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Cops aren't even in the 10 most dangerous jobs and most on duty deaths are car accidents.
Their odds of being killed by guns are lower than the average citizen. At 1 in 11,800
Regular citizen odds are 1 in 8,000
Cops need to chill out. The math says so.
You don't see commercial tree trimmers freaking out on people all the time and mag dumping when an acorn hits their own vehicle's roof. https://abcnews.go.com/US/deputy-fires-weapon-after-mistaking-acorn-for-gunshot/story?id=107229338
FLMAO
Comparing the homicide rates of police and "average citizen" is flawed. The “average citizen” is not the same thing as the “average law-abiding citizen”. The cohort used to calculate the risk of death due to homicide for the "average citizen" includes violent criminals who make up the vast majority of homicide victims. This group is excluded from joining the police force creating a sampling bias that distorts the comparison you’re making.
Additionally, you're conflating the risk level after implementing mitigation strategies with the inherent danger of the job. Police engage in work with high-severity hazards of varying likelihood. They employ risk mitigation strategies that reduce the potential severity (e.g., wearing ballistic vests) and the potential likelihood (e.g., situational awareness training).
The effectiveness of these risk mitigation strategies likely contributes to the lower fatality rates among police officers, masking the inherent dangers of the job. So claiming police officers have a low risk of being killed, so they don't need to employ such strict mitigation techniques, is flawed. It's akin to arguing that because few firefighters die on the job nowadays, entering burning buildings isn't actually dangerous and firefighters overly cautious.
The comparison to commercial tree trimmers is also flawed, as the nature and unpredictability of threats faced by police officers are fundamentally different. Unlike tree trimmers, who face primarily environmental hazards, police officers confront unpredictable, potentially hostile human actors. This introduces a level of situational volatility and stress that is not comparable to most other professions, including high-risk manual labor jobs.
I hear what you're saying and some of those are valid points. I would add that when comparing to other dangerous jobs, they all take mitigation and safety equipment into account as well. They don't just count tree trimmers killed without a helmet. Criminals, just like cops, are also citizens, their lives do count towards statistical death rates and can be included in national averages. A counter point is that not all cops work in places like south side chicago, yet most act like they do. I certainly understand that it can be a stressful job when no one is ever really happy to see you and you're dealing with a lot of the worst people on their worst day, I've had good and bad encounters with cops, 99% of the time while driving; I'm always polite, there really was no excuse for the bad encounters and it certainly soured me on the whole profession from a young age.
To quote the late great Warren Zevon. -"The Sheriff's got his problems too, he will surely take them out on you"
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This is extremely disingenuous example of lying with statistics. Sure that’s true of cops OVERALL. Cops don’t work the same environments, the same cities and the same suburbs. The places where all these altercations happen are usually highly violent and high crime locales where officers do indeed have higher fatality rates. This stat also ignores injuries - oh sure you merely got shot through the spine and paralyzed but you didn’t die, so chill out!
I compared apples to apples. I didn't count all the citizens that only got paralyzed or injured as well. Some citizens live in higher crime areas where they are more likely to be killed by violence. I fail to see your point here.
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Cops have lower odds of getting shot than the average citizen but how do those odds stack up to the communities they come from? Young men in the places that drive that average up don’t have the clean records to be cops.
People come from different places with different odds. That doesn't change that fact that being a cop is safer than being an average person overall.
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My odds of getting a needle stick injury are objectively pretty low. My odds of getting HIV (or something else) from a stick are even lower than that.
You'd better believe I shit myself just a bit whenever I handle a needle in the process of making sure those odd don't become real.
Yep, us civilians better be a lot more on edge than cops based on those stats. Considering on average a non-cop has a 50% higher chance of being murdered.
The point is that I have to deal with a low likelihood event on a day to day basis, which I have the training to avoid, but it lives rent free in my head altering my decisions, and it doesn't happen in part because it's more likely for me than the general public and because I use that worry and training to avoid it.
Looking at your stats you have a 1 in 50 chance in a given year, so I can see your worry. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493147/
The risk isn't the stick which is relatively rare but not unheard of, it's going on to end up with an infection. From your article:
"However, after a needlestick injury developing HIV is not common at all. In fact, from 1981 to 2010, there have only been 143 possible cases of HIV that were reported among healthcare professionals. Of these only 57 of the exposed workers seroconverted to HIV. Percutaneous needlestick injury was the known cause in 84% of these cases. Other infections acquired from exposure were 9% by the mucocutaneous route and 4% by both routes."
Those numbers are a bit more in line, and involve a similar anxious thought process of "okay how carefully do I follow the occupational health guidelines after this stick."
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