Guest Post by Karl Denninger
“With the increasing number of ambush-style attacks against our officers, I am deeply concerned that a growing anti-government sentiment in America is influencing weak-minded individuals to launch violent assaults against the men and women working to enforce our laws and keep our nation safe,” said Craig Floyd, chairman and CEO of the memorial fund.
“Enough is enough,” he said in a statement. “We need to tone down the rhetoric and rally in support of law enforcement and against lawlessness.”
Bite me Craig.
Here are the facts. There were 126 on-duty deaths reported among all officers in 2014. There are approximately 1 million sworn officers between federal, state, county and local government entities (and another couple of million employees who are not sworn; that is, they are not officers and do not have arrest powers, such as dispatchers and clerks.)
This is a rate of fatality of 12.6 per 100,000. Sounds bad, right?
Wrong.
If you’re a logger, you have a fatality rate ten times that of a cop.
A fisherman? Almost time times — 117 per 100,000.
A pilot? 53.4 per 100,000. Yes, really — it’s about four times as dangerous to fly a plane or chopper than be a cop.
The guy who puts your roof on? 40.5 per 100,000 — about three times as dangerous.
How about iron workers — you know, the guys who put up the buildings you work in? Yeah, those dudes. Three times the risk of a cop in dying, most from falls, being crushed by heavy materials or welding accidents.
Your garbage man has a risk of death twice that of a cop. Why? He gets hit by cars or crushed by heavy equipment (yes, it would suck to get caught in that trash compactor in the garbage truck!)
How about the lineman that repairs your power lines? Slightly less than double the risk of a cop, and of course the means by which they die are falls and electrocution, mostly.
Truck drivers? Close to double the risk, most from traffic accidents.
Farmers? Same risk, roughly; getting caught in a combine is a ****ty way to die.
Or you could just be a construction laborer. Your risk in that profession is materially higher than that of a cop (17.3 .vs. 12.6) as well but nobody cheers for you. Never mind that without said laborers you wouldn’t have a house or an office to work in.
So let’s cut the crap, eh? Being a cop isn’t particularly dangerous as occupations go.
Sworn officers are in fact officers of the court. Lying is unacceptable among both them and any organization that represents them. That means this butt-clown as well as the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in NYC and Patrick Lynch, their President. Pathological liars are worthy of the middle finger, not respect, no matter who they are.
Further, these organizations are not going to get any sympathy from me as long as we have cops arresting anyone for “DUI” when they choose to sleep off their alcohol in a parking lot rather than drive, nor are you going to get to claim “valor” without a loud pushback from people like myself as long as there is even one cop who reaches a settlement for his alleged attempt to create pornography with the intended target being solicited as a means to void an alcohol possession citation. That’s official corruption and if I pulled something like that I’d be prosecuted instead of being able to slough off the “settlement” on the taxpayers of the town.
Then there’s this sort of corruption:
It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage.
NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety, The Post has learned.
So either 94% of the stops and summonses were never justified in the first place, in which case the entire NYPD is nothing more than a band of felons committing armed robbery by the tens of thousands a week or this “action” constitutes acting as an accessory to crime after the fact.
Either way these are not cops they’re crooks. In either case every single one of these “officers” deserves to be arrested and thrown into prison for decades; odds are it’s the first of the two possibilities, by the way, which means that this “action” is as close as you’re going to get to an admission of tens of thousands of armed robberies committed by the cops each and every week.
If law enforcement officers want respect they can start by deserving it and that means cutting the crap — including false claims of “outrageously dangerous” working conditions that in fact are less hazardous on a statistical basis than the guy who picks my household trash, an immediate and complete cessation of false arrests on bogus charges and full prosecution of each and every member of such an agency who is alleged to have abused someone in the line of their duties.
Let me know when that happens and at that point my middle finger will be retracted — but not one second before.
You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist in the USA.
But firstly, all the politicians who imposed all these “laws” and statutes and all the “judges” who enforced them must be sent to prison. And then there are the people who elected these scoundrels. Attack the root cause, not the symptom, and relief from the “cancer” or “disease” might be effected.
@Jack W with regard to my above post on the power of juries. What you describe as “root cause” are but merely the symptoms of a far wider problem. The root cause, IMO, is a disengaged, disenfranchised, distracted and generally ignorant population.
Every legislative and judicial over reach can be thwarted by an informed, motivated citizenry which understands that, through the jury system, they are able interpose themselves between the State and it’s citizens when the State seeks to act outside it’s established boundaries.
Is that a panacea for what ails this Nation? Not at all, but including, again, a strong curriculum of civic training, in our local classrooms would go a long way towards teaching our children exactly how they, as individuals, can wield power in our society.
@anon, yeah, I stand corrected. The politicians and judges who have imposed and enforced the “laws” are symptomatic of a deeper defect, to which I noted: the people who elect politicians, which is what you explained. Perhaps even deeper is the loss of morality, the loss of or inability to reason, to think logically. And why have people lost that moral foundation? I don’t expect government schools will resolve this problem. I’m for privatizing education. May dad said, after a career in public education that it was a mistake for government to gain virtual monopoly of that realm. As to power, well Tolstoy wrote in The Law of Love and The Law of Violence that politics is violence. What say you?
Political power is indeed the power to use coercion and violence to force your desired outcome. But, I think, that is a double edged sword. Why? Because, we too, have political powers that we, the citizenry are collectively ignorant of.
Say what you will about U.S. Fed Gov, but it does follow the rules, which the ignorance of such rules, by the citizenry, they depend upon.
The rules favor us, if we only knew them, and understood how to use them. The government only has the power that we allow them to have. When they (Fed Gov) publicly abandons those rules, well then, that’s the signal to start loading mags and start picking your targets. That’s just one man’s opinion, though.
@anon, quite agree. Government/politicians have control of education, well mostly, and so these officials have a vested interest in keeping us in the “dark.” It was over 20 years after leaving high school that I began to discover the error of political government as opposed to organizational government. The inherent conflict of interest in public employment is obvious but not easily terminated and replaced by honesty in economics amoung other things. The moral breakdown in Amerika can be traced to commie/socialism and relativism. Force is bad when it is used offensively and it is politicians who use offensive power against us. Perhaps We The People need to invoke defensive power against the politicians. Jury Nullification is one means to invoking defensive power; the Prohibition Era ended when jurors refused to convict “violators” because the Volstead Act was bad law! When did you ever hear of a judge explaining to jurors that they have the duty, power and responsibility to judge not just the facts of a case but also the “law” and if they find the “law” is bad, then they an bring not guilty verdicts.
One is just as dead regardless if one was killed on purpose or by accident.
The police are my first line of protection. If they don’t arrive quickly enough, my last line of protection is my gun.
Keep your guns and ammo private; never register or tell the government what you have.
I would like to see most government functions or “forced” services privatized, which would amoung others, include police and fire protection.
We need to recognize that the constitution and man made law are without support. Read Lysander Spooner’s No Treason No. 6, The Constitution of No Authority and then see Marc Stevens’ No State Project where he puts the question: What factual evidence do you (politician, prosecuting attorney, judge, IRS agent et.al.) have that the constitution and law apply to me just because I am physically present in some geographical location like Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, Alabama et.al.? They don’t have it and the honest judges and attorneys are dismissing charges and refusing to prosecute on such simple things as traffic tickets where there is not claim, i.e. there is no personal injury and/or no property damage. BTW, you might like Away From Freedom by Vervon Orval Watts, For A New Liberty by Murray Rothbard, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt and The Inflation Crisis and How to Resolve It, also by Hazlitt.
Regards.