20/08/2019
A friend of mine recently posted to his personal Facebook page, seeking to make some sense of the numbers of people killed by police officers and the numbers of police officers killed in the line of duty.
The post, like many of his regular updates on social media, was well constructed and insightful.
I thought I'd share it here. The images and graphs were not part of his original post.
Curious... reflecting on people killed by cops, and cops killed in the line of duty...
There's been a massive jump in recorded deaths of people by cops, a step change in 2009 it would seem. Like a 5-10x increase depending on which year. That smells a little off, but I'm struggling to find more solid data prior to 2009.
I mean, did the job for cops suddenly become a lot more dangerous everywhere in 2009?
Unlikely. It's already a terribly difficult and dangerous job they do... So what else was going on then? A change in stats collection methods, policies, definitions etc? Hard to tell.
In the US you are 150 times MORE likely to be killed by a cop than in the UK. Almost exactly 150 times more. Why is that? Something about cops? Society? Access to weapons? It's complex. But still... 150 times MORE likely? 😮
For the cops, deaths in the line of duty have been steadily falling since 1990, not just in per capita terms, but more importantly in actual numbers. Being shot is the leading cause of deaths among officers, and road traffic accidents are next typically. It averages about 3 officers per year for each state... but the deaths or clustered around the major propulation centers.
Like I said, a tough job.
I believe that reducing access to weapons in the general population would have a good effect on officer deaths in the line...
You know, in the UK we did little about smoking related deaths, even though it was a couple of Brits who showed the link between smoking and lung cancer in 1950 - almosy 70 years ago! Doctors in the UK did nothing about it until about 12 years later a paper was published in their journal that talked about how many doctors (who as a group were just about the heaviest smokers at the time!) were being killed by it. And so it began - and now the UK has gone from worst country in the world for smoking related deaths to one of the best.
Perhaps if the law enforcement world & law makers could see the link between weapons and police deaths, something significant might change...?
Wouldn't that be great?
Wouldn't the eventual realisation of those in power in America that the amendment referring to the right to bare arms, was just that; an amendment. Therefore, a further amendment could be enacted; one which removed the right for ordinary citizens to own and walk around with weapons, including the assault rifles that hadn't even been imagined when the original amendment was written.
Is it really that difficult to recognise that the number of deaths by guns in America, whether by cop, on cop, or nothing to do with cops, has reached such levels as to mean that gun ownership must be reviewed and, ultimately, restricted?
It is time for change.
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