NYPD and possible work stoppage

[fskimospy]

So which pet store injuries are you discounting to make it sound less dangerous than being a cop? 50 lb bags of food being dropped on you? Animal bites? Maybe pet store employees should just start shooting dogs to lower their injury rate. It seems to work for cops...

He's basically saying:

"by one standard, fatalities, being a miner/roofer/deep sea fisherman is more dangerous than being a pet shop clerk, but by another standard, injuries, being a pet shop clerk is more dangerous than being a miner or deep sea fisherman."

My response has basically been:

"If your metric is telling you that being a pet store clerk is more dangerous than being a miner, your metric is fucking retarded."

I don't know why he keeps insisting on this. It's silliness. EDIT: Not to mention the repeated attempts to use data he doesn't understand, his ignoring the BLS itself not supporting what he said, his ridiculous claims about what other people were arguing, etc, etc. It's flailing.

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

He's basically saying:

"by one standard, fatalities, being a miner/roofer/deep sea fisherman is more dangerous than being a pet shop clerk, but by another standard, injuries, being a pet shop clerk is more dangerous than being a miner or deep sea fisherman."

My response has basically been:

"If your metric is telling you that being a pet store clerk is more dangerous than being a miner, your metric is fucking retarded."

I don't know why he keeps insisting on this. It's silliness. EDIT: Not to mention the repeated attempts to use data he doesn't understand, his ignoring the BLS itself not supporting what he said, his ridiculous claims about what other people were arguing, etc, etc. It's flailing.

I'm not saying this. Going home...I've had enough of your bullshit for one day.

 

[fskimospy]

I'm not saying this. Going home...I've had enough of your bullshit for one day.

If you aren't saying this that means your metric isn't useful for determining if a job is relatively dangerous as compared to other jobs, which was your whole point to begin with.

 

[BoberFett]

I'm not discounting any injuries of pet store employees, not saying anything about the severity of their occupational injuries, not comparing the severity of their injuries to the severity of cop injuries, nor trying to twist the data into meaning something other that what it is.

Your snide comments are totally unrelated to a rational discussion on this subject...your new friends seem to be rubbing off on you.

I'm snarky because you seem to be picking and choosing which facts support your argument and which do not.

I'm willing to concede that a cop is more likely to be shot on the job than a pet store worker. But it's still an extremely low probability, especially when you consider their duties. Based on the numbers and gut feeling about the day-to-day duties of a cop, it seems like they should be getting injured or killed a LOT more than they actually do. Since they don't, maybe it's not actually all that dangerous.

 

[werepossum]

I don't care if people want to use crack, that is up to them. If I could vote to make all drugs legal and regulate them, I would, but I can't. Although I do think it is a great side-effect of cops being lazy, that people's lives are being ruined because of stupid drug prohibition laws.

The problem is two-fold Darwin. If the cops can decide what laws to enforce and what laws not to enforce at will then they can decide to not enforce all kinds of laws. Try to think of what that could mean. What if the cops decide "not to enforce" laws on certain politicians who support their cause? It could cause all kinds of problems. They are also collecting a paycheck for doing nothing. Those two combined are reason one.

Reason two is that by making dugs de-facto legal in one city you take a huge amount of pressure off the whole legalization movement. If the drugs are treated like that in new york, why would new yorkers care about drug prohibiton? It doesn't affect them.


I get that arresting people for crack is stupid, I agree. However, the police won't just take that one law, and leave it there. They will then decide to ignore other laws, with the rationalization that "we did it with crack!".

If you make drugs legal and regulate them, you'll end up with exactly the same situation that led to Garner's death, only worse because drugs make people more likely to do something stupid when being arrested. In order to fund drug education and drug rehabilitation and whatever else they can squeeze in unnoticed, government at all levels will tack on high taxes, just as with cigarettes. Some people will sell unlicensed drugs to make money by undercutting government-approved drug prices, and some people will buy those untaxed and unregulated drugs because they can afford them but not the licensed and regulated drugs - or just to save some money by accepting more risk. Government will crack down on these unlicensed pharmacists because just as with cigarettes, government expects its own cut and will act to protect its interests. As a consequence of that action, some people will die, resisting arrest or simply by being in the wrong place (or the wrong color skin.) You can choose to not tax or regulate drugs - not bloody likely government would pass up that chunk of change - but then someone will die as a result of contaminated or overly potent drugs and people will be asking why this drug isn't regulated like, say, aspirin. There is no purely good answer here, and making drugs de facto legal may be the best possible solution.

 

[fskimospy]

If you make drugs legal and regulate them, you'll end up with exactly the same situation that led to Garner's death, only worse because drugs make people more likely to do something stupid when being arrested. In order to fund drug education and drug rehabilitation and whatever else they can squeeze in unnoticed, government at all levels will tack on high taxes, just as with cigarettes. Some people will sell unlicensed drugs to make money by undercutting government-approved drug prices, and some people will buy those untaxed and unregulated drugs because they can afford them but not the licensed and regulated drugs - or just to save some money by accepting more risk. Government will crack down on these unlicensed pharmacists because just as with cigarettes, government expects its own cut and will act to protect its interests. As a consequence of that action, some people will die, resisting arrest or simply by being in the wrong place (or the wrong color skin.) You can choose to not tax or regulate drugs - not bloody likely government would pass up that chunk of change - but then someone will die as a result of contaminated or overly potent drugs and people will be asking why this drug isn't regulated like, say, aspirin. There is no purely good answer here, and making drugs de facto legal may be the best possible solution.

Replace "drugs" with "alcohol".

Still think your prediction is likely?

 

[werepossum]

Replace "drugs" with "alcohol".

Still think your prediction is likely?

There is a LOT of unlicensed liquor sold, even though liquor is relatively high weight & volume and has economies of scale that we probably wouldn't see with drugs. Be damned hard to undercut small-scale meth or crack. Even where drugs do enjoy production economies of scale, running drugs from low tax states to high tax states like New York would still be a profitable thing absent law enforcement intervention, since drugs tend to be much lighter and smaller than even cigarettes. So, yeah. But remember, my point isn't not to do it, just that it would have the exact same problem that got Eric Garner killed.

 

[Darwin333]

What is your basis for determining that their jobs are 'not nearly as dangerous as cops often make it out to be'?

Mathematics.

 

[Dari]

Well thats the rub isn't it? In Milwaukee we have case after case where a cop illegally kills/maims a citizen, claims PTSD and goes on disability for the rest of their life (at about 70% of their normal income). It is a big sham. We reward cops for filing phony worker comps. They always file their claims BEFORE they can get fired. Thank you for shedding light on how they abuse the system.

Cops and firefighters are masters at this. If a fireman gets injured at home, his buddies will come and pick him up, drive him to the fire station, and he'll report it as a work-related injury. I doubt that police are any different.

 

[Darwin333]

Great, let's dig deeper.

http://www.forcescience.org/fsnews/207.html





So the injuries that cops are getting being shot or stabbed by a criminal are only 3% of the injuries. And only 24% of the total injuries are while making an arrest. The rest are typical day-to-day injuries that you could get on any job.

Not nearly as dangerous sounding as you make it out to be.

To top it off they get a fuckton (relatively) of paid sick leave. Notice how construction workers didn't even make the list, my hypothesis is that the vast majority of construction workers don't get paid sick leave so when they sprain their ankle they just suck it up and keep on working.

Hell just watching the show Deadliest Catch, I would wager that a good 25% of fishermen get an injury that could be counted but it goes unreported because they have a job to do and no one to replace them. That and they are some tough sons of bitches.

 

[Darwin333]

Actually at this point you're trying to backpedal and hope nobody notices.

You can keep invoking the BLS all you want, but it still remains very strange that you insist on doing so despite you deliberately choosing to ignore their analysis.

Also, you might want to go check your workman's comp numbers. I couldn't find them for New York specifically, but in other states law enforcement workman's comp composite rates rates in this example are lower than that of janitors.

http://lni.wa.gov/ClaimsIns/Files/Rates/2015RatesBusTypeClassCode.pdf

So yeah, not so sure the BLS or the worker's comp insurance industry sees it your way.

Workers Comp numbers say it all, it is quite literally their job to figure out how dangerous a particular job is and to price the workers comp insurance accordingly. They study and modify those rates every single year, I can't think of a better metric to judge true, non-minor (I stubbed my toe so I can't come in to work plus I'm really hungover), on the job injuries.

As much as I pay workers comp I should have thought of this, good find.

 

[werepossum]

Workers Comp numbers say it all, it is quite literally their job to figure out how dangerous a particular job is and to price the workers comp insurance accordingly. They study and modify those rates every single year, I can't think of a better metric to judge true, non-minor (I stubbed my toe so I can't come in to work plus I'm really hungover), on the job injuries.

As much as I pay workers comp I should have thought of this, good find.

I think being a cop seems more dangerous because the primary danger is being murdered or intentionally injured, as opposed to being accidentally killed or injured. Kind of like how Nazis murdered fewer people than the Soviets in World War II, but seem worse because of the methodical way they went about it.

 

[Ackmed]

Cops and firefighters are masters at this. If a fireman gets injured at home, his buddies will come and pick him up, drive him to the fire station, and he'll report it as a work-related injury. I doubt that police are any different.

More ignorant blanket statements, by an idiot.

 

[shady28]

What is your basis for determining that their jobs are 'not nearly as dangerous as cops often make it out to be'?

Can't speak for Eskimospy but the information you seek is out there.

This is from 2012, couldn't find more recent ones.

http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfoi_rates_2012hb.pdf

For patrol officers, the number of deaths on the job per 100,000 is 15.0


Here are some occupational deaths/100,000 that stand out :


Fist-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service, and groundskeeping workers 14.7

Fishers and related fishing workers 120.8

Logging workers 129.9

Construction laborers 17.8

Structural iron and steel workers 37

Roofers 42.2

Maintenance and repairs workers, general 15.7

Aircraft pilots and flight engineers 54.3

Driver/sales workers and truck drivers 24.3

Refuse and recyclable material collectors 32.3

Truck transportation 25.6


Lets put this into human language.


A cop is about as likely to die on the job as a lawn care guy.

That's just a fact.

It really does not rate as a truly dangerous job in any way, shape, or form.

 

[BoberFett]

Workers Comp numbers say it all, it is quite literally their job to figure out how dangerous a particular job is and to price the workers comp insurance accordingly. They study and modify those rates every single year, I can't think of a better metric to judge true, non-minor (I stubbed my toe so I can't come in to work plus I'm really hungover), on the job injuries.

As much as I pay workers comp I should have thought of this, good find.

If there's one group who knows the statistics on this stuff, it's actuaries. It's their job to know who gets hurt, and in what proportion.

 

[Darwin333]

Let me know when you get a gunshot wound or get hit standing next to a car by the side of the road or when the fatality rate within your profession exceeds 4 times that of the general population. You're not really living on the edge until you've had a few years of 3rd shift duty in East St. Louis...but hey, you can pretend you're a internet tough guy who knows the score...no one will ever see through it.

And you let me know when you get roughly 1/3 of your body covered in molten tar causing 3rd degree burns to said 1/3 of your body. Tar, unlike say kitchen grease, doesn't cool down very quickly, it just keeps on cooking your ass. The only thing they can do is throw the water cooler on you to cool the tar off but unfortunately your skin is already "boiling" so the tar fuses with it. Only one way to get it off and that is to peel it off along with the skin it is fused to. Then toss in a fuckup by the ER doc, not being able to actually see the injury injects some sort of anti-inflammatory to keep the fully tar covered hand from swelling inside of it. Only problem was said drug can't be mixed with narcotics so said peeling of skin off was mostly done without any sort of pain meds at all. Took them a few hours to flush the other crap before they could administer heavy duty pain meds and every single minute of those few hours were spent getting quite literally flayed alive.

Here is the first time I posted the story, you don't see me claiming to be some sort of hero for keeping a roof over anyones head or bitching about how dangerous my job is or putting the public at greater risk to reduce my own.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=23480484&postcount=90

Would you like to see some pictures of my hand almost two decades later? To this day I would take a bullet over going through that without a moments hesitation. You want to know the difference between me and LEO, I don't expect anyones sympathy, I was doing my job and I got hurt. I healed up eventually and you know what I did, I went back to work in the same field. No one clapped for me, no news coverage, no one tried to trump up charges on the guy who was in fact not only negligent but was responsible for my safety, nadda and I didn't expect nor want it.

So why don't you get back to me when your profession is over 3 times more deadly than being a LEO like mine was and if you are "just" injured it isn't a bullshit sprained ankle. Today I run the company but I would wager that my risk of dying on the job is still roughly the same as LEO because I still have to crawl on roofs to estimate, run projects and inspect them.

 

[Darwin333]

The data is the data. It appears that you want to focus on one piece of the data (24% of injuries related to making arrests) and draw conclusions as if the rest their injuries are unrelated to their profession. Many of these additional injuries occur as a result of training (13%), vehicle accidents (11% as they spend a ton of time on the road) and foot chases (6%)...I can only assume that you don't attach much "danger" to these particular job activities which also contribute to their extremely high injury rate.

Workers Comp, whose job is to calculate the costs of said injuries using very sophisticated and very factual data (they are the ones paying after all), sure don't agree with you.

So whats your theory, are they taking a serious financial hit because they want to help out the various .gov agencies or are they just flat getting it wrong despite being pretty much THE authority on the costs of at work injuries?

 

[shady28]

This is a really frightening number that I hope at some point, someone researches further.

I keep seeing numbers in the 400-600 range reported as the number killed by police each year. That seems high, but it's also clearly wrong.

Why?

I keep seeing things like this :

http://www.rgj.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/

"About 750 agencies contribute to the database, a fraction of the 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States."

These 400ish numbers are reported by the FBI, but less than 1/20th of the agencies report.

To illustrate, this site uses news reports as a means to track the killings by police. This is what the numbers came to using just that (incomplete) data :

https://www.facebook.com/KilledByPolice

At least 13 people have been killed by U.S. police since January 1, 2015.
At least 1,100 were killed in 2014.
At least 1,876 have been killed since May 1, 2013.


I have a feeling no one reports this because the numbers have the potential to be horrific. And I'm not talking about the 1,100 reported by that facebook page. Obviously that's not a complete number - it's a minimum.

If I just do straight math of 750reporting/17000total * X (total # of deaths) = 400, then X = 10,000.

10,000 is how many people would have been killed if the rate of killings is the same at the 16,250 agencies that failed to report as it is at the 750 who reported.

That's fucking monstrous.

 

[Subyman]

This is a really frightening number that I hope at some point, someone researches further.

I keep seeing numbers in the 400-600 range reported as the number killed by police each year. That seems high, but it's also clearly wrong.

Why?

I keep seeing things like this :

http://www.rgj.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/

"About 750 agencies contribute to the database, a fraction of the 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States."

These 400ish numbers are reported by the FBI, but less than 1/20th of the agencies report.

To illustrate, this site uses news reports as a means to track the killings by police. This is what the numbers came to using just that (incomplete) data :

https://www.facebook.com/KilledByPolice

At least 13 people have been killed by U.S. police since January 1, 2015.
At least 1,100 were killed in 2014.
At least 1,876 have been killed since May 1, 2013.


I have a feeling no one reports this because the numbers have the potential to be horrific. And I'm not talking about the 1,100 reported by that facebook page. Obviously that's not a complete number - it's a minimum.

If I just do straight math of 750reporting/17000total * X (total # of deaths) = 400, then X = 10,000.

10,000 is how many people would have been killed if the rate of killings is the same at the 16,250 agencies that failed to report as it is at the 750 who reported.

That's fucking monstrous.

No, no, no. That assumes each agency is the same size, which is clearly not the case. How do we know that the FBI doesn't already adjust the number to take into account all agencies?

 

[Darwin333]

If you make drugs legal and regulate them, you'll end up with exactly the same situation that led to Garner's death, only worse because drugs make people more likely to do something stupid when being arrested. In order to fund drug education and drug rehabilitation and whatever else they can squeeze in unnoticed, government at all levels will tack on high taxes, just as with cigarettes. Some people will sell unlicensed drugs to make money by undercutting government-approved drug prices, and some people will buy those untaxed and unregulated drugs because they can afford them but not the licensed and regulated drugs - or just to save some money by accepting more risk. Government will crack down on these unlicensed pharmacists because just as with cigarettes, government expects its own cut and will act to protect its interests. As a consequence of that action, some people will die, resisting arrest or simply by being in the wrong place (or the wrong color skin.) You can choose to not tax or regulate drugs - not bloody likely government would pass up that chunk of change - but then someone will die as a result of contaminated or overly potent drugs and people will be asking why this drug isn't regulated like, say, aspirin. There is no purely good answer here, and making drugs de facto legal may be the best possible solution.

Shrug, moonshiners still exist and I enjoy a nice stiff drink on occasion but I, nor anyone else I know, have ever been sold or offered moonshine. Same thing with cigs, I have smoked malboro lights (actually switching to an E-cig atm but point remains) for 2 decades. I've never in my life, nor have I ever heard of anyone, being offered black market smokes. Booze was illegal for a while so I think its about the best comparison we could possibly get. Sure there might be a small amount of black market sales (like moonshine) but for the most part its WAY cheaper for uber-huge pharma companies to make the stuff than it is to illegally import, distribute to uber big players, cut the product to increase profits, distribute to street level slangers, and purchase.

I don't read many stories about alcohol turf wars today despite the fact that it used to be illegal and while so it was quite a deadly and violent trade to be in. Alcohol prohibition is about the only thing we can use as a historical comparison and I prefer to use real data when I can.

Wayyyyy off topic, why did making alcohol illegal require a constitutional amendment yet making pot illegal didn't? Can anyone answer this?

 

[Darwin333]

No, no, no. That assumes each agency is the same size, which is clearly not the case. How do we know that the FBI doesn't already adjust the number to take into account all agencies?

I am not agreeing with his math in the least, he is assuming WAY to many variables but generally when an agency like the FBI puts out statistics they DO list all of the variables. The numbers are completely irrelevant if they don't.

 

[shady28]

No, no, no. That assumes each agency is the same size, which is clearly not the case. How do we know that the FBI doesn't already adjust the number to take into account all agencies?

We know it isn't adjusted because they call it a number of killings. But if it is adjusted, that's worse - because it is flatly wrong as evidenced by the link I already provided which compiles numbers using news reports.

There are some other sites / examples out there but none are complete.

This is what those FBI numbers are based on :

http://www.wsj.com/articles/hundred...re-uncounted-in-federal-statistics-1417577504


"The FBI has almost no records of police shootings from departments in three of the most populous states in the country—Florida, New York and Illinois."

"Justifiable police homicides from 35 of the 105 large agencies contacted by the Journal didn’t appear in the FBI records at all. Some agencies said they didn’t view justifiable homicides by law-enforcement officers as events that should be reported. "

 

[Darwin333]

I think being a cop seems more dangerous because the primary danger is being murdered or intentionally injured, as opposed to being accidentally killed or injured. Kind of like how Nazis murdered fewer people than the Soviets in World War II, but seem worse because of the methodical way they went about it.

I can't argue with that line of thinking but in this case the numbers are WAY out of whack. Per the actual facts, being a LEO is one of the safest jobs you can get. Those are the plain and simple facts. They have the same "risk" at work as farmers for christ sake.

Honest question, have you ever considered farming to be an outstandingly dangerous occupation across the board?

 

[shady28]

I can't argue with that line of thinking but in this case the numbers are WAY out of whack. Per the actual facts, being a LEO is one of the safest jobs you can get. Those are the plain and simple facts. They have the same "risk" at work as farmers for christ sake.

Honest question, have you ever considered farming to be an outstandingly dangerous occupation across the board?

Just for transparency, I wouldn't call being a LEO one of the safest jobs.

Office / clerical jobs are clearly the safest, with on the job deaths ~ 1-2/100,000.

The flip side is, anyone who drives a lot for a living (even salesmen) has about the same or in many cases (truck drivers) higher chance of dying than a patrol officer. Basically a cop and a delivery truck driver have about the same odds of dying on the job, and in the sense that they both drive a lot it's probably for many of the same reasons.

I don't see anyone crying about roofers, construction workers, mechanics, trash pick-up guys, etc. I hate seeing all these articles in mass media about how many cops are dying when it's just a load of horse shit.

 

[BoberFett]

Shrug, moonshiners still exist and I enjoy a nice stiff drink on occasion but I, nor anyone else I know, have ever been sold or offered moonshine.

I used to run with a motorcycle club and we had small club rallies down south in AR, GA, TN. There was always bathtub moonshine around. I'm sure it depends on your circle of friends.