America the Messy Yard Police State

Being a cop is a dangerous job - NOT really!!!!!

  Cops love to brag that they have a dangerous job and they risk their lives for us everyday. I suspect that is to justify their very high pay rates.

In reality any job that involves driving a car, truck or other vehicle is a dangerous job. After all people involved in auto accidents are often killed.

In 2009, 93 people were killed each day in US traffic accidents. That's about 34,000 people a year.

And of course being a cop is a dangerous job because it involves driving a car. Yea, sure a few cops are shot every year by criminals, but most police deaths are the result of auto accidents.

The job of being a cop rarely makes the top ten list of the most dangerous occupations in the USA. The top 3 most dangerous jobs year in and year out are fishermen, loggers and construction workers. Cops usually are in the top 20 most dangerous jobs, but rarely in the top 10.

When it comes to jobs with high murder rates again cops rarely make the top of the list. The jobs with the highest risk of being murdered usually are clerks in liquor stores or convenience stores, and cab drivers.

While cops are hated and every once in a while somebody assassinates a cop, most criminals are smart enough to realize that robbing an armed cop is a risk they should not take, and instead the rob liquor stores and Circle Ks.

This article starts out by saying 127 cops were killed this year, but later says that the leading cause of deaths was auto accidents, in this case 50 were auto accidents.

Source

Police officer deaths down in 2012

By Eric Tucker Associated Press Thu Dec 27, 2012 7:52 AM

WASHINGTON — The number of law enforcement officers who died performing their duties in the U.S. declined by about 20 percent in 2012 after rising the two previous years, a non-profit organization reported Thursday.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund said in a report that 127 federal, state and local officers have died so far on the job. The majority of officers who died were either shot or were victims of traffic accidents, figures show. [most of those died in traffic accidents, in this case 50, not from being shot as most cops would like you to believe] City and county police officers comprised most of the victims, but the list also includes a prison guard in Indiana who suffered a heart attack while responding to an unruly inmate, a deputy sheriff in Missouri who was fatally shot while responding to an ambush and a Coast Guard officer who was killed off the California coast while pursuing a vessel suspected of smuggling.

The toll is on pace to be the lowest since 2009, when 122 officers died, and this year would be only the second year since 1960 that the number of fatalities has dipped below 130. The organization, which also maintains a memorial wall in Washington bearing the names of fallen officers, reported 165 deaths last year and 154 in 2010. [So the group that collected this statistics is a organization that supports police officers, so I suspect the statistics will be biased towards cops]

The decline is heartening after two straight “alarming” years and may suggest that police departments, though still battered by budget cuts, are placing a greater emphasis on officer safety, said Craig Floyd, the chairman and chief executive of the Washington, D.C.-based memorial organization. [Sounds like this article is propaganda asking for more money for cops]

“I think officers are approaching these potentially life-threatening situations in a more cautious, focused manner,” said Floyd, noting the increased prevalence of body armor among officers.

Texas had the highest number of law enforcement fatalities at 10, followed by Georgia (eight) and Colorado and Maryland (six each). Thirteen of the officers who died were women.

There have been 49 firearms-related deaths this year, as of Thursday. [So shootings accounted for only for 37% of the deaths] Those include David Gogian and Jeff Atherly, two Topeka, Kan., police officers shot outside a grocery story last week while responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle, and two West Virginia state troopers, Eric Workman and Marshall Bailey, who were shot during an August traffic stop. Tom Decker, a police officer in Cold Spring, Minn., and a father of four, was fatally shot last month in what authorities called an ambush killing.

Car crashes, though down from last year, were the leading cause of death — causing 50. A Prince George’s County, Md., police officer who was pursuing a suspected thief died in August when his cruiser ran off the highway and crashed into a ditch. Another officer from the same department died in a crash two months later. Neither officer was wearing a seat belt, [So both deaths would have been preventable if the cops had been wearing seat belts] prompting Police Chief Mark Magaw to stress the need for officers to buckle up inside their patrol cars.

In Willoughby, Ohio, after Patrolman Jason Gresko’s police cruiser collided with a pickup truck en route to an emergency call in September, Chief Jack Beckwith cited the death as a reminder to his officers to be vigilant in responding carefully to emergencies and told his roughly 50-officer department that “this could have happened to every one of them.”

“It definitely takes a heavy toll on everybody personally that’s on the job,” Beckwith said. “We’re small enough that everybody knows each other very well.”

Other causes of death included job-related illnesses, stabbings and helicopter crashes. Two Atlanta police officers died in a helicopter crash in November during a nighttime search for a missing boy.

 
 

America the Messy Yard Police State