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?