Why Are Police Officers More Dangerous Than Airplanes?

Then they call you a conspiracy nut so society ostracizes you and ignores your observations

It's just our totally useless perception of risk along with some other unfortunate qualities of humans. Trains are very safe but when something happens it's usually lots of casualties, destruction and press coverage (same for planes). Many many more people die from car crashes but you'll never see root cause analysis there, instead you have police falling over each other trying to blame whichever party is dead.

American police are significantly more dangerous than most European police forces because of this. The lives of those killed by police are deemed not to matter.

It's not something intrinsic to the nature of police, it's a set of local - often hyperlocal - policy choices.

Most issues have a reproducible reason, so it's likely that the same problem will happen on many many planes and kill a whole lot of people.

For the comparison, cars are risk free. What happens when your car is broken? You just can't go anywhere. It's not like people are falling off the sky in pack of a few hundreds at a time.

-- Ex aerospace engineer.

You can rationalize different ways you could help ensure your own survival in maritime or police incidents. Despite that you often can't.

So people are supportive of extraordinary measures, regulation, because of all that.

Medicine could also benefit from an attitude that doesn't blame the individual but looks for ways to avoid problems later.

This is a very effective system, but it requires real buy-in from everyone involved, for things that are very much counter-intuitive to us as people. It also has a great deal of overhead and extra cost that must be accepted globally, and cutting corners cannot be tolerated even for the occasional cases where you may be convinved something is reasonable and safe.

The "eight times" statement is just referring to causalities over a time period, which I think end up over-representing the true danger from terrorists. The businessinsider link does a pretty good job to addressing that point.

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-top-10-dangerous-jobs-c...

If a garbage man shoots someone, he gets a criminal trial, same as everyone else. If it's a defensible shooting, he'll be exonerated.

What is the point of society paying for a police program, if not to be better trained and better equipped personnel to handle these kinds of dangers?

Equip police with recording equipment to maximize their ability to justify and defend their actions, and then remove all special provisions that allows them to kill someone and not stand a full criminal trial.

> The way it works now, civilians often feel like the ones responsible for keeping violence at bay. In May, an African-American journalist named Tonya Jameson was changing the license plates on the used S.U.V. she had recently bought when an off-duty officer accused her of stealing the car — and pointed his gun at her. Ms. Jameson had proof of ownership in a bag that sat on the ground nearby, but she dared not move a muscle.

> Ms. Jameson told me that the words “black people can die like this,” kept running through her head. “That was my mantra. I knew I had to be careful not to freak him out. If he killed me, no one would know what really happened.”

> She spoke in a soothing voice, explaining to the police officer that if he looked in the bag, he would find the bill of sale. Instead he kept his gun trained on her and called in reinforcements.

When someone is "on the edge" like that, in a situation like that, I'll consider therapy in prison for them, but that's about it.

The reason that people are pulled over for speeding, broken tail lights and illegal lane changes are so that they can be convinced to remedy the situation and make things safer. The punishment is not meant to be the only outcome of the incident.

You may well be correct (after all, static speed cameras exist, and apparently have an effect), but personally I'd want to see a fairly detailed analysis to convince me that you are correct.

And then they lied about it. What is brave about that, in this case? Yes, there are uncountable cops doing untold amounts of great "work" (I put it in quotes not to belittle it, but because I think it's more noble than that). I even think the "blue shield" does serve a valid purpose a lot of times, but it's when it's abused that is the problem. And that is a problem.

Here's an idea how actual guts might look like:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2652/

> This chapter examines reporting of health care errors (e.g., verbal, written, or other form of communication and/or recording of near miss and patient safety events that generally involves some form of reporting system) and these events’ disclosure (e.g., communication of errors to patients and their families), including the ethical aspects of error-reporting mechanisms. The potential benefits of intrainstitutional and Web-based databases might assist nurses and other providers to prevent similar hazards and improve patient safety. Clinicians’ fears of lawsuits and their self-perceptions of incompetence could be dispelled by organizational cultures emphasizing safety rather than blame. This chapter focuses on the assertion that reporting errors that result in patient harm as well as seemingly trivial errors and near misses has the potential to strengthen processes of care and improve the quality of care afforded patients.

Looking a relative in the eye and telling them their loved one is dead because you made a honest or even careless mistake -- now THAT is bravery. I don't know if anyone is actually doing that just because it's in the guidelines who wouldn't also do it if it wasn't -- but do similar guidelines at least exist for police? Because if you swap out some words, all of that could be said about police work, too.

It doesn't get much more hateful than lying about someone you killed. After that comes defending such incidents, then there is a big gap, and then comes "all cops are pigs" on the hate scale. That doesn't justify the latter, but I don't know what moral high ground you think you're posting from.

> And there are a good number of those 1000 that die that deserved to die and thankfully we have brave people to go after those crazys

A "good number" would be 1000. What "good number" do you have in mind? If it's even just 999 or less, would you swap with one of the innocent people who got killed? And why do the others "deserve to die"? Because it has to be that way, in your mind, or because you looked at the individual incidents? Wouldn't they deserve even more to get disarmed and do their sentence or whatever?

Sure it's a flawed idea, but may result in better ideas. For example, what about integrating that technology into the car itself? Yeah there are problems to be overcome (doesn't help with cars already out on the road, needs to account for spoofing and 4th Amendment considerations), but it is an interesting direction.

Let me tell you about my buddy's first week on the job as a police officer in what most would consider a small town with low crime. Keep in mind that prior to this he was a school teacher.

On his second day, a single-car car accident. Three young girls in the car, one had her brains hanging out of her head, one was halfway through the window mangled, bloody and dead, and the third was thrown from the vehicle and was "fucked up pretty bad". He said he could see her ribs where the skin had been torn away. Drunk driver, speeding, no seat belts. Guess who gets to deals with that shit?

A few nights later, a woman calls the police on her husband. He's a vet with PTSD and she tells the cops he took his guns and wanted to kill a cop.

An APB is put out on his car but before the police found it there was a call about a guy walking around in a park with a riffle. So the police surrounded the park and went hunting for the guy. Now my buddy, who a year ago was teaching kids in a prep school is walking through the woods where a trained soldier is looking to kill him. At the same time, 15 police officers are all converging from different vectors and trying not to shoot each other in the confusion.

After searching the woods they find his parked car and surround it. They can see him sitting in the front seat and tell him to put his hands up. He never complies. He never complies because he's already blown his brains out.

My buddy got to see that too. Can you imagine what dealing with this stuff does to your mind?

It gets better. When they get to his wife's house to tell her that her husband is dead she says "Good, how?" Perplexed my buddy said "He shot himself in the head in his car." Her response: "The car? That fucking bastard".

Can you imagine?

I live in a nice place. I had no idea this kind of crap goes on. This didn't even get a mention in the paper.

My point is, you don't know what the police do on a daily basis. And you don't even know how much you don't know.

There are no superheroes out there, but most cops are the closest things we have to them.

You should totally join. It sounds like you'd make it all look easy.