Bull ****.
That's like praising a firefighter for putting out a house on fire...that he set fire to himself 10 minutes earlier.
cop tazes driver
- Thread starter LordOpie
- Start date
That's like praising a firefighter for putting out a house on fire...that he set fire to himself 10 minutes earlier.
Apparently, you have never been threatened before.
Here is a tiny example. Cop walks up to a homeless guy, weakly mumbles "move on", homeless guy, who has been smoking crack, threatens the cop, who then pulls his gun but drops its in front of the cracksmoking threatening homeless guy.
The police receive a huge amount of training from posturing to weapons handling before walking the streets. I respect how they have to react because if they show weakness or incompetence, they could be killed.
So, yes, statistically a minuscule amount of police officers are killed in the line of duty. Probably the same percentage of fights or confrontations you have won.
I pretty much disagree with that.
By your math, with about 160,000 soldiers in Iraq, roughly 4000 killed in action, that's about a 2.5 percent chance of getting killed, making Iraq a safe place to be.
Your numbers are slightly low when you consider the number of sworn officers that are assigned to administrative, supervisory, or support duties and are at a much lower risk of being assaulted than an officer assigned to patrol duties. It also doesn't take into account the number of officers assaulted and permanently disabled, which is about 200 a year.
The way you deal with an asshole cop is to comply, get his name and badge number after the stop is concluded, and file a complaint for misconduct.
Failure to properly display a license plate is against the law in most jurisdictions, and while I think it is a stupid one it is still the law.
Your numbers are slightly low when you consider the number of sworn officers that are assigned to administrative, supervisory, or support duties and are at a much lower risk of being assaulted than an officer assigned to patrol duties. It also doesn't take into account the number of officers assaulted and permanently disabled, which is about 200 a year.
The way you deal with an asshole cop is to comply, get his name and badge number after the stop is concluded, and file a complaint for misconduct.
Failure to properly display a license plate is against the law in most jurisdictions, and while I think it is a stupid one it is still the law.
just a slight tweak: there are 160K in iraq now, but - what - over half a million (or more?) have rotated in for one or more tours? falls to less than 1%.
Not nearly as bad/dangerous as Vietnam.
Well, no. You'd have to look at it by year.
It looks like 846 soldiers died in Iraq in 2005. I'm having trouble figuring out how many served, but let's assume that 300,000 soldiers rotated in and out.
That's a 0.28% fatality rate for the year. That means it is about 40 times more deadly, on average, to be a soldier in Iraq than it is to be a police officer.
(Assuming the 300,000 number is close. If 600,000 soldiers rotated in and out of the country that year, it would only be 20 times more dangerous, on average, to be a soldier than it is to be a police officer.)
That means nothing, statistically.
You moonlighting at the VA now?
But it's sort of silly to argue about whether being a cop is more or less dangerous than being a soldier in Iraq or a fisherman.
All jobs have their risks, and I'm sure fishermen take steps to mitigate the dangers they face, as cops and soldiers take steps to mitigate their risk.
The important thing is that Silver's quick exercise in division means nothing vis-a-vis the real world.
edit: ^^^ what he said
and therein lies the rub: if i want it to, i can (statistically).
pulled over for 70 in a 65? WEAK.
Yes it does as that is how the real world works today. Pretty much all large organizations, government agencies, etc extensively use statistics to make decision as they should. Decision modeling is a hell of a lot more efficient and reliable than trusting your gut.
geezus people, full comprehension would be useful... it was also for a missing license plate. When you put the whole puzzle together, it *suggests* that the vehicle was recently stolen.
drive it like you stole it much?
if they're committing one criminal act, what's another? i'd say if you don't want to get caught stealing a car, first step might be not stealing a car. barring application of this logic, how can anyone be surprised they're doing something else wrong. speeding is a beltway drug.
missing-fockin'-license plate you goober.
Or that a license plate was recently stolen. Take your pick.
that would make sense if he was using one of those slick plate readers
It is ridiculous. One of those jobs is safe. The other two aren't.
The simple real world answer is this:
If this officer egregiously exceeded his authority, he would have been fired.
His superiors thought it was poor judgment and suspended him, although he could be on reduced duty for the rest of his career, a la the Sean Bell cops:
If this officer egregiously exceeded his authority, he would have been fired.
His superiors thought it was poor judgment and suspended him, although he could be on reduced duty for the rest of his career, a la the Sean Bell cops:
I agree. Point is, the cop can't know until he investigates. And when you pull bizarre, unpredictable delay tactics, expect the shocker! ||.|
Are you a lefty?
Don't forget the catcher!is this guy?
only the pitcher knows
It's a good thing they weren't gun carrying, crackhead gangsta's. This cop is all alone with one hand on his radio calling for back-up and the other hand holding the tazer. If the passenger was a criminal type, he could have pulled a gun and starting firing before the officer could respond.
The officer had cause to pull the car over, but his demeanor from the get-go was confrontational. Even if the driver was delaying (which I do not think he did deliberately) the time interval from the stop to the driver exiting the vehicle to being tazered was negligable. The officer was never in danger, he was pissed because he did not get the respect he felt he deserved (the whoa comment)
I think the driver was an idiot but the cop was a hot-head with a huge chip on his shoulder. If cops want a safer working environment, they need to stop doing things like this as it erodes the trust we should have in those sworn "To Protect and Serve".
What I meant was if someone stole a car and was speeding away, they'd probably be going a bit faster than 70mph. On that note, if you do pull the guy over for the missing plate, why even mention the 70mph? The plate is enough to bag the guy anyway, why tack on a charge that is most likely being abused by 99% of the other drivers?
Just a typical case of cops tacking on charges as much as they can for the sheer point of ruining people's days.
(If you can't tell, I'm still a bit bitter about a speeding ticket <<<ESTIMATED AT 87.6mph WTF?!?!?!>>> mishap that resulted in $600 fees/fines and a suspended license for 8 months.)
What was the speed limit in that zone that you got suspended? Or did it just put you over the points limit? I think my license will get suspended on the next ticket, so I've got to behave for another year.
Had nothing to do with the speed/points (it was in a 65mph zone), I tried to appeal it because he wrote down ESTIMATED at 87.6 mph.......so I figured the fact that he put estimated and to 1/10th of a mph, it would seem suspect (I had my CC set to 80, so yes, I was speeding, but it was worth a shot to get it reduced/taken away). Sent in the appeal, stuff got screwed up somehow (still don't know what happened, but the DMV admitted they screwed up), and never got the court date in the mail. At the time my dad worked for the state police, and told the staties at his place about, and said they would "take care of it," so I figured they did that, and didn't think much of it. 8 months later I go to register my new car, only to find out my license has been suspended for the past 8 months due to failure to appear at court, and the ticket and fees I had to pay would up being close to $600. I'm just glad I didn't get pulled over in that 8 month period, because technically I could have been arrested I believe.
Haven't got a ticket since, but I'll be damned if I even try to appeal another ticket again. Luckily that was my first and only moving violation, so it didn't effect my insurance.
First, I was talking specifically of Silver's rather farcical division of the number of officers successfully murdered on the job by the entire number of officers in the US. This is obviously not accurate for many reasons already mentioned and many yet unmentioned.
Second, lots of organizations use statistical analysis. It can be useful for making certain decisions and comforting, though useless, for others. It is inherently ineffective at predictive decisionmaking, because it ignores the possibility of the unexpected, which is in fact generally more important than deriving patterns from past behavior. Vast amounts of money, time, and thought go into predicting the stock market, and it simply does not work, although people are comfortable with the illusion that it does. I'd recommend reading "The Black Swan" for an example of an actual smart guy (a quant, actually) who rejects the folly of most of his peers.
In our specific case, stats are not very useful because they cannot show the relative success or failure of officers' pro-active measures to improve their safety. There is no way to measure what actions officers used to take in the past, what they're taking now, and what difference this has made and why...too many factors influencing this anyhow, from changing criminal tendencies to violence to overall crime rates. Plus, the homogenizing effect we've discussed (the mixing of cops of all types from all areas) ignores the fact that some cops' lives are safer than that of the average citizen of New York, while others could be murdered most any on the job in the inner-city gang unit.
Ed: In the absence and/or irrelevance, then, of an accurate analysis of large trends, we can focus on a single event at a time, and teach officers tactics and techniques which improve their chances in particular encounters. We can also teach them that a judicious use of lesser means of force to control a situation can forestall even more violent encounters.
What is undeniable is that any cop making a traffic stop faces an unknown, where statistics don't matter in the face of that potential Black Swan event. This is not to say he has to be a dick or exceed his lawful authority--he's also the one who signed up to do this--but he is going to take action to keep himself safe. He must stay within legal standards to do this, as this officer clearly did. Major fail on the "not being a dick" part, but that's not legally pertinent. SCOTUS has explicitly said an officer's subjective intent is not part of the calculus for the use of force. Even if he was *hoping* to tase or beat someone, what matters is the standard of objective reasonableness, based on facts known to the officer at the time, for the use of a given level of force...in this case, it was clearly reasonable. I can list the factors and analysis in another post if I haven't made them clear already.
Not to mention, and this is by far the most relevant part of the post, that you and Silver are yourselves not comparing apples to apples. Certainly fishermen might suffer a higher rate of accidental deaths on the job. But your stats don't refer to officer death through accident (which is the #1 killer, by the way, seeing as officers spend LOTS of time driving in cars, sometimes under hazardous conditions).
You're comparing accidents to those murdered on the job, and disregarding the accidental deaths of officers at the same time. No fishermen, or most anyone else but maybe security guards and bounty hunters, as far as I can guess, were murdered due to their confrontation of violent criminals on the job. You compare the total number of fisherman deaths (based on the number of guys out on the water, I'm assuming, unless you included everyone who works for Van de Camp in there) with the number of officers murdered.
And again, no statistic really matters in the face of any particular unknown vehicle, despite what any number of nerds with calculators might tell the guy approaching the car. The stats might inform your tendency to approach a car a certain way in a certain area, but that's it. This case is informed by the facts of the stop in question, and that's all that matters...not a simple exercise in statistical fallacy.
No the annual stats include all deaths, accident or otherwise:
http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/careerbytes/CBArticle.aspx?articleID=777
http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/07/pf/2006_most_dangerous_jobs/index.htm
Decision modeling is an effective tool that is why almost all the fortune 500, government agencies, etc use it among many other tools to make important decisions.
Another thing to note is that Fisherman and loggers only make about an average of $20K/yr.
Edit: Silver says 57 officers total died last year. Considering this: http://www.nleomf.com/media/pdf/MidYearDeathReport_2007.pdf
I think that number is a little skewed, even though it's a farce to try to calculate this anyhow. [/ed]
Being killed by a violent criminal isn't the same as confronting a violent criminal. Ed: Also divide 516 over the total number of office workers in the US...not a very high number...
It's funny, though...so many people say that workplace violence is so rare that average citizens shouldn't be allowed to carry a concealed weapon if they choose, especially in the workplace. Hmmm.
And just because everyone's doing it doesn't make it smart. "The church and the government endorse the theory of spontaneous generation...it has to be right, or at least effective..." It's effective for situations where statistical regularity is pertinent, and ineffective for situations where it is not, regardless of what its hardcore proponents want you to believe (as you hand them your cash).
It's also a VERY effective way to blame someone else when something goes wrong, and institutions LOVE to diffuse blame, especially onto an outside source.
I think that number is a little skewed, even though it's a farce to try to calculate this anyhow. [/ed]
Being killed by a violent criminal isn't the same as confronting a violent criminal. Ed: Also divide 516 over the total number of office workers in the US...not a very high number...
It's funny, though...so many people say that workplace violence is so rare that average citizens shouldn't be allowed to carry a concealed weapon if they choose, especially in the workplace. Hmmm.
And just because everyone's doing it doesn't make it smart. "The church and the government endorse the theory of spontaneous generation...it has to be right, or at least effective..." It's effective for situations where statistical regularity is pertinent, and ineffective for situations where it is not, regardless of what its hardcore proponents want you to believe (as you hand them your cash).
It's also a VERY effective way to blame someone else when something goes wrong, and institutions LOVE to diffuse blame, especially onto an outside source.
Workplace violence is rare, you'd be more likely to die commuting to work than at work.
Stats are just like science - garbage in, garbage out. If you have good data its effective. BLS is not a garbage source.
A single book against stats might bring up a few valid points but sampling one person's opinion as gospel is much more erroneous.
Its like believing N8's minute minority that global warming is a myth with little to no understanding of the topic.
The primary problem with bad stats and junk scientific studies is bad data.
Fine. Apples to apples then. Fair enough.
http://www.nleomf.com/TheMemorial/tributes/sacrifice2007.htm
For the 10th straight year, traffic-related incidents claimed the lives of more officers (83) than any other cause of death.
So, the biggest risk officers face is the same one that we all face driving to work in the morning? Of course, since we are doing that, now we have to add in the deaths of fishermen and loggers and pilots who get killed on the roads on the way to work in order to make it fair. I'm guessing that pretty much evens things out again.
edit: If you take the death rate among the US population for traffic accidents, and assume 800,000 LEOs, we should have expected about 118 deaths...
(Of course, comparing accidental deaths of fishermen to officers killed on duty by a criminal isn't really unfair. In both situations you're talking about people who are dying due to the specific risks of their jobs. We've already established that driving can be deadly, but that is a risk we all face every day.)
edit: I also need to note, It's not like I'm spending a lot of time on this. I'm not mining down into the 10th page of google results or anything. This is all very accesible information. And again, the simple fact of the matter is that being a law enforcement officer is just not that dangerous of a job, and the insititutionalized paranoia that officers seem to have is counterproductive to them doing a good job.