But how dangerous is it?

1 Logging workers

2 Fishers and related fishing workers

3 Aircraft pilots and flight engineers

4 Roofers

5 Refuse and recyclable material collectors

6 Driver/sales workers and truck drivers

7 Farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers

8 Structural iron and steel workers

9 First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction workers

10 First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service and groundskeeping workers

11 Electrical power-line installers and repairers

12 Grounds maintenance workers

13 Miscellaneous agricultural workers

14 Helpers, construction trades

15 First-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers

16 Police and sheriff’s patrol officers

Source: https://www.ajc.com/business/employment/these-are-the-most-d...

EDIT: Be nice to your fellow HNer's. Also, no one could pay me enough to be a policeman.

This ended up seeing Manning get thrown in jail, be tortured for years in isolation, as well as having attempted suicide several times while in jail (again! after getting a communicated sentence by Obama)_the last time for refusing to testify against others involved. And Assange has also had to suffer a confined existence, been dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy and placed in jail and still awaits trial while his health and mental health have deteriorated, I'd say his near 8 year amount of torture as a direct result of the Military trying to cover up misconduct showed the World just how perverse both systems really are.

I'm not even going to get into things like the use of Contractors like Black Water/Xe, or black-sites/rendition camps, and spies.

All I will say is read Jeremy Scahill's work, this pro-Military narrative seems entirely jingoistic and akin to 9/11 ahead of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have vets in both wars in my family and have seen the consequences first hand, to me and alarming as the tensions between the CCP and the US are accelerating.

Just so its clear, I despise the CCP but War is not a solution or an option we should accept.

Post police academy, AFAIK police never experience collective punishment. In the army its normal if someone loses a weapon to have everyone doing a few pushups. When you saw your squadmate without a rifle, why didn't you ask them wtf they're doing? From large to small scale cops experience punishment alone and military suffers as a group. Small crime breeds large crime and (pardon the pun) military simply self-polices more than cops as a leadership style.

I can't blame cops too much as they have to deal with demographics where saving face is important and one cop dropping another cop for pushups because they lost their summons-writing pen is impractical. Which brings up sociological difference where the enemy for cops is 40% to 100% of their daily interactions and is up close and personal, so screw these guys I'm breaking bad, whereas 100% of human interactions in the military is with buddies and the bad guys don't speak our language and the firefights are at 25 or more yards in a very abstract sense. Essentially cops spend most of their time with people who hate them so "getting even" makes more sense, whereas military spends nearly 100% of their time with friends and why would you want to screw over your buddy?

The military bakes corporate style reorganization into the cake, you can expect a PCS move around the world every two or so years, its very unusual to have TV or Movie style old timers who've been in the unit forever. Even in the Reserves if you are in long enough to get E-5 or E-6 you're almost certainly going to have to move to get that next promotion and higher level leadership always rotates even in the reserves. Noobs don't even know HOW to be corrupt for the first quarter of their time on station. Its a valuable learning experience and filters out people who can't learn quickly on the job, which for military is good. Cops on the other hand will have some old sgt who's been sitting on the same desk for 25 years and the good ole boys network of questionable activities formed decades ago and ...

The military is highly paid; civilians don't understand that when I got out (a quarter century ago) the current pay rate for me would be just under $3K/month, but that's not before tax like civilians, that's after getting housing, food, insurance, essentially all I have to pay for $3K/mo would be bar bill and car expenses. Cops on the other hand get paid approximately as much as public school teachers aka F-all not much in a pyramid scheme where people scream about the top of the pyramid making $100K but realize the top of the pyramid is incredibly small (like pro sports salaries) and the base of the pyramid is an immense number of people making $50K/yr or often far less. Speaking of pyramids, in the military every 5-yr experience E-4 makes the same $3K/mo after all expenses are paid, whereas with both cops and teachers its a pyramid where everyone has to compete to get up to that $100K/yr contract, there's a different attitude when you're competing vs when you all get the same paycheck.

Edited to add another important sociological point: Cops usually work alone or in a very small group like two people. Two people can keep a secret, even three. The smallest "working group" I can think of in the military would be special forces teams with at least 4 people, but the rank and file work in groups who can't keep secrets. You can't expect to catch a cop who works alone or with a buddy, so things get worse and worse until they make the news in a big way; whereas the first time someone screws up in the military they generally get caught and kicked out so things rarely get worse over time.

Note that outsiders think the military to cop pipeline is smooth. It CERTAINLY is NOT, and my buddies complain a lot about the sociological differences mentioned above along with others. Outsiders think they just wear a different uniform, but its really a wild cultural shift to go from military to being a cop. Maybe its the smallest shift to go from MP to civie police compared to other vocations, but its still a big shift in an absolute sense.

I can't see the benefit to having an organization whose role it is to fight the public (citizens) in order to improve the lives of a group granted a monopoly over a function (e.g. use of force/policing). With private company unions, there is at least market pressures that solve some issues.

(I am not against all forms of representatation for workers, and think unions should exist but be more like "hollywood agents", and sell their services to individuals. The power to strike always still exists if you can convince the individuals it is a good idea.)

https://www.stripes.com/news/emails-show-general-warned-agai...

It is utterly fascinating and I highly recommend it, but one of the most interesting takeaways (consistent with this article) is that police officers quickly become utterly disillusioned with the integrity of the police department as an institution. They complain about unfair recruitment and promotion policies, injured officers who become "disposable", an emphasis on quotas instead of applying the law consistently, on politicization of policing priorities, and above all the city always settling cases against police misconduct so that accused officers never get a chance to clear their name in court, when innocent.

With this mindset, when they don't trust their own institution, the only people they trust are fellow officers -- not captains, not management, not the department, not the mayor. Which aligns with this article -- that Marines view the Marines as a trustworthy institution, while police don't see their own police department in the same light.

Now obviously police misconduct and brutality exist and are a huge problem. But the book very much opened my eyes to the idea that it's not only the behavior of police officers that needs better standards and accountability -- that treating police officers themselves better and more fairly may also be just as necessary to achieve full transparency and accountability. What if the "blue wall of silence" dissolved because police officers trusted their own institution, rather than just each other?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Danger-Duty-Disillusion-Worldview-Off...

This reference appears to be completely wrong. The case it links to is an appeal of drug dealing convictions.

The phrase "A soldier is a reasoning agent" appears in the 1973 case U.S. v. Calley [1] appealing Calley's conviction for murder at My Lai.

[1] https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/united-states-united-st...

Instead of pointing out the military as the rule and police officers as the exception, maybe we should consider that the military is the exception.

Teachers, federal employees, and government employees at all levels of local government are known for being able to keep their jobs long after they should have been fired or disciplined.

The egregiousness of bad policing is that many times they are breaking laws. But honestly, there are gray areas. The police are allowed to hit some people. They have to shoot some people. So it's not a huge leap to assume that some of them will overstep their bounds. And when they do, the union will back them, and their colleagues will back them. And we'll hear how underpaid they are (just like teachers).

And they keep their jobs, just like bad teachers.

Like building a new corps of police ("NeoPolice") alongside existing police with same responsibilities, but with a more stringent process on recruiting, training, internal culture, values, etc. And have it slowly supplement the old, dysfunctional police.

Some rationale: - When something is really broken, non amount of repair can fix it, you need a new thing. Shifting some policing responsibilities to other institutions (eg Defund the Police) might reduce the negative impact of a failing institution, but doesn't fix it. - We need a transition plan if we defund/abolish the police, and so far there is none to replace the police core responsibilities (around the use of force) - New competition drives innovation, and having a new police force can shine the line on how much better our experience of the product can be, driving further change.

It'll require strong, sustained leadership to build those institutions from scratch which will be difficult, given how police is mostly a local institution and the resulting outcome can vary greatly.

(For the curious, check how Brazil transitioned to a new currency to stop inertial inflation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidade_real_de_valor Similar mindset, albeit for a completely different domain)

The reasoning goes that while any UCMJ violation short of the big ones (abandoning post, AWOL, murder, etc.) is recoverable from with regards to career impact by a PCS (change bases you're stationed at), a new commander, whatever, the ONLY thing that will really sink you is lying.

You can recover from all sorts of failures. What you will never recover from is lying on a sworn statement about that failure.

Enforcement of UCMJ proves this out. Officers and Enlisted both follow this in various ways from small infractions to things that involve UCMJ. The service academies only have 1 non-crime that will really get you kicked out: honor violations. Etc. etc.

The interesting background aspect is Army values get pounded into you from Day 0, and Integrity is one of them. Legitimate corrective action will go around violating them from Basic Training all the way through the last day of your career. Not a lot of other orgs take organizational value lists that are on the proverbial office wall quite so seriously.

I'm almost positive the police do none of this approach, but also they don't have a federal police force really to enforce it top-down like the Army does.

edit grammar

The military generals wanted to close bases that it didn’t need and that they thought was wasteful - the government wouldn’t close them because of the job loss.

The military leaders have said one of the biggest threats to our democracy is our ballooning national debt - I can’t find a quote from a general but you will find plenty of pro-military sites that agree. But yet the civilian government ignores the threat.

The military has plenty of weapon programs that it would love to mothball. But again, Senators are worried about job loss and they keep making weapons and selling them to foreign governments.

The government can spend billions on weapons that the military doesn’t need and private contractors but won’t equip soldiers with what they need.

There have been plenty of stories about how the civilian government has recently put soldiers health in danger for photo ops and exposing them to Covid unnecessarily. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/magazine/navy-captain-cro...)

The military may have laws/rules to report misconduct, but structurally, units are incentivized to hide misconduct (e.g. “handle internally”) because they don’t want the embarrassment. More importantly, failures by subordinates are often seen as leadership problems (you can make an argument that in many cases this is true) which mean officers and SNCOs are likely to sweep them under the rug if they can.

I saw many, many cases of this in the USMC. DUIs turned into “wet and reckless” because it involved a SNCO (an NCO or lower would have lost rank). NCOs (rightfully) pressing charges against subordinates for misconduct, only to be pressured by company/battalion leadership to accept “alternative punishment” (which often amounted to nothing). A let’s not even talk about all the case where there was sexual or physical abuse that went unreported despite everyone knowing it was happening.

The only time the military is motivated to act on misconduct is when it can’t hide it.

"Executive Order on Safe Policing for Safe Communities"

June 16, 2020

at

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

So, in short, "money talks"!

Yes, it's the money the DoJ has long been giving to local police departments to help them "protect and serve" and in general be pretty.

So, we get to set up a company, say, Local Police Audits, Inc. and a company Audits and Approvals, Inc. The second works to make sure the DOJ thinks they are pretty and, then, works to make sure the first is pretty; and then the first works to make sure the police departments, e.g., in Minneapolis, Atlanta, NYC, Baltimore, etc. are pretty, get a coveted, official pretty prize.

And if a police department does not get a pretty prize? Then the DoJ "will make them an offer they can't refuse" -- get a pretty prize or lose your DoJ money.

The Blue Line, police contracts, and police unions aside, this offer will be meaningful to the local mayor, town council, and maybe the local newspapers, voters, taxpayers, chief of police, the state governor, and even the mainstream media (MSM).

It's all right there in that executive order.

So I do think it is a quite dangerous job there to be honest. Moreso than the ones you mentioned. Some time ago deep sea fishing was the deadliest job. Would still prefer it from a risk assessment perspective.

Almost getting killed tends to cause PTSD, but the tendency is stronger if someone intentionally tried to kill you.

And doing violence to another person is also potent cause of PTSD.

For those 2 reasons, I would expect rates of PTSD to be higher among cops than among the other 15 occupations you list.

I would also worry that the habit of suspicion needed to be effective as a cop would be bad for my marriage and other relationships. In other words, I would worry that the work might make me pathologically cynical.

Finally, some people really enjoy having power over others and using that power to inflict pain. Even if the other disadvantages of police work did not exist, it might be wise for me to avoid it just to pessimize the probability of my needing to work with someone like that. It is a complicated issue, but certainly I find such people distasteful and suspect that most adults in my country (the US) share my distaste.

Police unions exacerbate the problem. But they aren't the root cause. Their leadership is supported by the rank and file. And police unions act much more antagonistically in comparison with other public unions.

Unions are boogeymen for these issues. They advocate for members by design so that is easy to do. The problems affecting police in states that prohibit collective bargaining for public employees or where private police are the same.

Nevertheless, the union is a symptom of a very deep problem that will not be solved by half measures. If you build a true public safety service to replace the police, you can expect their union to look normal, not like a big city police union.

How much of policing is actually responding to violent crime vs traffic infractions or minor spats between neighbors?

That the general populace is afraid of cops is largely of the cops own doing. If they weren't power-hungry thugs, even when executing traffic enforcement, they wouldn't have this problem.

The Austin PD chief has come under intense scrutiny for his department's handling of various arrests and protests over the past few months, and after roughly half of the city council called on him to resign, it was reported that neither the city council or the mayor could legally fire him.[0]

The city manager, which is appointed and not elected, has the power to demote the police chief, but the state does not permit a police chief to be terminated.

Long story short, none of Austin's leaders have the power to fire the police chief.

0: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/06/18/austin-police-chief-...

edit: added reporting

Look how fucking horrible behavior can be when even when the organization has a publicly stated stance of holding members accountable, and occasionally actually does so.

Now imagine the fucking horrible behavior that doesn't even manage to get surfaced in an organization that takes a public stance of not holding members or itself accountable.

The military is far far from perfect. The police still manage to be worse. And that's fucking terrifying.

2019 median pay for a police officer/detective: $65,170[0]

2019 median pay for high school teachers (often cited as underpaid): $61,660[1]

[0]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/mobile/police-and...

[1]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobil...

You pretty much need a clean and successful record with a bachelors degree for both paths.

Degree inflation is a real thing, similar to how receptionists in 2020 need a degree in "something" whereas in the old days high school was enough. Boomer generation cops could get hired with a mere high school diploma but that was 50 years ago.

It could also issue nation-wide guidelines such as making it impossible to turn off body cameras.

Data quality side note... Others have pointed out before that a primary work related risk for nearly all of these professions is transportation. That's why the only landscapers we see on this list are the supervisors: supervisors are on the clock while they're behind the wheel, the workers aren't. Reading this data in a meaningful way requires consideration of transportation related risks.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm

This is why the solution to police misconduct problems is going to require systemic change. There needs to be independent investigations and oversight of misconduct, and better systems to support whistleblowers. Those that are terminated for misconduct should not be reinstated and shouldn't be able to become officers elsewhere. In the military, you can't re-enlist if you've been dishonorably discharged, why should officers who abused their power be allowed to regain that power?

Not to say the military is perfect by any stretch. You still have your portion of GI's committing crimes and scandals at various levels of organization. And you still have problems someone of a higher rank can get away with stuff because of their power over subordinates. But by and large the military has much stronger mechanisms to maintain and enforce accountability than the average police department.

I keep looking back at how many bemoan corporate money in politics and how references that Citizen's United was the cause but completely ignore that DNC platform while supporting that completely ignores these unions contributing; in fact one certain Senator's webpage is explicit in only using corporation examples. Hell that same person wants you to pay for the DNC and RNC conventions; its criminal we pay for their convention security as is

Simple reason, when people are paid by tax coffers that means their unions are and in turn it just becomes one giant slush fund for politicians who want to remain in power.

While your comment explains the origin of this culture... it's generally not as easy to change such a culture as it is to maintain it. Once a group of people believe that the rest of the world does not understand them or is against them, they are somewhat inoculated against efforts by the rest of the world to change them.

New officers spend most of their time with older officers, not department leadership, not the mayor, not journalists, not activists, etc. Older officers teach younger officers how to act, and to some extent, what to believe. And, they act collectively to punish new officers who fail to adhere to this culture.

This is well-enough known to become a storytelling trope: a young idealistic officer finds him- or herself facing not only criminals, but also the cultural inertia of the disillusioned existing police force, as they try to do the right thing.

In many contexts, we accept that organizations have to end, and be replaced, to enact meaningful change. Companies go out business; political administrations lose elections.

This is why the idea of "abolish the police" or "defund the police" might not be as crazy as it sounds on its surface. It's not that we don't need people who are paid to investigate crime and keep people safe... obviously we do. But police forces as they currently exist may have too much cultural inertia to evolve the way they need to.

If it's one bad actor, they'll get court marshalled. If it's several (e.g. Abu Graib; possibly misspelled), or if it's systemic (e.g. no care whatsoever for collateral damage, such as shooting civilians or bombing schools and hospitals), then the powers that be will stop at nothing to cover it up or play it down.

I don't think we can consider "police" as a single institution, or in isolation. The character of the police in a particular locality depends on the local government of that locality. If the police are corrupt, it is because the local government is corrupt. That is going to vary widely from locality to locality, and fixing it cannot be a matter of simply changing the police alone; it has to be a matter of changing the local government.