There Is No "War on Cops"

[Suzanimal]

With the FBI releasing the 2016 Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted data (https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2016/home) this month, reports on police deaths have once again found their way into headlines. Such reports offer a great illustration of how reporting the same facts in different ways can dramatically change how big a problem seems to be. Also interesting is the information that is reported depending on the media outlet. NPR, for example, emphasizes the number of police killed with firearms specifically (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/30/507536360/number-of-police-officers-killed-by-firearms-rose-in-2016-study-finds), rather than the general category of “feloniously.” Fox News will emphasize the “War on Cops” narrative while reporting total officer deaths (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/07/05/police-officer-deaths-on-duty-have-jumped-nearly-25-percent-in-2017.html) rather than violent officer deaths, presumably because the former is a bigger number. This is misleading, however, since it includes deaths due to things such as heart attacks, accidents, and extreme weather.

Something to watch out for is when percentage changes are reported while excluding some of the raw numbers on which they are based. In this example (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-killed-line-of-duty-increase-2016/), CBS News reports that "the number of police killed in the line of duty rose sharply in 2016," with a "56 percent increase in shooting deaths over the previous year." They do report the raw number of police shot to death in 2016 – 64 – but not the previous year’s, which was 41. This is an increase of 23 deaths in a country with over 900,000 sworn law enforcement personnel according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (http://www.nleomf.org/facts/enforcement/). Reporting that a police officer’s chance of being killed went up from 0.00455% to 0.00711% (that is, 41/900,000 to 64/900,000), if it doesn’t confuse the reader, will likely make the violent shooting death of a police officer seem like a relatively rare event.

...

https://mises.org/wire/there-no-war-cops

[Origanalist]

There is no "war on cops", merely casualties from their war on us. If there were really a war on cops it would be pretty obvious.

[Raginfridus]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWATBOQCUqM

[TheTexan]

There is a war on cops.

Cops are just winning it. By a lot

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

This article gives numbers through 2015. I don't know about 2016 number. Even if the numbers are higher--it would be an anomaly. But alas, no one cares about trends.



Article: "It has never been safer to be a cop"


Excerpts:

"...the FBl has its own database for felony killings of police in the last few decades. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has also conducted a nat'l police census every 4 years since 1992, giving us some reliable estimates for the total number of sworn officers up through 2008.

------

And no matter how you slice it, police work has been getting a lot safer. Fatalities and murders of police have been falling for decades—per resident, per officer and even in absolute terms."

------

"...some people prefer the data from the Officer Down Memorial Page.

AEI’s Mark Pery has crunched their numbers for firearm related deaths (a good proxy for homicides), and his findings closely mirror my own.

Again, the data sh0w that 2015 is one of the safest years for American policing in history, both in abslute terms and adjusted for population."


"It’s safer to be a cop than it is to live in Baltimore. It’s safer to be a cop than it is to be a fisher, logger, pilot, roofer, miner, trucker or taxi driver. It’s safer to be a cop today than it’s been in years, decades, or even a century, by some measures."

"But none of these things-—and certainly not a mythical “war on cops”—should stop us from having a hard conversation about law enforcement and criminal justice reform in America.

Exaggerating the dangers of being a cop does no one any good."




http://www.newsweek.com/it-has-never-been-safer-be-cop-372025

[Suzanimal]

This article gives numbers through 2015. I don't know about 2016 number. Even if the numbers are higher--it would be an anomaly. But alas, no one cares about trends.


Later in the op...


To provide even further context in terms of how dangerous of an occupation policing is, one can look at the fatal injury rates data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Looking at the data for 2015 (which are the most recent available), one finds that “Police and sheriff’s patrol officers” are not in the top 30 for fatal injury rates, ranking behind occupations such as logging, mining, fishing, farming, aquaculture, aircraft piloting, roofing, collecting refuse, iron and steel working, trucking, power-line installing, landscaping, construction, waste management, cement manufacturing, taxi driving, and mechanical repair.

[tod evans]

There is no "war on cops", merely casualties from their war on us. If there were really a war on cops it would be pretty obvious.

^^^^^^^^^^ This! ^^^^^^^^^^^^

[phill4paul]

There is no "war on cops", merely casualties from their war on us. If there were really a war on cops it would be pretty obvious.

I'm with tod evans on this. Yup.