Just How Dangerous Is Police Work?
Radley Balko | December 28, 2007, 9:04am
The news wires buzzed yesterday with stories about an uptick in police fatalities last year. Most stories followed that lead with language about the dangers of police work. I won't deny that police work is more dangerous than your average profession (it's certainly more dangerous than journalism). I also don't mean to belittle those cops who were killed in the line of duty. Nor will I argue with the fact that there are times when police officers really do put their lives on the line, and that those who do deserve our admiration and gratitude.
But it's also important to get some perspective, here. Browse online police forums, and you'll see cops defending all sorts of bad acts by other cops with lines like, "I'll do whatever we have to do to make it home at night." Letting statistics like those released yesterday go unchallenged with only the varnish applied by various professional police organizations exaggerates the real threat to police officers, and leads to the troubling trend toward militarization we've seen over the last 25 years. It also allows for police groups and advocates to dismiss aggressive behavior, excuse improper police shootings, and justify all of those taser videos we've seen over the last couple of years. We should do what we can to diminish the threat to police officers, but not at the expense of the rights and safety of everyone else. Striking the right balance requires a proper assessment of just what sorts of risks police officers actually face.
So just how dangerous is police work? Generally, police are about three times as likely to be killed on the job as the average American. It isn't among the top ten most dangerous professions, falling well behind logging, fishing, driving a cab, trash collecting, farming, and truck driving. Moreover, about half of police killed on the job are killed in traffic accidents, and most of those are not while in pursuit of a criminal or rushing to the scene of a crime. I don't point this out to diminish the tragedy of those cops killed in routine traffic accidents. My point is that the number of annual on-the-job police fatalities doesn't justify giving cops bigger guns, military equipment, and allowing them to use more aggressive and increasingly militaristic tactics. A military-issue weapon isn't going to prevent traffic accidents. In this context, then, it makes sense to remove from consideration deaths not directly attributable to the bad guys.
So take out traffic accidents and other non-violent deaths, and you're left with 69 officers killed on the job by criminals last year. That's out of about 850,000 officers nationwide. That breaks down to about 8 deaths per 100,000 officers, or less than twice the national average of on-the-job fatalities.
Now I suppose you could argue that on-the-job police fatalities are low because of the very things I'm arguing against—aggressive tactics, bigger guns and armor, military equipment, etc. But I'm not sure that's backed by the numbers. On-the-job police fatalities peaked in 1974, at the height of Nixon's war on drugs. They declined throughout the 1970s under Carter's less aggressive drug war, then leveled off in the 1980s under Reagan. The next big drop came in the 1990s, coinciding with a dramatic overall drop in violent crime nationwide. Probably not coincidentally, the slight increase in police fatalities in 2007 also came during a year that saw a slight uptick in violent crime in general.
Twice the national average means police work certainly carries added risk. But is it the kind of risk that justifies, for example, a more than 1,000 percent increase in the use of SWAT teams over the last 25 years? Does it justify the fact that our cops that once looked like this now look like this? Your call, I guess.
Of course, if policymakers were really serious about protecting police officers, there's one thing they could do that would have a dramatic, immediate impact on officer safety: They could end the drug war.
Elemenope | December 28, 2007, 10:35am | #
John --
I agree that some people are dangerous in the extreme; non-functional in society, sadistic, or otherwise a menace. As some folks in Texas say, sometimes " He just needs killin' "; and while I am against the death penalty, I certainly sympathize with the sentiment sometimes. Some people are dangerous; only a fool or a naif would think otherwise.
However, these people have always existed; they predate professional law enforcement for sure, and predate criminal justice in general. Societies have attempted several different methods of minimizing the harm that the presence of such individuals can inflict, and a militarized police department with broad powers is merely one of them (with, shall we say, mixed and middling but fairly substantial success).
I and many of the people I know, including those who have had close experience with or have been victims of crimes, fear more from the day-to-day threat of an interaction with a cop than they fear being victimized (again, in some cases) by a criminal. They don't fear for their lives, generally speaking (though one fellow who I got pulled over who was Black I thought was going to pass out he was so scared; he was gripping the steering wheel pretty damned tightly. That, incidentally, was the only time I've seen a cop approach a car with a weapon drawn. Might have had something to do with it.) What they fear is the power that police have (with basic impunity) to penalize them or not, using traffic regulations as their weapons. They also fear having their things turned inside out, or degraded or intimidated by a person with power over them, and they fear that they will not be treated fairly and if they are that they will have no recourse.
The number of predators on the street remains very low, always has been. The problems that I see as being worse than those that the police were created to solve are the erosions to the basic sense of dignity and independence to which every adult person ought to be entitled. After interacting with police, if a population generally doesn't come to expect fairness, comes to feel emasculated and used, disrespected, and becomes fearful of the power being held over them (with seemingly arbitrary application) then something is deeply wrong.
While I generally don't care much for Justice Scalia, his concurrence in
Minnesota v. Dickerson is worth reading in its entirety, as it articulates fairly sharply just how far we've fallen from the pride and dignity of the founders to now in the name of safety provided by police departments.
It would have been worth much, much more as a dissent, but after all, Scalia is a conservative first and a "libertarian" far, far second.
BTW, police are pressured by explicit and implicit inducements to produce "results", i.e. # of tickets, convictions, closed cases, etc.. It literally has become their job, one way or another, to "get the guy", and that often translates into ruining lives. I really believe that the lawyer who said what I wrote above was not being overly cynical when he said that.
The Wendigo | December 30, 2007, 11:56am | #
Good essay. Lots of hogwash in the comments, though. Expectedly, the "cops as heroes" fanboys and salivating drooling authoritarian-figure worshipers are here to tell us how dangerous a cop's job really is.
What a sack of fecal matter.
Cops who are injured in their work almost always have provoked the violent response by virtue of their authoritarian, command-and-control perspective.
This is rooted in the subtle but dangerous shift from
peace officer
to
law enforcement officer
and though I shouldn't have to explain this to the SWAT-team snuggle bunnies, I will do it for completeness' sake.
A peace officer strives to keep the peace. He views each peace-breaching situation as a dispute between two people with whom he shares his town. In other words, between two people who are his equal. Not his inferiors. Not his "subjects" and most assuredly not "civilian perps."
Despite decades of reverent boolshyte bad TV drama focusing on the "dangerous, heroic" nature of police work, policemen find themselves in need of tools of the modern warrior.
These are not tools of diplomacy. They are not tools of peace-making.
A "law enforcement officer" tells you his purpose in his title. ENFORCEMENT. Therefore he will be a literalist on the primacy of the law, and a subjectivist in the interpretation of that law for "enforcement" sake. His subjectivity comes from the perspective of authority = primary.
This is not the means to achieve peace. It is the means to provoke war, to sow division.
Ironically, police have it within themselves to determine how dangerous is their job. Whatever dangers they encounter, the dangers are a product of the society that the policeman lives in. The policeman has an obligation to increase tranquility.
And as bears repeating in this doubletalk era of human history, war is not peace.
