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Re: Police The issue

To: tag@cs.utah.edu
Subject: Re: Police The issue
From: Mari L Clements <mrndr2@juno.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 12:17:28 -0700
> According to this site,
47[http://www.nleomf.com/WhatsNew/PressReleases/newreport.html] 
> out of 740,000 officers were killed in
> automobile accidents (note that is total, not just those who were 
> hit outside their cars) in 1998, and 7% of all police fatalities are 
> caused by being struck by a vehicle.  If you are the family, I'm sure
one 
> death classifies as "many", but statistically, I would argue otherwise.

At first I read this and thought it was horrifying that that many
(740,000) officers were killed.  Then I thought about it and thought that
was an awful lot of policement to replace...Then I went to the site and
saw that there are that many (740,000) police officers.

Looking further at the site, I thought that there were some things that
weren't clear to me from the original post, so in case other people were
confused by the numbers...

A quote from the site:
Nearly 7,000 officers were shot to death, accounting for about 49 percent
of all law enforcement fatalities over the past 100 years.
Traffic-related accidents were the second leading cause of police deaths,
resulting in more than 4,000 officers killed, but the gap between these
numbers is narrowing.  In fact, for the first time in history, the number
of officers killed in automobile accidents last year, 47, was higher than
the number of officers killed by firearms, 45.  

The 7000 and 4000 numbers are of the 14,000 police officers killed in the
past century.  So, of all police fatalities, 50% are firearm related
(including how many where the officer stops someone and they shoot?) and
nearly 29% are traffic related.  The 47 and 45 are for the 130 police
officer deaths in 1999, so in '99, 36% of deaths were traffic related and
35% were shootings.

If your point was that the likelihood of dying on the job as a police
officer is relatively low, I wouldn't argue that point at all.  If you
are arguing that dying as a result of a traffic stop is an uncommon way
of dying on duty for police officers, I would argue that that is not
true.  (Although all deaths in the line of duty are relatively uncommon,
and thus deaths by any means while on duty are relatively uncommon,
within such deaths, traffic related deaths are consistently in the top
two causes.)

One other thing to think about.  Although the likelihood of dying in the
line of duty for a police officer is relatively low, it is a risk that
they encounter daily, and it is almost certainly significantly higher
than the risk encountered in most other jobs, like say, statistician.  

mlc
'91 MR2 NA
------I take no responsibility for anything below this line------

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