5,000 British Police in 300 years
Police Roll of Honour Trust - National Police Officers Roll of Honour and Remembrance
Perhaps one of our EO mathematicians would care to do the ratio.
US Police Officers
19,000 in 220 years
You would need to know the total population for each year in order to come up with a per capita figure. In addition, you would need the total numbers of police officers in a given year to come up with a valid ratio.
All organizations have their little special interest agenda. The link for the
National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund is no exception. They need people to feel sorry for or have empathy for how dangerous it is to be a police officer, a real-life crime fighter, a bona fine hero. They talk of crime, violent crime, officer deaths, assaults, of being killed in the line of duty. A bread truck delivery man is more likely to be killed while on duty, actually.
19,000 officers killed in the line of duty since 1791. OMG! That's a lot! In 2005 alone, 156 line-of-duty deaths occurred! Wow.
But what they fail to talk about is that despite the increased risk of being a victim of a homicide, automobile accidents are the most common cause of on-duty officer deaths. Of those 156 line-of-duty deaths in 2005, 35% were from criminal acts (55 deaths, 38 of which were gun related), 44% were vehicle related (only 3% during vehicular pursuits) and the rest from other causes: heart attacks during arrests/foot pursuits, accidental gun discharges, falls, drownings, diseases contracted from suspects body fluids and, rarely, emergency blood transfusions.
(US police gun deaths are on the rise, however. A total of 61 on-duty officers in the United States died after being shot in 2010, up from 49 in 2009, and as of August 12, 2011, already 49 police officers have been shot and killed while on duty, putting 2011 on track for one of the worst years for lawmen killed in gun-related deaths in a decade.)
In the UK, in the 10 years from April 2000 there were 143 line of duty deaths, 70% of which were vehicle related: 54 in road accidents traveling to or from duty, 46 in road accidents while on-duty, 23 from natural causes on duty, 15 from criminal acts, and 5 in other accidents (4 falls, 1 drowning).
Meanwhile in the United States, 679 people in America have died as a direct result of being shot with stun guns by police. 48 people in 2008, 55 in 2009, 61 in 2010, and as of August 6th of this year, 39 people have been stun-gunned to death. Anyone else notice the similarity of the police officer gun related deaths and the civilian stun gun related deaths? And these numbers don't even include the numbers of civilians who were killed by police using firearms.
While it is true, at least according to the National Institute of Justice (the research, development and evaluation agency of the US Department of Justice), 99.7 percent of people who are tasered suffer no serious injuries, much less die. So that's good. On the other hand, if 679 dead people is 0.3%, that means that more than 26,000 people have been tasered by police since the stun guns began to be widely used in the 1990s. It means that an average of five deaths per month equates to more than 1,600 people per month are getting stunned.
Three died last week alone, one of them a student at the University of Cincinnati who was trying to break up a fight in front of dormitory when campus police responded.
A naked man on drugs and disoriented died in Wisconsin this weekend, after police used a Taser stun gun to subdue him. A man high on drugs in Manassas, Va. punched an officer and a firefighter,
while handcuffed, and then tried to escape. Rather than expend effort in, you know, chasing after him, they simply tasered him, which caused an immediate cardiac arrest followed rather quickly by his death.
Eighteen year old Everette Howard was an honors student in the top ten percent of his high school graduating class, a volunteer at a homeless shelter, preparing to attend college on wresting scholarship, was taking summer classes at UC. Police said Howard appeared agitated and angry (duh, he just broke up a fight) and didn’t follow orders. Witness have a different story. Because he didn't follow the orders of police to stop right where he was, they tased him.
He was handcuffed and police noted a good pulse and that he was breathing, albeit somewhat irregularly, but also that he was not in a "normal state of mind," that something was amiss. Paramedics were called, and as they arrived a few minutes later he went into cardiac arrest. They were unable to revive him at the scene or at the hospital. An autopsy will be performed, campus police have discontinued the use of stun guns, the officer who stunned Howard is on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation into the incident, police chief says officer's actions were justified, and Howard's parents have retained an attorney.
.... I understand that, as it is hard for me to embrace your gun culture, you in turn find it hard to embrace our non-gun culture.
