Full list of occupations ranked by fatal injuries per 100k workers. The referenced article isn't that useful because it doesn't provide any numbers to do an absolute comparison.
The airline pilots who are flying from NYC to LA have a fairly safe job. It's the bush pilots flying between remote places in Alaska who are driving up the statistics; basically all of the fatal air crashes in the US are in Alaska.
It strikes me as a bit disingenuous to say it's not even in the top 10 when it's number 18, according to that list. At that point we're talking about a difference of degree, not category. If anything your citation supports the idea that police officers endanger their lives.
18 is quite close to 10, in an absolute sense. The context of that citation is a claim that it's statistically inaccurate to say police officers risk their lives. That claim is demonstrably not borne out by statistics. Out of the universe of available professional work, being a police officer is #18 in risk. It's a rather small consolation that they're not eight jobs higher up the chain in terms of risk, considering there is essentially no chance of e.g. my monitor killing me as I sit at my desk.
A valid takeaway from the cited list is that being a police officer isn't literally the most dangerous thing you can do for work. An invalid takeaway is that being a police officer isn't dangerous.
How close 18 is to 10 in absolute sense has zero meaning. So does saying "10 most dangerous jobs" without quoting actual numbers. What if job 11 is 100x more safe than job 10? What if job 18 is 100000x more safe than job 10?
Being a police officer in a suburb where there is no crime does not belong in the same analysis as being a police officer in a crime filled area. Being a parking compliance officer and an undercover drug enforcement agent also have wildly different risk exposure. To compare these various jobs similarly from a risk assessment point of view by bucketing them under "police officers" is ridiculous.
Being a nurse or care technician in a hospital is more dangerous than being a cop in terms of being physically assaulted. They are often females on 1-to-1 assignment with mentally ill men that often attempt to attack & rape them.
I'm not sure if you just intended to reply to someone else, or just ignored the words I wrote completely. Comparing these professions on a global basis is dumb. Nurses who work in environments where they are exposed to convicts or the mentally ill are at a higher risk of assault than those who work in pediactrics. Comparing risk-laden professions by just putting everyone into a gigantic bucket by a job title in order to say "which job is more dangerous" defies a basic understanding of what people in these fields actually experience depending on where their job is, their position, and their role (disclosure: son of a firefighter, brother in law of a cop, husband to a physician)
The point is, you can render specifity to the point of uselessness. Of course there are specific situations & circumstances where a given occupation is more risk prone than another, but global averages are where public perception & policy are set & laws are made. Such is life.
Why do you consider the idea that police officers risk their lives to be statistically inaccurate? According to the United States Department of Justice, there are approximately 1,100,000 police officers in the entire country[1]. If 144 police officers died last year, a given police officer has (assuming uniformity) slightly greater than a 0.01% chance of dying each year. In other words one out of every 10,000 officers is killed.
Assuming surviving one year does not impact the likelihood of dying the next year, over a 20 year career a police officer then has a 0.26% chance of dying in the line of duty. We can expect that slightly greater than two out of every 1,000 officers will die prior to retirement.
Okay, but it is listed in the top 20. What you're citing doesn't seem to support your thesis; in fact, it appears to refute it. With that in mind, and considering the foregoing back of the napkin math I presented, I'm still not following how police officers don't endanger their lives.
Statistically speaking, yes, if your compensation model pays commensurate with risk. But I'm not sure I see how that's relevant to the discussion at hand.
You started by saying that the claim that police officers risk their lives is statistically inaccurate, with a citation. I countered that citation with one of my own and a calculation showing they do risk their lives. Now you are talking about garbage collectors and their exposure to risk being greater than that of police officers.
That doesn't really counter my point about police officers' lives being exposed to risk, because I never made a claim that police officers are exposed to more risk than garbage collectors. Likewise I'm not forwarding a normative point about whether or not people should be paid commensurate with the amount of risk they encounter in their professional work. I am making the narrow, positive point which is that, objectively speaking, police officers are exposed to risk (and this is borne out by statistics).
I'm not in a position to make a normative claim about whether or not (or how much, in an absolute sense) we should compensate people more for risking their lives. I'm not sure if you were expecting me to say that garbage collectors shouldn't be paid more than police officers in hazard pay. But if we are assuming a system that pays commensurate with risk, then I'm happy to agree it would be internally consistent to pay garbage collectors more than police officers in hazard pay, sure.
To say someone "does not risk their life" is meaningless really. What OP probably means is "not risking their lives to an exceptional degree". Born out by a comparison to jobs that might otherwise be classed as lower risk
When killed in duty, it's most often due to a traffic accident. [0] Garbage men die when their own truck runs over them.[1] Additionally, trash collectors get a lot more repetitive stress injuries. The cause of death for garbage men is just as intrinsic, to their job. It's just that the sanitation workers' union isn't as politically popular.
As for firefighters, it's literally no more deadly than being a painter (8.9 fatal injuries per 100k). They're both climbing tall ladders with one hand. It may not be romantic to say that, but that's the actuarial science.
According to another post, the study attributed much of the difference to shift work and bad eating habits that may result from shift work. This also isn’t unique to police work among blue collar workers.
>A recent study suggested that overweight and obesity were more prevalent among law enforcement personnel than the general population (Ramey, Downing, & Franke, 2009) and lack of regular physical exercise is one of the occupational risk factors contributing to the higher prevalence of elevated blood pressure, metabolic syndrome, and CVD among emergency responders such as police officers (Kales, Tsismenakis, Zhang, & Soteriades, 2009).
From a sibling comment, it is the 18th most dangerous job.
Also from the article.
Leading causes included heart attacks and strokes, which caused 18 deaths. And 15 officers died due to cancers that the NLEOMF says were "related to search and recovery efforts after the attack on the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001."
Why does the fact that they are unionized matter? The police union is one of the strongest unions in the country and they will even protect obviously bad apples from prosecution. On the one hand, it's good to see unions protect their members, on the other police don't really need more protection from prosecution than they inherently receive just for being officers. It's pretty hard to prosecute an officer even when is obvious to most of society that they've done something wrong that any other person would get some form of punishment for simply because it's in the DA's best interest to not screw with the police, who they require assistance from regularly.
Have you spoken to any police officers lately about their jobs? My next-door neighbor in my hometown was a state policeman who had guns and knives pulled on him several times in his career (during ordinary traffic stops, no less). If you're a cop working in a high-crime area, you're going to be dealing with the worst of society on a daily basis. I'm very thankful that my computer can't sporadically decide to physically attack me while I'm at work.
We pay soldiers who literally go into war zones less than what we pay officers typically. I'm if the opinion that we should pay soldiers more and gurantee lifetime healthcare for soldiers, but at this time it does put the actual risk into perspective. Healthcare workers are also routinely put into danger, as are security guards, and really any position that deals with the public on a regular basis. I'm not sure police officers really have a strong argument about being more dangerous because of several occasions of violence or risk of harm, obviously it's a non-trivial risk, but they typically should have body armor and training to minimize the risk that others may not have access to.
The Chicago police department isn’t exactly what most people would call “quality”.