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by rabanne
2184 days ago
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Even accounting for that rate, police faces 5x "prosecutable assults" more than a "reported assult" on a normal person. We don't know what "prosecutable assult" statistics on a normal person so we can't compare them directly, but the rate is approx. 67%[1]. Clearance rate is 52%, so it shows that while policing in US, you get approx. 15x more chance of facing "prosecutable assult". [1] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/scpdvc.txt |
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Several issues with that statistic.
1. Police are much more likely to report an assault than average citizen is. Just by the nature of their job, very nearly every single assault against a police officer is likely to be reported.
2. Once reported, an assault against a police officer is much more likely to be prosecuted because courts, prosecutors, and juries place much more weight on the testimony of a police officer than an average citizen.
3. "Assault" is a very broadly defined crime. Generally assault doesn't actually require a physical attack, so using it as a metric for "danger" is dubious.
Assault usually only requires someone to do something that makes the victim think they were in danger of being physically attacked. Police officers are trained to be hyper aware of threats, and they know that the legal definition of assault is different than the colloquial definition, so the police (and prosecutors) have a much broader view of what qualifies an "assault" than the general public does.