Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
Brian The Mick said the same thing on the other thread. So you think the guy in danger of being shot by the cop should be subjected to different chances based on whether the officer works gang patrol or white collar crime? (not saying that's wrong. But others might.)
Basically yes, but I think even being on gang patrol in the U.S. isn't particularly dangerous. People just don't kill cops here very often. A gang cop's threshold would be lower than a white collar crime investigator's threshold, but I think even gang cops rarely face a legitimate chance of being killed by a suspect. From what I could find, the annual line of duty death rate for American cops is 19/100,000, and I'm sure a substantial portion of those are from traffic accidents or other misadventures. I think it's pretty likely that the actual homicide rate faced by American cops is pretty randomly distributed across different divisions. I think by far the largest subset of police interactions that actually end with an officer's murder is confronting crazy people, and more particularly confronting crazy people in situations where the cop has no idea what they're walking into. So, I think the deadly force threshold should be mostly a function of how often the cop has to interact with random unknown people with little prior knowledge of the situation.