate of truckers, and 4 times the rate of taxi drivers and chauffeurs. Food for thought.
Oh, they’re quite deadly too.
Are the pilots flying large commercial jets or are we talking about small private plane pilots? IIRC there is a big difference, safety record wise.
Indeed. A bush pilot doing supply runs in Alaska is not facing the same risk factors as a commercial airline pilot doing the LAX-ATL run in a Boeing 747.
Do you have any idea on how these police die? I’d be willing to bet that many more police officers die in traffic accidents than via homicide.
I found this list. Auto accidents are the number two cause of death, after shootings. It doesn’t break the shootings down into accidental/intentional. That would be another interesting statistic.
Causes of Law Enforcement Deaths, 2005-2014
It appears that auto crash related deaths are in decline for police officers.
Doesn’t say. I have to think a lot of those are small craft. Or anyway, I want to think that.
To further confuse the issue, some police are also pilots. Another set of statistics indicates that 22 police officers were killed in aircraft accidents in the last decade. So there has to be some double-reporting going on with the Bloomberg numbers. With death rates that high, you have to wonder if there’s a lot of crossover between the fishermen and loggers.
Overall, slightly more police officers die in transportation incidents than violence, although they are the most likely to die from violence after taxi drivers (I’m going to think of taxi drivers differently now).
