Can't believe people are citing this data. Comparing homicide statistics of people armed with guns being killed vs armed or unarmed regular people and thinking cops are safer than armed or unarmed regular people? Come on.
How about we account assults? In 2018, 10.8% of sworn officers faced assult. Of them, 30.6% sustained injuries. In 13.2% of the incident, the attacker was prosecuted.[1] But the rate of aggravated assult against regular people is 0.2%. Clearance rate is 52.5%. Prosecution rate is much lower.[2] I really don't care about your ideology or anything, but saying police is a safe job is just stupid. 10.8% of sworn officers faced assult while armed. Let's see how things changes when police is forced not to be armed.
10.8% faced “assault” is a very misleading statistic because “assault” as reported here is completely up to the discretion of the reporting officer.
Only ~1/10 of these “assaults” are even prosecuted. If prosecutors aren’t even willing to charge someone with assaulting an officer, it probably wasn’t worth calling an “assault”.
There was one famous case from Ferguson, where a guy was charged with destruction of property, because he bled on the uniform of the four officers who were beating him in the cell they've just thrown him in, after he complained about conditions.
(The reason why the victim was in jail in the first place was because they arrested him after incorrectly identifying him as a target of an outstanding arrest warrant. Filing the property damage charges allowed them to keep him in cell for another week, until he could procure the bond money.)
Even accounting for that rate, police faces 5x "prosecutable assults" more than a "reported assult" on a normal person. We don't know what "prosecutable assult" statistics on a normal person so we can't compare them directly, but the rate is approx. 67%[1]. Clearance rate is 52%, so it shows that while policing in US, you get approx. 15x more chance of facing "prosecutable assult".
1. Police are much more likely to report an assault than average citizen is. Just by the nature of their job, very nearly every single assault against a police officer is likely to be reported.
2. Once reported, an assault against a police officer is much more likely to be prosecuted because courts, prosecutors, and juries place much more weight on the testimony of a police officer than an average citizen.
3. "Assault" is a very broadly defined crime. Generally assault doesn't actually require a physical attack, so using it as a metric for "danger" is dubious.
Assault usually only requires someone to do something that makes the victim think they were in danger of being physically attacked. Police officers are trained to be hyper aware of threats, and they know that the legal definition of assault is different than the colloquial definition, so the police (and prosecutors) have a much broader view of what qualifies an "assault" than the general public does.
Cops are also looking to throw the book at a hookup, with the help of willing prosecutors. We've given cops the benefit of the doubt for decades, and only now with widespread phonecams are we seeing the truth.
Unfortunately, a police assaulting a civilian, wherein the civilian victim performs any act of self defense down to and including bleeding on an officer counts as a prosecutable assault on the officer.
