The mainstream media lately have been decrying the 56% increase this year in the numbers of police officers fatally shot in the line of duty, apparently outraged that 50 police have been shot this year. Certainly, we are all concerned about the death of police. But the media repeatedly fail to provide any context for determining how serious the increase is. They provide no information on the occupational death rate for law enforcement officers or on how that death rate might compare to death rates for those in other occupations.
The police seem to regard their job as so dangerous that they must behave like an occupying army in order to protect themselves. But the fact is that law enforcement work is not even among the ten most dangerous jobs in the country. According to the FBI, in 2013, 27 law enforcement officers were killed in encounters with felons. Nearly twice as many, 49, were killed in traffic accidents. A total of 76 officers were killed in the line of duty in 2013. If we estimate that there are roughly 900,000 law enforcement officers in the country, only three police per 100,000 were fatally shot. The overall death rate on the job for police was 8.5 per 100,000. By comparison, the 10th most dangerous job in the country, construction worker, appears to have been twice as dangerous as law enforcement with nearly 18 fatalities per 100,000; the most dangerous, logging, had a fatality rate of 91 per 100,000—more than ten times more dangerous than police work. Even the higher figure for 2014 of 126 deaths cited by the Police Officers Memorial Fund amounts to 14 fatalities per 100,000, significantly lower than the rate for construction workers.
Police kill civilians far more often than civilians kill police. FBI figures cite 463 “justified homicides” committed by police in 2013. That’s 17 times as many civilians killed by police as police killed by felons. And there are no statistics for unjustified homicides. Apparently, since it compiles no such statistics, the FBI chooses not even to acknowledge that there is such a phenomenon as unjustified police homicides. Some estimates of total homicides committed by police range as high as 1000 per year.
In spite of their relatively low frequency, the mainstream media seem to be outraged at the increase in police fatalities. But where is their outrage at the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed in our invasion and occupation of their country? Where is their outrage at our having forced millions of Iraqis from their homeland into squalid refugee camps? Where is their outrage that 2.5 million American children are homeless?And finally, where is their outrage that criminal energy companies and their equally criminal crony politicians, by refusing to address or even acknowledge climate change, are consigning hundreds of millions of our descendants to misery and premature death? Are we to believe that the lives of police are more valuable than the lives and well-being of these innocents? Apparently, many in the mainstream media want us to think so.