Fun fact: being a police officer is actually the 22nd most dangerous career field after things like being a garbage man, roofer, traffic cop, USP delivery driver, etc. (
https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748...-united-states)
FBI places it as the 18th most dangerous job. (
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-ma...-line-of-duty/)
The number of people shot to death by police has been steadily increasing (
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...olice-by-race/) despight the public not getting more violent -based on homicide data at least (
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s...ta-table-8.xls).
Police are more than 20x as likely to shoot someone to death as they are to be killed themselves, and that rate has been climbing for years. About 16% of people shot and killed by police were unarmed (
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom...-as-in-whites/) which comes to roughly 160 a year.... which is 3x the number of cops killed by gunfire.
if you have different stats please share. I'm not a liberal and I don't trust a lot of stats I see because our media is awful. However, when it comes to policing I truly can't even find stats that make it seem like cops are actually justified in "fearing for their life", or that they're always exercising enough caution before pulling the trigger. I also see no evidence that things are "getting worse for cops" over a 5, 10, 30+ year timeperiod.
If a roofer is scared of heights and is violent with others due to the stress of "fearing for his life", we say "sorry, but you should probably get a different job". But cops? Despight their cob being significantly safer than the roofers, we DO allow the cop to be violent as a 1st response due to that fear. And we call then heros for doing it too. I'm saying we need to hold our cops to a higher standard. They get away with behaviors we'd never allow from those working in the ACTUAL dangerous professions. UPS drivers are more likely to die than cops. But if a UPS driver pulled a gun and shot another driver because "I feared they were going to swerve into me" we'd say they should go to prison. When a cop shoots someone unarmed, "he made a motion that seemed like he might be going for a gun" is accepted as valid reason. It's ridiculous