1 in 82 PER YEAR, just to make it clear. Not per time he pulls someone over or anything.
I guess with those odds you'd be quite happy to sit in a chair that has a 1 in 82 chance of electrocuting you once a year?
If you put it into the perspective of how likely any particular incident is going to be, you have about 40 MILLION Americans over the age of 16 had some form of face-to-face time with a cop in 2008, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. You know, a government agency, not some hippie anti-cop group.
Now many of them had more than one such contact in a year, but let's be generous with our estimates and assume only 40,000,000 INSTANCES of a cop interacting with someone. Out of those, you get those 10,000 assaults with a deadly weapon, out of which 2000 with a gun.
That would still mean that only 1 in 4000 such contacts risks resulting in an assault with a deadly weapon, and only 1 in 20,000 in an assault with a gun.
Note however that as mentioned before, the actual number of incidents is vastly larger than the number of persons involved in them, so the risks are actually lower than the generous calculation in the previous paragraph.
Also note again that "assault" is NOT equivalent to "attempted battery". While assault with a gun sounds scary -- and it IS scary -- it does NOT mean 2000 people in a year actually SHOT at a cop. Most of those are people just waving a gun around or verbally threatening to use a gun.
It's hard to water that down any more than it already is, really. It's hardly the kind of lawless wild-west no-mans-land that justifies shooting someone as soon as they act funny.
Wow, you go from noting that there are 40 million encounters with cops in a year to rushing claim that the Police just shoot people for acting funny. Yet somehow the streets aren't running red with the blood of the thousands if not tens of thousands of those 40 million who likely acted funny, instead we're talking a handful, most likely 30 odd given the numbers reported in the news, but hey let's be generous and say 100 out of the 40 million where something goes terribly wrong. That is hardly the police just shooting everyone who acts funny.
And generally, the chance of dying each year is almost 4 times lower as a cop than as a motorcyclist in the USA. And people do the latter for fun, so it's not exactly the pants-crapping kind of terror that being a cop is made out to be.
And yet with the odds (assuming they were just shooting random people they meet) of being killed by a cop is around 1 in 40,000 each year. Yet some how this converts to people needing to be terrified of the super bad bully boys that go around shooting everyone.
In reality, the odds of getting shot actually increase with your own behavior.
You know, like running from them, getting out of your car without being instructed to. Failing to comply with orders. Continuing to approaching them when told not to. Fumbling about in pockets or waistbands, quickly reaching into glove boxes and centre consoles. Saying, "I have a gun," and then reaching for it.
Time and time again when these incidents occur we see these same things happening, and we also see the same crowd leaping up and down about how terrible the cops are because they can't distinguish between behaviour that often leads to attacks on cops and just someone acting strange.
This is the thing. The reason that most of those in the 40 million don't get shot for "acting strangely" is that their "acting strangely" doesn't mimic the behaviour of those that are acting with malicious intent against the cop.
If you act like someone planning to attack a cop and then move in a way that looks like going for a weapon, don't be surprised if you end up on the wrong side of a bullet.
It takes two people to cause these situations, but in the minds of the Cop haters, the victim can never have done anything wrong at all. Nope the cop was suppose to be a mind reader, the actions of the victim are totally irrelevant to it all cause the cop should have know that despite how he acts, he's not actually a threat.
Hey, here's an idea. How about we make it so that cops aren't allowed to fire until fired on? Might mean more dead cops and criminals able to go on and kill other people instead of being stopped, but who cares if it save a few civilians from being shot by cops. Right?
