Domestic Partner and Police Violence
One day I was hatewatching "Blue Bloods" (I highly recommend not watching it if you, unlike me, enjoy not yelling at your TV), and they mentioned that being a police officer was dangerous. The show had also recently discussed issues of domestic violence, and kind of dismissed it. So - I decided to run the numbers, and they're really not all that great.
Since this is framed about police being killed in the line of duty, I am going to only focus on deaths. Being wounded or injured is going to be out of scope for this. I am also going to look at deaths caused very directly. The police officer must have been killed by: -Someone else. -Who isn't a police officer -It wasn't an accident (my call, my bias)
So - let's look at this: https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2015 - this is the list of police officers killed in the line of duty.
From this data I am including:
-0 of the 9/11 Related Illnesses
-0 of the Accidental deaths
-0 of the Aircraft accidents
-3 of the Assaults
-9 of the Vehicle Accidents (I ignored single vehicle collisions, collisions with animals, and accidents where the officer was at fault, I left in this where motorists ignored the officers' signal and did not yield)
-1 of the Duty Related Illnesses
-0 of the Drownings
-1 Fall
-0 of the Bombings (All within the same bombing, all overseas. I nearly didn't include it, since I wasn't including military police)
-35 of the Gunfires (I included everything but the K9 units. This is about human officers)
-0 of the Gunfire (Accidental)
-3 of the Motorcycle Accidents (all 3 the officer was not at fault and struck by another person who wasn't an officer)
-5 of the Vehicle Pursuit (That's hard to do well, and let's not blame people just doing their job)
-0 of the Weather/Natural Disaster
-8 of the Vehicular Assaults
That is a total of 65 Police officers killed by someone else who wasn't a cop.
I am using these statistics in order to get a sense of the number of women who are currently in domestic relationships: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_022.pdf - the statistics I am referencing are on page 20. Note - that that is a weighted number of 1000s of women - and a weighted statistical average. Unfortunately I can't find many better numbers, and I can't find any newer numbers. If anyone has better numbers - please send them to me.
Those numbers give us a total of 40093866 (just over forty million women in relationships). Using this paper: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/jr000250.pdf We can see on Page 31 that between 1000 and 1600 women die every year from a domestic partner.
This ends us with a number between 0.00249% and 0.00399%.
In terms of the number of Law Enforcement Officers I am using: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/nsleed.pdf which is all of the officers employed by the Department of Justice, at the state and local level. At the federal level I am using: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fleo08.pdf
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1,076,054 From the Uniform Crime Reporting census - which covers state and Local Law enforcement agencies.
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120,348 from the Total on page 11
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1561 Federal Officers in the Territories (On page 13) (Yes, they are also reflected in the above deaths)
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TOTAL: 1197963
0.00542%
So - we can see that the rates of deaths from being a member of the police, are within 0.002% of being the same as the deaths from being a women with a domestic partner. So - no - it's not more deadly to be a straight woman trying to find love than it is to be a police offer. But it's close.
Now - I am using a lot of fairly conservative numbers - and gave the police the benefit of the doubt a lot of the time. I'd like to get wounding statistics for police officers - but I doubt I could vet them as closely with the time I had.
NOW I am very biased to think that there's a lot of unacceptable domestic violence, and not much police violence. But - this research was done badly - please let me know if there's better resources out there.
