I don't know why anyone would want to be a police officer. There's no upside.
Aside from the genuine affection they get from the people they help here and there.
Given the nature of their job, it seems like there would be too much personal risk to get involved in any kind of physical altercation with the public. Because if you get in a fight, I mean a real fight, you better be ready to fight-to-win. Because there's a good chance that the meth'd out junkie you're fighting doesn't even know what planet he's on, let alone what are the consequences of pulling your gun off your hip and shooting you with it.
You mean no upside other than a really cushy pension after 20 years. Also police officers aren't anywhere close to the most dangerous jobs. Above them are gardeners, construction workers, iron and steel workers, farmers, drivers, garbage collectors, roofers, aircraft engineers, fishermen, and loggers. In other words, if your a strong idiot, police work is the one of the best paying and safest jobs for you.
Seattle cops similarly make bank. Of course, police pay is heavily effected by local cost of living, but Seattle cops make tons of overtime. I just learned there is a minimum three-hour overtime pay, meaning much of the overtime payout isn't even physically worked: https://www.theurbanist.org/2020/09/04/seattle-police-fleeci...
A lawyer friend of mine told me that it's a well known thing (at least in WA) that state patrol deliberately tries to ticket people at the end of their shift, because then they have to go through with the whole rigmarole of writing a traffic ticket, and it goes into overtime, triggering the payment. Supposedly, if you look at the statistical breakdown of tickets written by time of day, you see a clear spike there.
It depends on what kind of cop, obviously. But here's one example.
"The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate. “Oh, it’s a huge rush,” Franklin says. “Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.” Downing agrees. “It’s a rush. And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.” Jamie Haase, a former special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who went on multiple narcotics, money laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better. You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That’s the safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a lot of these cops are meatheads. They think this stuff is cool. And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get during a raid.”"
Police officers actually don't have particularly risky jobs.
In this list based on BLS data [1] it makes #22 behind crane workers, delivery drivers and crossing guards. Important work? Definitely. It's not logging, though - not even close.
You’re arguing police work isn’t dangerous because there are a handful of more dangerous jobs, by linking to a page that includes police officer as a dangerous job.
In any case, you aren’t really offering a compelling case for several reasons:
-Death is not the only negative outcome of danger.
-Not all police jobs are equal so any metric that measures across the entire array of such jobs is fundamentally flawed. An undercover officer going after a drug dealer is in much more danger than a desk sergeant.
-Other people are the primary danger to police officers, so even if we accept the numbers as meaningful, there is a qualitative difference. A tree doesn’t decide you need to die, it just falls and you die or you don’t and it’s over. People aren’t like that.
-This is a measurement of outcomes with safety measures in place, including some that people find distasteful, like carrying fire arms.
> You’re arguing police work isn’t dangerous because there are a handful of more dangerous jobs, by linking to a page that includes police officer as a dangerous job.
No, they're arguing that it isn't particularly dangerous by naming 20 other jobs that are more dangerous, that orders of magnitude more people are employed in, and that nobody thanks for their service, leads a parade for, raises tens of thousands for, or reports on the news when they fall off the ladder and break their neck.
> Other people are the primary danger to police officers, so even if we accept the numbers as meaningful, there is a qualitative difference. A tree doesn’t decide you need to die, it just falls and you die or you don’t and it’s over. People aren’t like that.
The existence of more dangerous jobs is not an indicator that the job in question is not dangerous. This is especially true when the number of more dangerous jobs are a small percentage of all jobs. The linked article is literally titled “Top 25 Most Dangerous Jobs in the United States,” so his own source says the job is dangerous.
Whether the job is dangerous or not is in part fact (by whatever metric you choose) and in part where you draw the line (which is largely arbitrary but may have some statistical support).
If I were to stipulate the metric of fatalities, I would still conclude the job is dangerous because I consider construction work dangerous and it has fewer fatalities per capita.
Whether it is appropriate to throw parades or not for any of these groups doesn’t have an impact on the veracity of the claim.
They do get paid well. Policing is generally a family income type job. Those are increasingly difficult to come by.
Good policing = a better society to live in.
Regarding risks:
A return to robust and inclusive deescalation and related situational awareness, people awareness training can pack a big punch, as can having multiple avenues of response.
Perhaps that flying high person is better met by others, not necessarily police.
We can, and should, improve on the currently poor balance of income vs cost and risk exposure. Lots of ways to that, and putting a bunch of people to work cleaning up, repairing and enhancing our infrastructure would be top of my list.
Stronger requirements for police to be from and or parr of the community they police can cut a lot of risk too. This also can improve reward as well as respect and consideration. All these things go a long way.
Frankly, we could pay them more and invest in them more and get better policing as well as a lower risk for those police.
In my town, we just hired new officers. The difference between them and the ones either leaving or who are long into their careers is striking.
The training and overall readiness for all aspects of the job are not so well aligned as they have been in the past.
Better policy = lower risk too. The war on drugs has been particularly brutal all around. It would be great to see those risks taken for better, more mutually agreed upon rewards.
In simple terms: policing is an investment that can deliver great returns
Or... not, and a lot of that is on us, as a people, as it is on the officers.
Some people, well adapted to, or whose basic nature aligns with the job may feel very differently about what "upside" means too.
You are not fundementally wrong. It can range from OK to pretty grim.
A lot can be done. We need to have police people open to it, educating people as much as we ourselves need to be open to it, educating people.
The basic want of a better, safer, appropriately secure, helpful place to live is reason to sign up just as thuggery can be.
We can work on that too. Hiring criteria, bigger and more inclusive, robust training is a big part of seeing policing improve.
The current state of affairs is entirely of police's own making. It's not like that in many other countries, where cops are genuinely respected.
And maybe we do need radical measures to fix things. Georgia (the country) had a similar problem with their traffic police. They solved it by literally firing the entire force overnight, then raising both the hiring standards and the pay, and rebuilding it all from scratch.
If you mean the story of the Georgian police reform, it happened a while ago, and there's plenty of articles on how it went and the results it produced. For example:
Did you respond to the wrong comment? I’m having trouble making sense of your question in context to the comment you are responding to. I am on mobile though, so maybe I’m experiencing and off by one error.
Do you know any police officers? They frequently retire in their 40s with their living expenses covered for the rest of their lives. To generate that much passive income in another job typically would require a person to accumulate $2 million or more.
Aside from the genuine affection they get from the people they help here and there.
Given the nature of their job, it seems like there would be too much personal risk to get involved in any kind of physical altercation with the public. Because if you get in a fight, I mean a real fight, you better be ready to fight-to-win. Because there's a good chance that the meth'd out junkie you're fighting doesn't even know what planet he's on, let alone what are the consequences of pulling your gun off your hip and shooting you with it.