Rescue Humor The Entertaining Side of Police, Fire & EMS
The past few months have been hard to work in Law Enforcement. It seems us Police officers now can’t do anything right. Arrest a bad guy we are the villains for being aggressive. Fail to arrest a bad guy and we are lazy incompetent buffoons.
Damed if you do… damed if you don’t…
Social media is hard to look at. Post anything about the cops and someone will have to comment about hating the police. Or even worse is the passive aggressive hate for cops, as in the person saying “Normally I support the police but lately they have gotten out of control”.
Have the police gotten out of control? Or do people just have more access to local news that they never had before? Also how many people looking for a few seconds of fame are baiting the police and goading them into a fight. Their goal to tape it and become a viral video hit.
I am not a trained statistician so please forgive me if my math has some errors. But here are some numbers to think about when saying how out of control all cops are…
There are about 1,000,000 police officers in the USA.
A full time employees works about 2,080 hours per year.
This means that US police put in about 2,080,000,000 man hours of work each year.
When working patrol I tend to have on average one citizen contact every few hours, this could be anything from a traffic stop, to a neighbor dispute to dealing with a felony crime scene.
So if other officers have numbers close to this, we are looking at about 520,000,000 citizen contacts per year. Yes just over 500 million interactions between police and members of the public take place each year.
Given that the US population is just over 300 Million that means many people will have multiple interactions with a police officer each year.
Hundreds of millions of contacts every year between police officers and citizens and how many incidents of brutality and shootings do we hear about? One every few weeks maybe even one each week…
Yes I agree we should as a profession strive for perfection. But name me one occupation that has all people doing that job doing it 110% right with 110% full ethical purity.
If the police are as “out of control” as some in the media would make people think then there should be way more stories of police abuse. Seriously given statistical probability we should have a story of police abuse coming out every few hours.
Just some food for thought…
