One thing that isn’t being factored in here is that this is just deaths, not overall persons shot. I don’t have stats, but it is possible that less people (police or not) who are shot are actually dying due to better medical intervention.
That is a factor, as is more cops wearing vests. But if you look at assaults on cops, they are down as well (which remembers includes spitting and other not-really assaults.)
3 Likes
Is it safe to assume that the cop population tracks the overall population pretty closely? I would guess so on a national scale, but I don’t know for sure. Locally it often doesn’t track closely at all; some places have statutory staffing levels based on population, others have fixed numbers that are revisited by their legislatures every so often.
1 Like
I really appreciate the spelling of the word “mam” here. Why bother with seeing if that squiggly red line means anything when you’re “saving the children” by pulling over a speeder in a school zone a week before the school year begins.
Actually, I have no idea if school starts after Labor Day in Florida. It does in most of the states I’ve lived in.
Lastly, I’d like to point out that police fatally shot nearly 400 people by the end of May. If there’s a war, it’s on the general public, not on police officers.
4 Likes
When I was an angry young man I would raise a fist and shout “Fuck The Police” like any other punk, but now I understand that attitude isn’t much different than some quasi-anarcho-libertarian complaining about the government “infringing on his liberties” because he has to follow laws he doesn’t like. Laws are like rules to a board game, and we should all follow the same rules; if you’re playing Monopoly and you are the battleship piece you don’t get to have a huge pile of “Get Out Of Jail Free” cards.
That’s the problem: cops have been getting away with shit for years. They have their “blue code of silence” and their “thin blue line” bumper stickers (I am so sick of seeing those in traffic-- when is someone going to print up a million of them and tag every car at the mall?) How are we even supposed to expect police Internal Affairs departments to really get tough with abuses of power if they’re all part of the same fraternity? Does anyone have numbers on how often a cop is “punished” by being given a desk job or paid leave of absence?
So yeah, the “War On Cops” is really just them trying to play the victims, or to divert attention from all the cell-phone footage of police misconduct. It should be second nature for every bystander to film traffic stops and arrests in case things get hairy. The maxim “if you’re not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?” goes both ways.
(steps down off soapbox)
9 Likes
Yea, but if you have a Glock on your hip, an M-16 in your car, permission to access the state’s sovereign monopoly to use violence as a tool, as well as a radio to call everything from the dog catcher to the national guard to back you up, I bet you would feel comfortable bending the rules or even flipping over the table if the you start to feel like you could loose the game.
3 Likes
I love how while cops walk in with a HS diploma and make good money because DANGER!
Hell cops constantly accept donated stuff from the public because they are protecting, many restaurants will buy a cop a meal but a lowly ambulance EMT making minimum wage again pays her own way and tips.
Yet airplane pilots, who make minimum wage in the US(neat huh?) until they get into the big airliners, and have to pay gobs for schooling, practice flight hours, and usually also a professional BS are still near the top in danger per capita. OTOH we get to fly, so fuck yall!
9 Likes
Being a pilot is not what it once was. We recently had a UAV pilot (they have to fly real planes to get their flight hours) renting a room here, and the guy was poor as shit, but thankfully not as badly off as the UAV pilots the USAF owns.
His employer even covers the cost of flight hours, and he still can’t afford his own place.
ETA - Know why you never hear of the plight of the military folk our country screws in the name of security? They can’t afford to live off-base.
9 Likes
Guns don’t kill Cops, Drug wars kill cops. Yet they never seem to lobby against those…
1 Like
Also 9/11 is in those averages for the last 20 years. Firearm related deaths look like a 3rd or less of on the job police deaths.
1 Like
Automobile traffic does
It also is a plague on EMTs, paramedics, firefighters, road workers, stranded motorists, cyclists, joggers, prison litter patrol, girlscout litter patrol, etc.
Before you get around to banning guns that the cops claim to be afraid of first ban the 150km/h capable 500-1000kg no-news mass murderer boxes filled with an explosive liquid related to napalm.
3 Likes
It is the most degenerate kind of biological submission. Big dog eats first.
2 Likes
Clearly these authors fail to recognize the true cunning and depravity of the criminal type, and their liberal allies…
You see, good people, not-killing cops is(along with the sinister fad for muddying the water with ‘evidence’ where we already have the testimony of a police officer to trust in) a diabolical strategy to storm the moral high ground!
It is not that the enemies of society, and its brave protectors, have ever ceased in their anarchistic assault, it is that these cowardly and degenerate elements have adapted from the relatively crude attrition strategies of the Prohibition era to a terrifying hybrid of maneuver warfare and network-centric psychological operations; one well suited to asymmetric warfare against our morally superior forces…
People laughed when Admiral Harry B. Harris told the nation that the Guantanamo suicides were not acts of desperation; but acts of asymmetric warfare against the United States; but here we are, when even the domestic criminal underclass and those who coddle them are mounting a multifaceted assault on the credibility and axiomatically well-deserved respect of our great nation’s peace officers…
It saddens and concerns me that more people cannot see through the machinations being played out here:
5 Likes
3 Likes
I’m having a surprisingly hard time finding an answer to the “How many police officers are there in the United States?” question; but estimates seem to be around 1,000,000; plus/minus ~100,000, depending on how you count part-timers, ‘sworn’ vs. non-sworn, etc.
With a demographic of that size, is a death every two days even a particularly harrowing number? I don’t doubt that you could select some groups that do better (“children of middle class and above families old enough to have grown out of accidental poisonings but not yet old enough to drink and drive” might be a good one); but if you chose any of a number of more cop-like groups(so, employed in some other capacity; but skewed male and spend a decent amount of time on the road, with a mixture of reasonably well paid HS diploma only and some college graduates) is a death every couple of days across a million-ish people particularly unusual?
I obviously don’t wish to diminish the tragic nature(in most cases, some people are just write-offs) of a given death for the people affected by it; but once you start talking about such large groups of people what sound like shocking death rates(when stated in ‘every X hours’ terms are actually relatively normal, and typically sound way less shocking in ‘X deaths/year’ terms.
2 Likes
I’d say that demo describes truck drivers pretty well.
According to the CDC there are about 2.6 million truck drivers and in 2009 700 were killed in road accidents, putting them at about 1.36 truck driver deaths/per million/per day.
Cops should stop whining.
4 Likes
150 kph? Your murder box a governed Big Three product, or something? My murder box is a hybrid and has gone 168 kph with little complaint.
150 km/h is plenty enough speed to turn a human being into hamburger. Your murder box can make 12%^2 more hamburger out of a person? Good for you!
1 Like
It’s the same amount of hamburger, you just get it that much quicker.
4 Likes
But there are no poor in America, only middle class people - a politician told me so!
3 Likes
