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Law-Enforcement Officers Exhibit Less Malice and Fewer Major Errors than Other Professions
How many bad cops are there? What is the percentage? According to this: “In 2018, there were 686,665 full-time law enforcement officers employed in the United States.” What is the percentage of truly bad cops? How does that compare with the percentage of bad sports figures? How does that compare with the percentage of media figures who do not do their jobs or harass coworkers? How does that compare with the number and percentage of soi disant journalists who make up facts or interviews or get their data from kids’ science projects where the kids made up the numbers?
Let’s face it, if a law-enforcement officer does something bad, reporters will report on it, even if it does not involve the death of a black man. How many of these do we hear about in a year? A handful? Is it even that high? Or is that the number over several years where the stories have stuck with us and the stories told over and over and blown out of proportion? The Ferguson Unrest (as it is referred to in Wikipedia) was in 2014. How about the original “I can’t breathe!” Eric Garner who died while being arrested for selling loosies on the streets of New York City? That was 2011. We seem to be getting one of these major incidents about every three years. Whatever your profession is, can you say that you have one major incident every three years per 650,000 employees? Is your profession’s record that low? Does your profession have so few scandals? Medical doctors don’t. Priests don’t. Teachers don’t. Politicians sure as shootin’ don’t.
The truth is that incidents involving law enforcement officers are much higher than one every few years, but usually, there is no question that the officer needed to act. In a casual search, I found lots of numbers, but most were counting apples and oranges and grapes. One estimate is that close to a thousand people are killed per year in the US in justifiable homicides. Were those all by law-enforcement officers? Although it was on a page purporting to be about that, it was not clear. Still, that would mean that about one in three thousand of these incidents were not justifiable homicides based on what is protested and reported by the race mongers and “journalists.”
Can you imagine journalists getting things right that often? I was interviewed for a local paper, and they couldn’t even get my hometown right, despite the fact it’s a well-known city with famous characters named after it. Alright, I’ll admit that getting the name of a city wrong is not as bad as killing a guy who didn’t need to be killed. Not the same scale. On the other hand, that was not the only fact the reporter got wrong. Given the number of facts gotten wrong out of the total number of facts in the article, the journalist definitely loses by percentage overall. Not just by a little, but by orders of magnitude. And we all know that this one reporter is not exceptional. Everyone has seen an article where one is a subject matter expert and the reporter gets everything wrong. One thing that reporters should be a subject matter expert on is the English language, and they usually get that wrong, too.
Law-enforcement officers who are involved in unjustifiable homicides are few and far between. One big incident per three years? Maybe there are multiple cops involved, such as the four in this latest incident. So, maybe the number works out to a really bad cop per year. With journalism, it’s sort of the opposite. Good, honest reporters might come into the business at a rate of one every two or three years. The rest are just a bunch of hacks. Law enforcement officers are heavily screened before employment and heavily trained by most major departments. Journalists come out of our university system, unable to spell, and in most cases unable to read or write, either.
The truth is that I can’t find the numbers I want. All I have is a few figures and anecdotal evidence from what I hear reported. If any of you have solid figures, I would love to see them. But my impression is that law-enforcement officers tend to be much more professional, honest, and nonprejudicial and even-handed than any other profession. As they should be, given the power put into their hands.
Published in Policing
I wonder how many deaths are caused by people reacting to false information provided by journalists?
Sounds interesting. Sometimes those things work better in the book than in practice when being applied to over 650,000 LEOs. Still, could be worth a try. Maybe if a few departments picked it up and had success, it would spread.
The truth could hurt…a lot.
Thanks for your comment. It is a good one.
Amen, Brother! Preach it!
Yeah. St Floyd was the classic “man bites dog story”.
How many dead, how many lives ruined by violence and looters because the MSM drives this narrative?
Mostly from what I see you get more hassled if you are out of place, dressed certain ways, and attitude. If as a 50yr white start driving certain parts of town I will be stopped. When I drove a hot car I got pulled over so much I thought there was a cop living in the trunk. I have a few friends that end up in jail all the time, but they look like criminals and have mouths that are too smart for their own good.
Isn’t this why care in recruitment, selection, and training is so important.?
Maybe? Or maybe this is effective policing.
If the policy is to give everyone and everything that looks hinky the benefit of the doubt, the crime rate will likely skyrocket.
Do you want to use that commentary to explain to Senator Tim Scott why he has been stopped while driving by police without probable cause 7 times since he has been a senator?
Scott may well be an excellent example here given his intelligence and lofty position, but I personally prefer specifics as to accusations of “driving while black.”
That’s why I use him as an example. I do think we probably have large numbers of police officers who have entered that role as much for the authoritarian physical power it offers as politician enter or remain in politics for the power that offers. I wasn’t sure what the comment meant by ‘hinky’ but I doubted it meant ‘black’.
So, he has been a senator 7 years. I have been stopped about that many times and I doubt I travel as much and as varied as he does. I received no tickets during any of those stop.
Is it possible that blacks make more of an issue of this than whites, so that our awareness is increased? Are whites likely to be more accepting (or at least silent) about random stops? In addition to the authoritarian motive you mention, I’ve always assumed that a certain percentage of stops are de facto fishing expeditions in search of another crime, and are based on an officer’s perception of that.
Why were you stopped. I’ve been driving for 65 years and I’ve been stopped twice, both times by state patrol on the highway for speeding, and I was speeding. No, I missed the time I was stopped by Fairfax County police when they were in a big fight with the county over their pay. They were in general harassment mode.
Being stopped by a policeman for no apparent reason – or for a picayune reason – generally brings forth the question ‘why me’?
Black people have a ready answer – and indeed it may be the correct answer. It may also not be the correct answer.
Agreed there’s lots of maybe’s.
Once for a bad computer messing with lights. The other times there seem to have scattered abductions by people driving trucks like mine :)
Good thing you didn’t have any abductees with you at the time.
I found it odd how many people are abducted by old pick up trucks.