It is less dangerous than being a cabbie, yet every time a cab driver dies in a car accident I’m not forced to listen to hour after endless hour about how that noble cabbie died so that the good people of Chicago could get from point A to point B. The on the job fatality rate for police officers is only 20 per 100,000 officers, with only 1/4th of all fatalities related to homicides. On the other hand, fishermen have a fatality rate of 127 per 100,000, meaning that if you are a fisherman, your odds of dying on the job are approximately 6 times that of a police officer. Meanwhile, the average compensation for a police officer is $57,000 compared with a salary of $26,000 for fisherman. So in addition to being six times as likely to die on the job, the average fisherman earns half as much as a cop does. So why then am I not continuously being bombarded with proclamations of the selfless brilliance of our nation’s fisherman, braving stormy, treacherous seas, contending with waves and high winds, knowing always that they might drown or be struck by lightning simply so that I might have some salmon for my evening meal?
In addition to the fact that being a cop isn’t actually dangerous, no matter what the inveterate cop-lovers might tell you, for decades American policing has been possessed of a brutality, a fearsomeness, a general degree of oppression which does not exist in any other civilized society. A distressingly large percentage of American police officers behave themselves like stormtroopers in a banana Republic.
J.R. Ireland, “Cops Deserve Rightful Criticism No Matter What Whiny, Boot Licking Conservatives Might Like to Pretend”, Locust Kings, 2015-08-20.
Note: when I originally read the linked blog post, it was available to all. At some point in the last year or so, the original author or the owner of the blog changed to a members-only model, so you are now required to log in to read it (I don’t have a Blogger account). One reader asked me whether the original post cited any sources, but more than a year later I don’t recall. My apologies for any inconvenience.
