Obscuritus.ca A nerd making a nerdy blog

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

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.