Cops Put Their Lives on the Line. Their Lives, Man!

I have no doubt that many police officers frequently risk real harm in the course of duty; my turban's off to them.

And then there are these wankers:

When climate camp protesters descended on the site of the Kingsnorth power station for a week-long summer demonstration, the scale of the police operation to cope with them was enormous. Police were accused of using aggressive tactics, confiscating everything from toilet rolls and board games to generators and hammers. But ministers justified what they called the "proportionate" £5.9m cost of the operation, pointing out that 70 officers had been injured in the course of their duties.

But data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act puts a rather different slant on the nature of those injuries, disclosing that not one was sustained in clashes with demonstrators. ... [I]njuries reported included "stung on finger by possible wasp"; "officer injured sitting in car"; and "officer succumbed to sun and heat". One officer cut his arm on a fence when climbing over it, another cut his finger while mending a car, and one "used [his] leg to open [a] door and next day had pain in lower back". A separate breakdown of the 33 patients treated by the police tactical medicine unit at the climate camp shows that three officers had succumbed to heat exhaustion, three had toothache, six were bitten by insects, and others had diarrhoea, had cut their finger or had headaches.

Not to take anything away from the châpeau in the first line of this post, but in 2007, Forbes presented a slideshow presenting America's 10 deadliest jobs. Guess who's not on the list.

[hat tip: Fark]

Comments

[hermesten]

Top 10? I don't think cops even rank in the top 20 most dangerous jobs. And last I saw, 50% of cop deaths were in traffic accidents, not at the hands of big bad criminals.

[shane]

Danger is over-estimated in police work by the cops themselves. If they had to clearly describe what they do for a living without all of the associated bravado, it would be rather boring. Here is the typical cop day -
1)Come to work and shoot the shit with my buddies for an hour.
2)Get in patrol car and drive around, see something stupid, find a way to turn said stupidity into a crime.
3)Eat lunch and shoot shit with buddies.
4)Repeat #2 until shift ends.
-
This is interspersed with efforts to milk the taxpayer of productive wealth through overtime, trainings and general scams.