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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

And they are that high just because statistically they are in traffic for such a large amount of time.

At least in my state the actually high risk portion of their job…dealing with traffic collisions on the highway…is being outsourced to non police “hero units”

Tells me we can change what police are and aren’t responsible for, and it is telling which ones they want to drop and which ones they don’t.

Incidentally, that's a big part of the argument behind "defund the police" (which is poorly named, at best). Instead of having police do everything, almost none of which they have any training in, and making any situation potentially lethal just by virtue of them having guns, there should be specialized units for their various responsibilities.

Where I live this has also created a secondary debate. Due to union laws, when these jobs are handed off to non-police, the municipality must still pay the prevailing wage, aka what the cops were getting paid.

Here it's required to have a police detail at every road based construction site. They get paid overtime to sit there playing candy crush in case maybe something happens requiring them to direct traffic. So it seems like a win-win to replace them with citizen flaggers as it'd remove the cops from that role but also drastically lower cost to the city. But no, it'd mean taking what should be a minimum wage job and paying someone $50-100+/hr to do it.

And then the secondary debate is that some people see this as a bad thing and others see it as a good thing.

Another decent chunk is medical events. If an officer has a heart attack and dies while on the clock, that's "killed in the line of duty."

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