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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

How many police officers are shot yearly? This seldom gets much press.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/03/us-usa-shooting-te...

Just knowing this stuff happens must make police edgy.

Police officer doesn't even crack the top 10 most dangerous professions, and a large number of those police deaths are due to traffic accidents.

I'll give police officers some slack as soon as we start allowing 7-11 clerks or cab drivers (both an order of magnitude more dangerous than police work) to murder their customers with impunity.

> and a large number of those police deaths are due to traffic accidents.

I wonder if the fact that cops don't normally obey speed limits affects this at all...

126 cops killed in 2014 [1] and 623 citizens killed by cops in 2014 [2]

1. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/u-s-police-officer-...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

Those numbers are total police officer deaths across all causes, not just shootings, which was what the parent was talking about.

Reading further, it's actually 50 officers who were killed by firearm in 2014, and it's not clear whether that number includes suicides.

This number is trending downwards since in the mid-seventies.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/u-s-police-officer-...

Would guess the downward trend is due to more widespread use of body armor. I seldom if ever see a uniformed cop who's not wearing a vest.

Actually, gun violence has been on a downward trend since the early nineties across the entire population. You'd expect police firearm fatalities to trend downward accordingly, regardless of the use of body armor.

Police wearing body armor, armored cars, AR-15s, and the like are part of a different trend: the militarization of US police using surplus equipment from the Department of Defense, in a DOD program 1033.

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-best-reporting-on-the-...

It's worth reading through at least some of the particulars. About half seem to involve people also shooting at the police. Assuming the police are at fault every other time, I don't know how else one would expect a shootout with police to end. For that matter, even if it happens to be a fake gun, waving it around and refusing to put it down is probably a bad idea.

And then there's murder suicides by people who happen to be cops, but I don't think killing your own family is something that comes up in the line of duty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

http://killedbypolice.net has more details on most of the cases of people killed by police.

It's interesting to combine that with traffic stop data to get an idea of how risky it is for a person who is pulled over.

There are at least 17.7 million people pulled over for traffic stops per year in the US. If we attribute ALL of the deaths to traffic stops to get an upper bound of 3.5 deaths per 100k for people in traffic stops per year.

That puts the probability of getting killed during a traffic stop in a given year at about the same as the probability of dying that year from stomach cancer. It's about half the probability of dying by suicide from firearm, and 3 times the probability of dying by influenza.

That's a very generous upper bound. Only 2% of the descriptions at Wikipedia mention traffic, but that is too low because some do not have descriptions. Let's be generous and go with 10% to get a more realistic bound than the 100% I used earlier. That would give a death rate from traffic stops of 0.35 per 100k.

That would put the probability of dying when you are pulled over as similar to the probability of dying that year from Hodgkin's disease, and about 1/3 the probability of dying from malnutrition [1].

[1] malnutrition deaths are way higher than I would have expected in the US!

Around 50 per year die due to shootings, according to data from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (www.nleomf.org) for 2003-2014.

About as many as die per year from auto crashes/getting run over.

Contrast that with around 400 deaths per year caused by police officers (2003-2009 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf , that study seems to have stopped then).

Edit: the ~130 numbers from some of the other posts are closer to the total number of police officers dying in the line of duty, rather than shootings specifically.

I don't know about injuries, but regarding fatalities, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund claims 117 officers were killed in the line of duty in 2014 (http://www.nleomf.org/facts/enforcement/). Meanwhile, 385 people were killed by police Jan 1-May 30th 2015: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shooting...).

Are we looking for some kind of parity in dead cops vs. dead civilians?

How many of the 385 people were killed as a consequence of criminal actions? Cop shooting unarmed civilian gets a lot of play in the media, but that describes a small percentage of police involved shootings.

Strictly speaking, I'm looking for parity in the sense that both those numbers should be 0. But, realistically speaking, some percentage of those civilian deaths are completely justified, and police are better armed than civilians in general, so we'll obviously never get there.

I'm saying we have a problem because American police killed more people in March 2015 than UK police killed in the entire 20th century (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/american-cops-killed-people...). I'm saying there's a problem because it's more dangerous statistically to be a bystander in an NYPD shooting incident than the target (citation escapes me, unfortunately). And, I'm saying it's ridiculous that an unarmed suspect can be charged with assault because the police shot and wounded two bystanders while trying to deal with him (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/nyregion/unarmed-man-is-ch...)

Something's got to give here.

Just checking: are you saying it's fine to shoot criminals?

How minor does the criminality have to be before it's not okay to shoot them?

(Let's ignore the "innocent before proven guilty" and right to trial stuff here.)

How many black lives are lost yearly? And those that aren't by chance caught on video tape get zero press.

Just knowing the stuff that happens must make people edgy.

I tried to look it up. The Post has police shootings at around 400 people. Half were white and half were minority. 2/3 of the minority were black. So, I think around 133.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shooting...

From the article you link to:

"Overall, blacks were killed at three times the rate of whites or other minorities when adjusting by the population of the census tracts where the shootings occurred."

But statistically they appear to be involved in a high number of homicides. I don't know the details of the shootings. How many people were armed/unarmed for example. Where did the shootings take place? Traffic stops on highways, for example.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/02/...

The time window on that particular number isn't actually a full year, but the year up till may 30 when the article was published. Considering that crime tends to go up in the summer months instead of staying flat over the year you're probably better off looking at last year's numbers, instead.

According to http://www.rawstory.com/2015/04/black-americans-killed-by-po... (which cites killedbypolice.net), at least 238 black people were killed by police in 2014. That's about double the total number of police killed in that year.

Here are some more statistics, which seem to show that police work is not getting any more dangerous.

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7430943/police-killed-statisti...

Nobody is forcing them to be cops. Accept the danger or find another job.

The guy who was killed was a Marine who served in Iraq. He probably figured it couldn't be any more dangerous. Police could also take a more hands off approach. Unfortunately, crime rates tend to increase:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/60352506f481415c8edf3fc35b6f8...

to be fair, maybe his daddy cop created a large incentive

Perhaps, just perhaps, they might get shot less if they had two orders of magnitude less of a habit of shooting others on basically no provocation whatsoever.

This isn't some abstract dream scenario, it's basically how it is in every other modern democracy. It's only the US that has this problem. Clearly we are screwing up, somehow. It's long past time to come to terms with that.

http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/causes.h...

Shot & killed? Around 50/year.

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