[smcin]

> Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer.

I don't see that the FBI stats support that claim, and even if, the rate is still comparatively low, and skews very heavily towards the US South (which is only 38% of the population, but has very high gun ownership and gun violence rates):

Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking [0].

From the 2021 data ('FBI LEOKA') [1] for on-the-job police officer deaths reported by 7886 LE agencies:

• 73 were Feloniously killed (only 7 total in responding to all disorders/disturbances (e.g., disorderly subjects, fights, domestic disturbances/violence))

  - 61 of those 73 were killed by firearms
  - 44 of those 73 were in the South

• plus 56 Accidental deaths (32 of which were crashes).

(If we check individual case reports at [2], we can see how many of the 7 total responding to disorders/disturbances were Domestic.)

• Assaults: [3] 43,649 officers assaulted in 2021

- 28.6% (12,463) occurred while officers responded to [all] disturbance calls - 35% sustained injuries - 49.5% occurred in the South

And for 2022, FBI releases preliminary LEOKA statistics for 2022 to October [4].

The latest years for which I can easily find all the detailed LEOKA Tables are 1996..2019 [5] e.g. Table 24: "Circumstances encountered by victim officer upon arrival at the scene of the incident".

[0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...

[1]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight...

[2]: Comprehensive data tables about these events and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks are available on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) portion of the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/

[3]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight...

[4]: https://www.police1.com/officer-safety/articles/fbi-releases...

[5]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-feloniou...

[injb]

>>> Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking

The difference is that everyone who works on those jobs has roughly the same risk. A cop who has to respond to a disturbance in a bad area is fat more at risk than someone in the crime lab or the evidence room. If you look at the risk of injury to cops who are out on patrol all day, it's more dangerous.

[smcin]

Sure but can you cite or estimate more accurate stats? I read ~68% of officers do patrol, so as a decent approximation that's most of them.

I take your point about cities/areas/zipcodes/states. To me one pattern that keeps jumping out is that the South (LA, MS, GA, TN) has incredible levels of (gun) violence.

Ideally we could quote police officer injury and death rates, per-capita population, by region, by circumstances of incident.

[injb]

>>> can you cite or estimate more accurate stats?

No, sorry. But I don't know if the stats would fully capture what I think the difference is. Like, I remember a case of a cop who shot a teenager who was running away from him in an alley way at night. I think he had been armed but threw the gun away, not sure now. But the discussion about these incidents usually lead to the stats about how being a cop is not that dangerous in aggregate. That may be be true, but the distribution of danger is very peaky for cops and it's not just a question of whether they are patrol cops, but its also a question of the circumstances they're in in a given moment (which I didn't really mention in my previous post).

If you're called to investigate a group of armed young men in an alleyway at night, and you end up chasing one of them in the darkness, alone, you are in far more danger than the stats would imply.

From brief searching & skimming, I'm seeing that US police kill around 1000 people per year, while around 250 cops are shot. I deliberately compare shot to killed because police are usually far more accurate and effective at shooting than the average criminal. Needless to say this doesn't include all the time that police are shot at or attacked with other weapons that would justify shooting. So while yes they are not in as much danger generally as the people who attack them, it's certainly not a trivial amount of danger either.

[RogerL]

I've thought about this a fair amount. I think a big difference is psychological. I've done logging (just family gather firewood for winter stuff, not commercially). It can be scary, but the trees and machinery bare no malice towards you, and you can minimize risks just by being alert and understanding the risks. That is, a lot of injuries are 'your fault'.

In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you, they run to evade capture, etc. Even if the total risks of logging are higher I can imagine it is very hard to treat the risks in police work in the same dispassionate way the logger does. Tree leaning while cutting it vs suspect's hands maybe going towards their pocket. Even if the stats in those two situations are identical (I suspect they are not), I think very different emotions are going to be triggered, and without a lot of training those emotions are going to make situations go sideways either at the time or later (treating every person you meet as dangerous scum, etc). You don't hate the trees, you don't fear walking amongst them when not cutting them, you don't want to cut them a bit harder next time to teach them a lesson, and so on.

Anyway, I think all of that results in the 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.

[smcin]

> In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you

Definitely, some people do. Some don't. Some are trying to commit suicide-by-cop. Some are unarmed and not even a threat. Your post makes it sound like anytime an officer decides force is necessary, that it necessarily must be. Let alone, lethal force. Sometimes police get that determination wrong, whether by accident or intent. Sometimes police abuse qualified immunity. This stuff almost never goes before a jury, and on the occasions it does, if there's no bodycam and no other narrative (i.e. the other person's dead), unlikely to result in a conviction.

Angelo Quinto [0] was an unarmed, non-violent, non-criminal, 30-yo mentally-ill Filipino-American veteran killed in his own home by Antioch PD, by kneeling on his neck, while handcuffed. His mother was the person who called 911, and noone asked for the police, she only asked for medical. He apparently wasn't even committing any crime, just having a psychiatric emergency. But the police killed him.

Antioch PD didn’t disclose Quinto’s death to the public for nearly a month, then only after public requests. And there's no bodycam of his death. None of them were fired or charged, and there's no public mention of disciplinary actions. In response Gov Newsom signed eight police reform bills.

The level and frequency of police use-of-force in the US is also too high. It needs to be reduced.

> 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.

Equally, ignoring all the above also leads to bad consequences too.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Angelo_Quinto

[injb]

I'm sure the psychological factor is huge. That said, I did come across a few relevant stats [1]:

>>> 2,744 officers were assaulted with firearms; 6.1% of these officers were injured. 1,180 officers were assaulted with knives or other cutting instruments; 9.7% of these officers were injured. The remaining 11,760 officers were assaulted with other types of dangerous weapons; 16.8% of these officers were injured.

That same year (2021) US police killed 1048 people - less then half the number of cops that were attacked with guns, and less than 1/10th of the number attacked with other dangerous weapons.

I wonder how this compares with European countries, i.e. the ratio of people killed by police to how often they police are attacked in a serious way.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/dallas/news/pre...