Thread by @bopinion, “In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be [...]

“In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.”

This claim from 2016 has resurfaced on many conservative platforms. Is it true? https://trib.al/35qVglH

How Dangerous Is Police Work?

Misleading statistics have been used to distort the real perils of walking a beat.

https://trib.al/35qVglH

It's unlikely that 18.5 times more officers were killed by Black men than unarmed Black men were killed by police, writes @foxjust.

Annually, about 50 U.S. officers are “feloniously killed," while police and sheriff’s deputies kill about 1,000 people https://trib.al/35qVglH

But there's fewer police officers than there are Black men.

If what the author meant was that an officer’s odds of being shot by a Black man were higher than a random unarmed Black man’s odds of being shot by police, maybe the numbers would back them up https://trib.al/35qVglH

So @foxjust ran the numbers for 2015:

18 law enforcement officers were killed by Black men

36 unarmed Black men were killed by the police

There were 635,781 police officers and sheriff’s deputies

There were 20.4 million Black men https://trib.al/35qVglH

So @foxjust ran the numbers for 2015: 18 law enforcement officers were killed by Black men36 unarmed Black men were killed by the policeThere were 635,781 police officers and sheriff’s deputiesThere were 20.4 million Black men https://trib.al/35qVglH

In both cases the odds of being killed were quite small:

2.8 deaths per 100,000 in the case of police
0.18 for unarmed Black men

Divide the former by the latter and you get a ratio of 16, close enough to the original 18.5 that the calculation seems legit https://trib.al/35qVglH

But is it informative?

According to the same data sources, the odds of a police officer being shot by a White man in 2015 were 112 times higher than the odds of an unarmed White man being shot by police, for whatever it’s worth https://trib.al/35qVglH

It seems more relevant to current debates that twice as many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2015 as police were killed by Black men https://trib.al/35qVglH

What the statistic does hint at is it’s more dangerous to be an officer than not to be a police officer.

Occupational fatality statistics back this up: police suffered 13.7 job-related deaths per 100,000 workers, compared with 3.5 for the workforce https://trib.al/35qVglH

But police work is far from the most dangerous work out there.

It’s not nearly as risky as, say, working as a roofer or a truck driver or a farmer or a garbage collector https://trib.al/35qVglH

“A major issue with today’s police is that so many officers perceive the risks they face as akin to parachuting into hostile territory in Afghanistan or Iraq when in reality they are much closer to those involved in pruning shrubbery,” writes @foxjust https://trib.al/35qVglH

Police work also seems to have been getting less dangerous over time.

A big part of the self-image of many police officers seems to be that they are embattled warriors doing dangerous work on behalf of an unappreciative public https://trib.al/35qVglH