No, they mean no such thing. Really, get some education on the most basic principles of science and evidence-based reasoning, not to mention the definition of "danger".
For a good understanding on the dangers of work, I recommend watching
this video.
Whether a person dies doing something is not at all a valid indicator of how much danger they faced doing it. Death is an actual realized harm, while danger, by definition, is not actual but only potential harm. Whether a very real danger because an actual harmful outcome is determined whether people person engage in mental and physical precautions plus react in ways that minimize the actual harm to themselves from those dangers.
Okay, so um... how does this apply only to police work?
Take roofers or steel workers or loggers for instance. How is the death toll for these three fields (higher per capita than policing) unrelated to the safety protocols in place and the training to help ensure fewer people are killed? Are you somehow suggesting that the danger for higher death tolls doesn't exist?
No. I am suggesting that the dangers of those professions are also actually higher than their death tolls indicate. However, many dangers on some jobs (like roofers, etc.) are due to random and largely uncontrollable factors, thus even the most careful precautions can do little to avoid some accidents. Also, the fact is that a large % of accidents in such jobs are in actually due to workers not taking the proper precautions, especially since financial rewards are often tied to productivity which is slowed by being careful. My father was a lifelong construction worker who did everything from the roof to the wiring and foundation. He never got seriously injured and every time a co-worker got hurt, he was fond of telling me exactly what they did wrong.
With police, there are some accidental dangers, but mostly it is dangers from the deliberate actions of others. These actions and the people likely to engage in them are not random, so the police can and do successfully keep most of the dangers (aka plausible harm) from becoming actual harm. The police actions not only thwart the efforts of criminals to harm them, but prevent many criminals from even attempting to harm the cops to escape because they know the cops are expecting it and are armed to stop such attempts. IOW, the attitude among cops that most situations they encounter are plausibly deadly combined with their ability to use and use of force that is known to the people who pose the greatest danger to cops are what keep the actual fatalities much lower than they would be.
Besides all of that. The notion that cops don't suffer disproportionate injury and death is utter bullshit.
OSHA stats show that only 3.4 workers per 100,000 die each year from job-related events. In contrast,
about 20 cops per 100,000 die each year from job-related events(and that is from a source trying to argue that being a cop is "safe", and which ignores the huge % of "officers" that don't actually perform arrests on the streets. That means that cops are at least 600% more likely (and beat cops much higher than that) to die on the job compared to the average American worker. Plus, they are about 20,000% more likely than nearly all other workers, even on the deadliest jobs, to be killed intentionally by people who their job requires them to interact with every day.
The fact that there are a small % of workers in jobs that lead to more death is completely meaningless. It has zero implications for how cops would be reasonable expected to think and act. It is the combination of the much greater than average actual harm, together with the extremely high constant plausible danger only thwarted by constant vigilance, and the nature of the threats being from the actions of their "customers" rather than random accidents that determine how it is reasonable to expect cops to think and act, and make comparisons to other jobs merely on death rates of zero relevance to anything.
laughing dog said:
Whether someone is killed doing something is a valid indicator of the danger. It is not the only indicator.
Nope. For reasons already explained, it is not merely not "the only indicator", it is not even "a" valid indicator of danger. Valid indicators must have strong and reliable correlations with the thing they are presumed to indicate. Death rates lack such a correlation with the amount, level, and frequencies of dangers that must be avoided.
Using death rates as an indicator of the dangers people must deal with on a job is like using whether or not a person has lung cancer as and indicator of how many cigarettes they have smoked in their life. Sure, there is a non-zero relationship but the former is not any kind of valid indicator of the latter.
