Police and Guns

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

Mike Riggs shares some facts about police and guns:

  • In 2008, ten times more civilians were killed by cops than cops were killed by perps.
  • In 2011, 72 cops were shot and killed in the entire U.S.; in L.A. County alone, cops shot and killed 54 suspects the same year — 22 percent of those people were unarmed.
  • As Scott Reeder reported at Reason this morning, “Farmers, ranchers, commercial fishermen, loggers, garbage collectors, truck drivers, construction workers, pilots, steel workers, roofers, and others are far more likely to face death on the jobs than police or firefighters, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
  • And as Choire Sicha wrote earlier this year, “2008 was the ten-year low for police officers being killed, and 2012 is, so far, year-to-date, down 49% from last year.”

Some of those statements are misleading — it doesn’t say innocent civilians, for instance, but it does imply it — but they should nonetheless put some things in perspective.

Comments

  1. Wobbly says:

    I might face a greater risk of death on the job, but there’s something scarier about a perp with a gun. Maybe death rates don’t correspond with the balls needed to do a job.

    Also it might be that there are a lot of people categorized as police who do jobs that aren’t too risky. When I think of police I think of the guys doing the jobs we see on the TV shows, but the numbers probably include federal police, folks that work at desks, training staff, management and so on. What are the death rates of people like Starsky and Hutch?

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