Because you claimed "yet the police are constantly in fear for their lives" as if it was irrational for them to be in fear even though their risk per encounter was lower.
But that is the point: their fear in any given encounter is more irrational than our fear.
They want us to be calm and yet the likelihood of us getting hurt is higher than the likelihood of them getting hurt. I think you were right to focus on a per encounter basis, because that is how we look at these things.
Furthermore, a policeman's risk in any individual encounter can be orders of magnitude higher, depending on the circumstances, and he would know it. If a suspect is acting erratically (as if on drugs), or has a serious arrest warrant outstanding, or if the encounter is in a high crime neighborhood, the policeman could have legitimate fear in just one encounter.
Right, but that fear is being applied to all encounters. Are police even very good at judging when the risk is high? There are plenty of studies showing that they aren't good at judging who has drugs on them, so why should we assume they know when the risk is high?
It is an unbalanced relationship from the start because of who you are, which, presumably, is a law-abiding citizen. If you were a psychopath, or a violent criminal on the lam, the risk would be far greater for the policeman than for you.
That assumes that all police are the same, but that all civilians are different. You can see the problem with that, yes?
How do I know the cop isn't a psychopath who remembers what a dick I was to him in high school? Yeah, I was a dick to a lot of people, the odds are higher than you might imagine.
Perhaps 99 times out of 100, the policeman has nothing to fear from the person he stopped. But 1 time out of 100, he is at serious risk.
I'd say your number are way off. by at least an order of magnitude, if not more.
The problem is that he doesn't have a good way of differentiating the two situations.
Agreed, so really he should be treating everyone as a citizen who deserves their respect until there is a reason not to.
There are several acceptable metrics he could try to use: gender (women are far less dangerous than men), age (older people are far less dangerous than people aged 15 to 30), evidence of wealth (wealthy people are less dangerous than poor, in part because they have something to lose), sketchiness of neighborhood (stops in high crime areas are far more dangerous than stops in low crime areas), facial expressions and body language (humans have evolved a rather accurate ability to perceive threat from such visual information), and verbal expression (humans have likewise evolved the ability to perceive thread from auditory information). What police are not supposed to use as a metric (although they probably do subconsciously) is race or ethnicity. I suspect that the other acceptable metrics would easily dominate the unacceptable one if there was a conflict. Unfortunately, some of those acceptable metrics are correlated with race or ethnicity, so the importance of the unacceptable factor is probably overestimated in the statistics.
Focusing on when to be afraid misses the point that even when all those metrics point towards bad the cop is very unlikely to be harmed. Even if it is a poor young man in a bad neighborhood with shifty eyes and shuffling feet and a threatening or disrespectful tone the likelihood that the cop will be injured is still less than 1 in 100.
Why? Because a lot of those factors are correlated to being afraid of cops. With good reason.
He only has more control over the encounter actually if the civilian chooses to be compliant.
Nope. He has control over whether he even seeks compliance. A stop and frisk requires compliance, while a "hey, you need hand with that?" does not.
Demanding compliance from every encounter is the start of the problem, not a solution to the problem.
If the civilian has decided not to be compliant for whatever reasons, then in fact the cop has less control because he is constrained by protocol.
I don't think cops are showing that they feel all that constrained by protocol, what with them doing things on tape that are out of protocol. But yes, let's blame protocol for them not following protocol.
Which is another way of saying that the cop has less control over the encounter precisely when it matters.
No, they are in complete control when it matters: at the beginning.
The cop sets the tone for any encounter, and they know this. If they want a pleasant encounter they have the choice to start that way. If they want a confrontation they can start that way.
