Why Policing is Not Soldiering

The recent epidemic of police over-reaction - from tasering loud students in a library to pepper-spraying AARP members to arresting Harvard professors for jimmying their own front doors - has some people justifying such misconduct with hysterical paens to the extreme danger of police work.

Josh Marshall has a couple of nice correctives.

Following up on the post below, just how dangerous is police work?

Turns out it's pretty dangerous. But by no means the most dangerous line of work. In 2007, policing was the tenth most dangerous job in the country. In 2005, the profession was not in the top ten.

The most dangerous jobs are fisherman, loggers, pilots, iron and steel workers, farmers, truckers, construction workers, etc.

"The post below" to which Josh refers is is this one, quoting an email from reader JS:

Police work is not that dangerous compared to, say, driving a cab. Firefighters have a far more physically dangerous job. However, cops have a heroic job: much harder in so many ways than firefighting. Firefighters are almost never in a morally ambiguous zone and almost always are in the business of making people feel good. Cops handle humans at their worst.

This distinction matters. When cops stress the (low) physical danger of their job, they're setting themselves up to be military. That's no good for the country. Large cities probably need a SWAT team, but that is not the model for most police work. Collateral damage is simply not acceptable for police. It also leads to police cowardice. A lot of civilian damage is justified by the military concept: "force protection." Highly-armed and highly-trained cops use a lot more violence against citizens than a court would deem acceptable if one citizen used it against another.

Cops do not stress the (high) psychological danger of their job, because that makes them social workers with guns, able to handle difficult people with aplomb and an absolute minimum of violence, either threatened or applied. And that's what they should be.

So don't play into fascist stereotypes of manly danger. Police work is hard, dirty, and noble. But it is not particularly dangerous. And it shouldn't be viewed that way.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.