Virginia teen was detained and prosecuted for saying 'OINK OINK' to cop

iluvatar5150

Well-Known Member
Aug 3, 2012
25,021
23,928
Baltimore
✟551,652.00
Country
United States
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Democrat
No...you'd need to look at the number of instances.

If an airplane crashes....it should be counted when considering the dangers of air travel. It doesn't matter if no one was injured, everyone died, or some mix of injured, uninjured, and dead.

We're talking about how dangerous it is to be a cop....not how dangerous it is to be assaulted.

If you redefine “crash” to mean anything more serious than a gentle landing, then the likelihood of a “crash” becomes a lot less meaningful to determining risk.
 
Upvote 0

Ana the Ist

Aggressively serene!
Feb 21, 2012
37,386
11,317
✟433,395.00
Country
United States
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
I'm sorry but the rate of injury and death of plane crashes DO matter in the assessment of the danger of air travel.

If we are going to compare them to other forms of travel where crashes occur...

If we are going to compare it to walking...then forms of travel that involve a reasonable possibility of crashes are automatically more dangerous.

The rate of crashes matter too because the entire job of airplanes is to not do that as much as possible.

Yeah....if we used your method, air travel would be the most dangerous form of travel. Nobody does that though...because the rate of incidents is so low for air travel that it's actually far less dangerous form of travel than driving.


And how can you assess one without assessing the other?

By the rate of incident....I already explained this.

Being assaulted isn't by definition dangerous when 2 out of 3 times it doesn't cause serious injury and we're counting everything north of minor resistance to arrest.

Lol look at the argument you're desperately trying to make here....being assaulted isn't dangerous? I suppose next time it happens to you, you won't fight back then lol...after all, what's the harm?

If we simply make a blanket statement that assaults are dangerous then it is more dangerous to be in high school:

Physical Fighting by Youth - Child Trends

Exerpt:
  • In 2017, about one in four high school students (24 percent) reported being in a physical fight in the past year, a continued decrease from the 1991 high of 43 percent.
So, is it more or less dangerous to be a police officer or a high school student where you are assaulted on average twice as much?

I don't know and frankly I don't care...the poster and post I was replying to originally before you decided to add your two cents was comparing the danger of being a cop to the danger of other kinds of jobs. Jobs which have no reasonable expectation for being assaulted.

Clearly being a cop is more dangerous.
 
Upvote 0

Ana the Ist

Aggressively serene!
Feb 21, 2012
37,386
11,317
✟433,395.00
Country
United States
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
If you redefine “crash” to mean anything more serious than a gentle landing, then the likelihood of a “crash” becomes a lot less meaningful to determining risk.

Well let's take a look then....

"In 2016 there were about 163 aviation ‘accidents’ worldwide, including those involving business jets and military transports as well as jet and propeller airliners.


“A grand total of 24 resulted in fatalities, meaning only about 15 per cent of all accidents in this grouping – which themselves are extremely rare events – actually resulted in lives being lost.”

What are the survival rates for plane crashes, how many are there in a year and how can you stay safe in a crash?

15% of accidents were fatal. That's pretty high....

https://www.anidjarlevine.com/faqs/what-percentage-of-car-accidents-are-fatal/

0.7% of car accidents are fatal. I guess traveling by car is far far less dangerous than flying. Perhaps you and variant can go around correcting everyone who seems to think otherwise. Conventional wisdom is that air travel is the less dangerous of the two.
 
Upvote 0

iluvatar5150

Well-Known Member
Aug 3, 2012
25,021
23,928
Baltimore
✟551,652.00
Country
United States
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Democrat
Well let's take a look then....

"In 2016 there were about 163 aviation ‘accidents’ worldwide, including those involving business jets and military transports as well as jet and propeller airliners.


“A grand total of 24 resulted in fatalities, meaning only about 15 per cent of all accidents in this grouping – which themselves are extremely rare events – actually resulted in lives being lost.”

What are the survival rates for plane crashes, how many are there in a year and how can you stay safe in a crash?

15% of accidents were fatal. That's pretty high....

https://www.anidjarlevine.com/faqs/what-percentage-of-car-accidents-are-fatal/

0.7% of car accidents are fatal. I guess traveling by car is far far less dangerous than flying. Perhaps you and variant can go around correcting everyone who seems to think otherwise. Conventional wisdom is that air travel is the less dangerous of the two.

Seriously? Do you need me to point out why that's a flawed argument or are you doing this to make a point?
 
Upvote 0

iluvatar5150

Well-Known Member
Aug 3, 2012
25,021
23,928
Baltimore
✟551,652.00
Country
United States
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Democrat
Please....explain the flaw.

If you want to actually measure the risk, you can't just look at part of the equation. Risk is a factor of both the likelihood of injury in an accident and the likelihood of an accident to happen in the first place. IOW: R(total) = R(i) * R(a) where R(i) is rate of injury in an accident and R(a) is rate of accidents per unit of measurement.

Talking about the likelihood of a fatality in an accident only deals with R(i). R(i) might be higher with flying, but if flying's R(a) is sufficiently lower (and AFAIK, it is), then flying's R(total) can be lower than driving's.

If you re-define an "airplane crash" to include rough landings, then you haven't affected R(total) at all, since flying hasn't gotten any more dangerous. All you've done is increased R(i) and decreased R(a) by proportional amounts.

The same principle applies to policing. If you only look at the number or rate of assaults (which would be R(a)), then your numbers can get skewed by an overly-liberal definition of "assault". Measuring risk requires accounting for the likelihood of those assaults to cause injury.
 
  • Winner
Reactions: SummerMadness
Upvote 0

variant

Happy Cat
Jun 14, 2005
23,625
6,387
✟293,730.00
Faith
Agnostic
Marital Status
Single
I don't know and frankly I don't care...the poster and post I was replying to originally before you decided to add your two cents was comparing the danger of being a cop to the danger of other kinds of jobs. Jobs which have no reasonable expectation for being assaulted.

Nice dodge and spin at the same time.

You mean your argument falls apart if we just consider all assaults equal and don't care about injuries? Yes, yes it does.

By that standard it IS more dangerous to be a school child.

Clearly being a cop is more dangerous.

That's just your assumption right there, it stands contrary to your professed method of finding out how dangerous it is to be an X. Now you propose a different method I suppose? Clearly? Whatever you make up?

You know how you could tell by just looking at numbers? You could look at the rate and severity of the injury's sustained.

Or, we could use your method of just looking at incidents and conclude the exact opposite of what you just did. That since school children are assaulted at a rate double that of police that it is more dangerous to be a school child.
 
Last edited:
  • Winner
Reactions: SummerMadness
Upvote 0

variant

Happy Cat
Jun 14, 2005
23,625
6,387
✟293,730.00
Faith
Agnostic
Marital Status
Single
If we are going to compare them to other forms of travel where crashes occur...

If we are going to compare it to walking...then forms of travel that involve a reasonable possibility of crashes are automatically more dangerous.

While it's the crash that makes the car dangerous, the injury is how we tell how dangerous crashes are.

So, if we were to look at motorcycles compared to cars in terms of danger, we would look at both the number of incidents (crashes) and the injuries sustained (many more per crash) to conclude that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars.

Yeah....if we used your method, air travel would be the most dangerous form of travel. Nobody does that though...because the rate of incidents is so low for air travel that it's actually far less dangerous form of travel than driving.

The rate of injury per air travel mile and trip is actually quite low (lower than the crash rate) so you don't understand my argument at all.

By the rate of incident....I already explained this.

The rate of incident doesn't tell us anything unless we know how dangerous each incident is.

Thankfully we do since it's right there in the data.

Lol look at the argument you're desperately trying to make here....being assaulted isn't dangerous? I suppose next time it happens to you, you won't fight back then lol...after all, what's the harm?

I am saying that being assaulted as a trained police officer isn't always dangerous yes, they are trained to handle exactly that situation and they do so without injury 2/3rds of the time.

Assaults aren't inherently equal of course which is my main point. Some are clearly not all that troubling for police as they successfully do their job without sustaining injury.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0

Ana the Ist

Aggressively serene!
Feb 21, 2012
37,386
11,317
✟433,395.00
Country
United States
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
If you want to actually measure the risk, you can't just look at part of the equation. Risk is a factor of both the likelihood of injury in an accident and the likelihood of an accident to happen in the first place. IOW: R(total) = R(i) * R(a) where R(i) is rate of injury in an accident and R(a) is rate of accidents per unit of measurement.

I'm just going to hit the pause button here and ask you a question....

I can understand needing the rate of "injury" if we're talking about two relatively similar things...let's say vehicle crashes. Simply saying that one type of crash (a car crash) occurs more often isn't particularly useful in a situation where we're trying to figure out which method of travel is more dangerous.

When it comes to these claims about the dangers of policing....there simply is no similar comparison. The original post I responded to had a list of 20 or 25 jobs according to "danger" and had police at #14.

The odd thing is the way that it compared the dangers of "slipping and falling" as a roofer to the danger of "being attacked by a person". We don't actually have an analysis of why roofers fall...but as a former roofer and someone with a brain, it probably could have been avoided had the roofer been more careful. After all, I've never heard of a roof throwing a roofer onto the ground.

In regards to the police....there's things they can do to minimize risk, like wearing bulletproof vests or de-escalating as often as possible, but ultimately....the person who decides whether or not a cop is assaulted is the person assaulting the cop. A cop can take every precaution, do their job 100% correctly, and still be killed on the job.

That's not really comparable to the other jobs on the list. I'm going to make a possible exception for loggers (a falling branch isn't always controllable).

Does that make sense? Do you see why I don't think it matters if we assess the relative danger of "assault"....because we aren't comparing it to assault. We're comparing it to "being careful around large machinery" and "overexerting yourself". Being assaulted is almost always going to be more dangerous. Even if your assailant is just throwing punches....if they knock you out, there's no way of knowing they won't continue their attack and kill you. Here's an example from the same FBI website, in the detailed assaults section.

"At 11:24 a.m. on November 28, a 34-year-old police officer with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department was injured in an unprovoked attack while working as a special operations detective. The plainclothes officer, who was a veteran of law enforcement with more than 10 years’ experience, was driving an unmarked vehicle with tinted windows and was accompanied by another officer. They came upon a vehicle that was driving erratically—swerving in and out of lanes and running red lights—so they began following it. The officers got close enough to the vehicle to notice it had a temporary license plate number. They radioed in to check the license status and the response indicated the temporary tag was stolen. The officers requested a follow-up to see if the vehicle’s make and model was also listed as stolen. While waiting for the response, the officers followed the vehicle until they stopped at a traffic light in the right lane; the vehicle with the stolen tag was stopped slightly behind them in the left lane. As a response came over the radio, the veteran officer noticed that the vehicle’s passenger had exited the car and was standing four feet away from the driver’s side of the officers’ vehicle. The man was armed with a 7.62x39 mm semiautomatic rifle and ordered the officers to exit their vehicle. Fearing the man would realize they were law enforcement officers and open fire, the veteran officer, who was in the driver’s seat, drew his service weapon and fired several rounds through his driver’s-side window toward the armed assailant. As the assailant retreated toward the vehicle with the stolen tag, the veteran officer, who was wearing body armor, exited his vehicle to seek cover behind the passenger side of his patrol vehicle. At some point, the assailant fired two rounds, and the veteran officer was struck by shrapnel in the forehead. The victim officer reloaded and fired several more rounds across the hood of his vehicle. Meanwhile, the driver of the suspect’s vehicle made a U-turn and fled the scene, leaving the assailant, who had gunshot wounds to his legs and arms, lying in the street. The officers’ supervisor arrived at the scene, and the officers took the assailant into custody. The victim officer was transported to the hospital where he was treated for a head injury and released; he has since returned to duty. The 21-year-old suspect was also transported to a nearby hospital. He was later charged with First-Degree Robbery, two counts of First-Degree Assault on a Law Enforcement Officer, and two counts of Armed Criminal Action. He had a criminal history that included charges for murder, a violent crime, and a weapons violation."

Now, you may have noticed that isn't a very serious type of injury. You may also have noticed that it could have easily gone two other ways...the two bullets could have missed the officers entirely, or they could have killed 1 or both of the officers.

When you say "we need to assess how dangerous these assaults are" it sounds like if the above situation had played out only slightly differently....and no one was hurt....you'd somehow "conclude" that it wasn't really a dangerous situation. Can we agree that even if no one had gotten hurt...no injuries were sustained by the police....we're talking about an extraordinarily dangerous situation that there's no real comparable situation to be found in any of those other jobs?
 
Upvote 0
This site stays free and accessible to all because of donations from people like you.
Consider making a one-time or monthly donation. We appreciate your support!
- Dan Doughty and Team Christian Forums

Ana the Ist

Aggressively serene!
Feb 21, 2012
37,386
11,317
✟433,395.00
Country
United States
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
Nice dodge and spin at the same time.

You mean your argument falls apart if we just consider all assaults equal and don't care about injuries? Yes, yes it does.

By that standard it IS more dangerous to be a school child.

No offense...but it doesn't say assault in your report. That, plus the fact that "kid" isn't an occupation ....means we aren't remotely talking about similar things.

That's just your assumption right there, it stands contrary to your professed method of finding out how dangerous it is to be an X. Now you propose a different method I suppose? Clearly? Whatever you make up?

Are 1 in 4 high school kids being arrested for assault? You're awfully trusting of accounts when we aren't talking about cops.

If you could at least provide a legal record of the assaults on high schoolers....then it would be worthwhile to compare injury rates to see which assaults are more violent. The problem is, you're asking about injury rates for assaults on cops...so we can compare it to what exactly? The injury rates for slipping and falling off a roof? Does that happen because of how dangerous roofing is? Or is it because roofers tend to stop worrying about falling after awhile and begin taking risks? How many are drinking on the job? This article suggests the number is 1 in 4.

Drugs, alcohol, work and the law

It also suggests that alcohol use is involved in almost half of construction injuries. Tell me how you intend to assess the "danger" of these jobs? From the looks of it, it seems like it's pretty difficult to say it's a dangerous job at all if so many people in the industry are comfortable drunk on the work site.

Do tell, variant, how you intend to accurately assess the "danger" of all these workplace accidents....and once you do....how are you going to compare an accident to an assault?
 
Upvote 0

Ana the Ist

Aggressively serene!
Feb 21, 2012
37,386
11,317
✟433,395.00
Country
United States
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
While it's the crash that makes the car dangerous, the injury is how we tell how dangerous crashes are.

We aren't comparing how dangerous different assaults are....we're comparing how dangerous different jobs are. The only job that involves assaults on the list are police. The supposed "dangers" of every other job involve some measure of human error.

So, if we were to look at motorcycles compared to cars in terms of danger, we would look at both the number of incidents (crashes) and the injuries sustained (many more per crash) to conclude that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars.

What are we comparing assaults to then? It's clearly not other assaults.

The rate of injury per air travel mile and trip is actually quite low (lower than the crash rate) so you don't understand my argument at all.

Since you never brought up "distance traveled" until now...I'm not very confident that you understand your argument.

The rate of incident doesn't tell us anything unless we know how dangerous each incident is.

Thankfully we do since it's right there in the data.

Cool...so what are we comparing assaults to here?


I am saying that being assaulted as a trained police officer isn't always dangerous yes, they are trained to handle exactly that situation and they do so without injury 2/3rds of the time.

By that logic....with enough training, cops can avoid assault entirely.

Do you understand that even if a cop performs his job 100% correctly, he still faces the risk of assault?

Assaults aren't inherently equal of course which is my main point.

We're only talking about assaults on cops though....what other assaults are you going to compare them to?

Some are clearly not all that troubling for police as they successfully do their job without sustaining injury.

That, or assaults are extremely dangerous situations that can require split second life and death decisions without any warning....and our cops are genuinely very good at their work.

I suppose that would be a hard conclusion for some people to realize though....especially if they've bought into a heavily biased narrative about them. I imagine some of those people would have an easier time believing that "assaults" are not really very "dangerous". I mean, if the bullets don't hit you...you were never in any real danger, right?
 
Upvote 0

variant

Happy Cat
Jun 14, 2005
23,625
6,387
✟293,730.00
Faith
Agnostic
Marital Status
Single
No offense...but it doesn't say assault in your report. That, plus the fact that "kid" isn't an occupation ....means we aren't remotely talking about similar things.

It tracks "fights". Or are we going to play semantics?

When one child physically attacks another we call it a fight, but it would be legally defined as an assault whether or not it would ever actually go to court as such.

You know like the police aren't tracking assaults on the police as a matter of legal assault cases but as a matter of how much it happens.

Are 1 in 4 high school kids being arrested for assault? You're awfully trusting of accounts when we aren't talking about cops.

Again these kids are getting in fights. Similarly to police reporting assaults. They are the same thing. One person hits another, it is an assault (actually battery, but we're not talking about resisting legal orders with physical violence here, just physical violence).

An assault on an officer is when someone fights them (or in this case fights back more than a little when arrested).

Or is this too basic an idea?

If you could at least provide a legal record of the assaults on high schoolers....then it would be worthwhile to compare injury rates to see which assaults are more violent. The problem is, you're asking about injury rates for assaults on cops...so we can compare it to what exactly?

We have injury rates for police so I was suggesting that it is the better number to assess the danger of the assaults.

If we compared them to the injury sustained during fighting in school it would tell us which is more dangerous.

So incident, plus risk of injury per incident = danger instead of, incident = automatic assumed danger.

The injury rates for slipping and falling off a roof? Does that happen because of how dangerous roofing is? Or is it because roofers tend to stop worrying about falling after awhile and begin taking risks? How many are drinking on the job? This article suggests the number is 1 in 4.

Drugs, alcohol, work and the law

It also suggests that alcohol use is involved in almost half of construction injuries. Tell me how you intend to assess the "danger" of these jobs? From the looks of it, it seems like it's pretty difficult to say it's a dangerous job at all if so many people in the industry are comfortable drunk on the work site.

None of this is relevant to anything I have said.

Do tell, variant, how you intend to accurately assess the "danger" of all these workplace accidents....and once you do....how are you going to compare an accident to an assault?

Well if you want to assess workplace incidents you would have to also assess the cause of the incidents.

So then if you want to get that technical we have to also assess whether the police were handling the situation properly when an assault happened.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0

variant

Happy Cat
Jun 14, 2005
23,625
6,387
✟293,730.00
Faith
Agnostic
Marital Status
Single
We aren't comparing how dangerous different assaults are....we're comparing how dangerous different jobs are.

Right and to do that you'd have to know how dangerous assaults are.

The only job that involves assaults on the list are police. The supposed "dangers" of every other job involve some measure of human error.

Police work also involves human error. Sorry to tell you.

What are we comparing assaults to then? It's clearly not other assaults.

To other dangers, if you want to compare danger of course.

Since you never brought up "distance traveled" until now...I'm not very confident that you understand your argument.

It works out per trip as well. You would compare injuries and deaths per unit measure, and crashes per unit measure to get a comparison.

Cool...so what are we comparing assaults to here?

We're not, we're comparing injuries to assess danger.

By that logic....with enough training, cops can avoid assault entirely.

Do you understand that even if a cop performs his job 100% correctly, he still faces the risk of assault?

That logic was not offered actually.

My point would be that a well trained officer lowers the rate of injury from assault. And, conversely a poorly trained one could increase such a risk. You can also probably train officers to be less likely to be assaulted but we're dealing with people here. Neither can a person avoid the danger of others completely in any way shape or form in society and especially not when tasked with public order.

We're only talking about assaults on cops though....what other assaults are you going to compare them to?

Every assault is a different set of circumstances, you can compare them to each other.

That, or assaults are extremely dangerous situations that can require split second life and death decisions without any warning....and our cops are genuinely very good at their work.

I suppose that would be a hard conclusion for some people to realize though....especially if they've bought into a heavily biased narrative about them. I imagine some of those people would have an easier time believing that "assaults" are not really very "dangerous". I mean, if the bullets don't hit you...you were never in any real danger, right?

And sometimes someone pushes or shoves, or takes a poorly aimed drunken punch at you or struggles vigorously while being arrested.

Because not all assaults are created equal. They would be a terrible way to judge actual danger if you want to assume every time the police are assaulted they are getting literally shot at.

Now the statistic YOU offered said what the rates of armed attacks were. They have a lower injury rate because the police tend to defend themselves with deadly force.

When we're talking about physical attacks with punches and kicks and the like the injury rate goes higher because the danger someone can actually pose with just a fist is limited. And physical altercations, are both more common, and a lot of those might not be that dangerous at all.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0

KCfromNC

Regular Member
Apr 18, 2007
28,632
15,949
✟484,096.00
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Private
Anti police hate speech wont fix the problem, it only makes it worse.
It is weird - this post seemed to be cut off before giving a list of ways to fix the problem. It simply stopped after complaining that some people were protesting the wrong way.
 
Upvote 0
This site stays free and accessible to all because of donations from people like you.
Consider making a one-time or monthly donation. We appreciate your support!
- Dan Doughty and Team Christian Forums

W2L

Well-Known Member
Jun 26, 2016
20,081
10,988
USA
✟213,573.00
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Private
It is weird - this post seemed to be cut off before giving a list of ways to fix the problem. It simply stopped after complaining that some people were protesting the wrong way.
Calling people names doesnt take much intellect or character.
 
Upvote 0

Ana the Ist

Aggressively serene!
Feb 21, 2012
37,386
11,317
✟433,395.00
Country
United States
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
It tracks "fights". Or are we going to play semantics?

Everything you've posted has been semantics. You argued about what qualifies as assault....and when that fell apart, you argued about the relative dangers of assault. Your whole argument has been semantics.....semantics you want to drop now that you think you've found a favorable statistic. For all you know...some kid responding could be thinking of the time some bully knocked books off his desk or a fight that happened outside of school. Why did your scrutiny suddenly disappear when we aren't talking about cops .

That's aside from the point that being a high schooler isn't a job.


Similarly to police reporting assaults. They are the same thing.

Wow...other than the fact that police are typically getting assaulted by people who want to avoid the consequences of criminal behavior. As long as we ignore the differences between the amount of damage an adult does compared to a high school kid. If we ignore the reality that cops are going on record for their assaults and the kids could be making things up since they don't have any consequences....

...then yes, these are similar. In reality though, not really.



None of this is relevant to anything I have said.

You seem confused....so let's take a minute to consider what you're talking about. Another poster posted a link about the relative danger of being a cop compared to other jobs.

I responded to that by making the point that simply looking at on the job deaths is misleading. Police face assaults...they get attacked by other people. That's not really comparable to forgetting to shut off the electricity and shocking yourself to death.

Then you replied to me with this nonsense about how assaults "aren't that dangerous". The point I made was about the dangers of policing compared to other jobs. That's why your schoolkids statistic will never be relevant. Even if you could pin down what they mean by a "physical fight" (and let's face it...you can't) being a high school student isn't a job. They can simply walk away from a fight. They haven't sworn an oath, they aren't expected to do a duty. There's no ethics or scrutiny involved. It's completely irrelevant.

So are we comparing the relative danger of jobs? Or did you not have any clue what you were replying to?

Cuz if we're still comparing jobs....all of what you dismissed above is entirely relevant.
 
Upvote 0

Ana the Ist

Aggressively serene!
Feb 21, 2012
37,386
11,317
✟433,395.00
Country
United States
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
Right and to do that you'd have to know how dangerous assaults are.

And the dangers of the other jobs.

Police work also involves human error. Sorry to tell you.

A cop doesn't get injured by being mistaken about the application of a law or arresting the wrong suspect. These things happen all the time without incident.

We could count incidents where they pull someone over on a busy road...and don't pull over far enough and get struck by another driver...but there's still someone else involved.

How do we compare that to the danger of a roofer? If a roof collapses under him...that's certainly not his fault. If he drinks before work and slips and falls off the roof...that's not really a danger inherent to roofing. That's a danger of drinking and doing something that is normally not very risky at all.

How do we discount all those incidents without any data on them?


To other dangers, if you want to compare danger of course.

Well comparing one crash to another makes sense...they're similar to each other. Comparing the danger of vehicle travel to walking however....that doesn't seem to make much sense at all.

We're not, we're comparing injuries to assess danger.

Which doesn't make any sense...

We could be looking at a typical day for a soldier and his wife. The soldiers goes out and shoots at people, get shot at, but comes out unscathed. The wife at home however, burns her finger while making a pot roast.

If we used your method, we would have to conclude that the wife had the more dangerous day. That would be absurd. It would make more sense to just subjectively consider the difficulty of avoiding danger on the job. Is it harder to avoid getting shot? Or is it harder to cook a pot roast without getting burned? Probably getting shot, right?

I understand that's not a perfect way to look at things, but it will allow to avoid making ridiculous claims like "being assaulted isn't that dangerous" or "landscapers have a more dangerous job than cops".


That logic was not offered actually.

My point would be that a well trained officer lowers the rate of injury from assault. And, conversely a poorly trained one could increase such a risk. You can also probably train officers to be less likely to be assaulted but we're dealing with people here. Neither can a person avoid the danger of others completely in any way shape or form in society and especially not when tasked with public order.

Then how can we reasonably compare that kind of job to one where danger comes almost entirely from mistakes made by the worker or their coworkers? That's exactly the point I made originally. It's a completely different kind of danger...one that cannot simply be avoided by training harder or performing your job correctly all of the time.

We are comparing unlike things. Simply calling them both danger just glosses over that fact.

Every assault is a different set of circumstances, you can compare them to each other.

But not really to dangers that don't come from people attacking you.


And sometimes someone pushes or shoves,

Which isn't going to be counted in the statistics I presented.

or takes a poorly aimed drunken punch at you or struggles vigorously while being arrested.

Sometimes it involves running for cover while someone shoots at you...but just because they missed their shots doesn't mean you aren't in any danger. That would be a ridiculous position.

Because not all assaults are created equal. They would be a terrible way to judge actual danger if you want to assume every time the police are assaulted they are getting literally shot at.

I'm not making that assumption....but that is the risk they take on every day they go to work. There was a cop killed fairly recently during a traffic accident. Some guy with mental problems was on a bicycle, completely unrelated to the accident, didn't know her, and shot her....killing her, because he had something against the police.

That's not really a danger in other the vast majority of jobs. Nobody is out there shooting roofers in the back because he has something against roofers.

Now the statistic YOU offered said what the rates of armed attacks were. They have a lower injury rate because the police tend to defend themselves with deadly force.

And? Because they killed someone who was trying to kill them....they weren't in danger?

What is the conclusion that you're making here?

When we're talking about physical attacks with punches and kicks and the like the injury rate goes higher because the danger someone can actually pose with just a fist is limited. And physical altercations, are both more common, and a lot of those might not be that dangerous at all.

Why? Because a cop successfully fought for their life against an attacker and didn't sustain an injury?

It's a completely bizarre argument that I can only imagine you're making to back your earlier hasty statements. Here's an example of some surfers narrowly avoiding a shark attack? How narrowly? One of them punched the shark...

Surfer narrowly escapes wild shark attack after punching shark

If I were to assess danger the way you want to....I'd be concluding that no one was ever in danger. Would that be reasonable to you? Or would it sound rather silly for me to say the surfers weren't in any danger?
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
This site stays free and accessible to all because of donations from people like you.
Consider making a one-time or monthly donation. We appreciate your support!
- Dan Doughty and Team Christian Forums