Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by koheripbal 1434 days ago
It's a nice zinger, but obviously false.
2 comments

There were around 42k traffic deaths in 2021 (a 16 year high apparently) and around 610k patrol officers

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/751015/number-of-police-...

So, assuming every fatality is wearing a seat belt and is handled by a cop ('optimistic' assumption for it to be 'obviously false'), it would still be around a 7% chance per year for a cop to "unbuckle a dead man." So this isn't obviously false, depending on the career length. For example, after 10 years, assuming independent probability of such an encounter per year, .93^10 ~= .48.

The quote is not "No one ever unbuckled a dead man".