Hacker News Reader

Comment by nawgz | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there's anything sane about the Police reducing their job requirements when we see how ripe for abuse the position is and how unstable it has become in the US based on similar reductions.

I also don't really understand how university education is "almost ubiquitous"; I see that the prevalence of Bachelor's degrees amongst adults is under 40%. Is the claim that the demographic of 21-32 would have a percentage like 70% or what?

View on HN

College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive. Why waste money on them when we could instead give police better police training and resources?

Very idealistic to think that money would be reallocated to give police better training and resources, unless you mean military grade equipment for responding to domestic disputes.

One can dream though...

True, but it’s only idealistic because nobody is seriously talking about it. The two options seem to either be defund or militarize. If more people talk about sensible options regularly then they won’t seem like pipe dreams.

In any case the point here is that college degrees clearly don’t serve as great police training.

There are people seriously talking about it. E.g. the current President of the United States has been talking about better police training since his campaign, and has issued executive orders touching on it. It's just kind of boring, so it doesn't end up in the news and doesn't go anywhere with the legislature.

(edit: I don't want to litigate whether POTUS's preferences for better training would actually improve things, I only want to point out he's been talking about it).

In that case, I guess I’m not being idealistic, just reasonable.

Domestic Disputes in America very often involves guns now. So yeah it seems like if you were a copy and you were told to handle a bunch of yelling from an apartment upstairs in the US, you might want to go with at least a vest on, if not helmet.

Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer. I sure wouldn't want to show up to a couple fighting in a bad neighborhood without backup and guns because some suburbanite is squeamish about violence. Especially for like $50k a year or less.

> Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer.

I don't see that the FBI stats support that claim, and even if, the rate is still comparatively low, and skews very heavily towards the US South (which is only 38% of the population, but has very high gun ownership and gun violence rates):

Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking [0].

From the 2021 data ('FBI LEOKA') [1] for on-the-job police officer deaths reported by 7886 LE agencies:

• 73 were Feloniously killed (only 7 total in responding to all disorders/disturbances (e.g., disorderly subjects, fights, domestic disturbances/violence))

  - 61 of those 73 were killed by firearms
  - 44 of those 73 were in the South

• plus 56 Accidental deaths (32 of which were crashes).

(If we check individual case reports at [2], we can see how many of the 7 total responding to disorders/disturbances were Domestic.)

• Assaults: [3] 43,649 officers assaulted in 2021

- 28.6% (12,463) occurred while officers responded to [all] disturbance calls - 35% sustained injuries - 49.5% occurred in the South

And for 2022, FBI releases preliminary LEOKA statistics for 2022 to October [4].

The latest years for which I can easily find all the detailed LEOKA Tables are 1996..2019 [5] e.g. Table 24: "Circumstances encountered by victim officer upon arrival at the scene of the incident".

[0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...

[1]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight...

[2]: Comprehensive data tables about these events and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks are available on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) portion of the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/

[3]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight...

[4]: https://www.police1.com/officer-safety/articles/fbi-releases...

[5]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-feloniou...

>>> Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking

The difference is that everyone who works on those jobs has roughly the same risk. A cop who has to respond to a disturbance in a bad area is fat more at risk than someone in the crime lab or the evidence room. If you look at the risk of injury to cops who are out on patrol all day, it's more dangerous.

Sure but can you cite or estimate more accurate stats? I read ~68% of officers do patrol, so as a decent approximation that's most of them.

I take your point about cities/areas/zipcodes/states. To me one pattern that keeps jumping out is that the South (LA, MS, GA, TN) has incredible levels of (gun) violence.

Ideally we could quote police officer injury and death rates, per-capita population, by region, by circumstances of incident.

>>> can you cite or estimate more accurate stats?

No, sorry. But I don't know if the stats would fully capture what I think the difference is. Like, I remember a case of a cop who shot a teenager who was running away from him in an alley way at night. I think he had been armed but threw the gun away, not sure now. But the discussion about these incidents usually lead to the stats about how being a cop is not that dangerous in aggregate. That may be be true, but the distribution of danger is very peaky for cops and it's not just a question of whether they are patrol cops, but its also a question of the circumstances they're in in a given moment (which I didn't really mention in my previous post).

If you're called to investigate a group of armed young men in an alleyway at night, and you end up chasing one of them in the darkness, alone, you are in far more danger than the stats would imply.

From brief searching & skimming, I'm seeing that US police kill around 1000 people per year, while around 250 cops are shot. I deliberately compare shot to killed because police are usually far more accurate and effective at shooting than the average criminal. Needless to say this doesn't include all the time that police are shot at or attacked with other weapons that would justify shooting. So while yes they are not in as much danger generally as the people who attack them, it's certainly not a trivial amount of danger either.

I've thought about this a fair amount. I think a big difference is psychological. I've done logging (just family gather firewood for winter stuff, not commercially). It can be scary, but the trees and machinery bare no malice towards you, and you can minimize risks just by being alert and understanding the risks. That is, a lot of injuries are 'your fault'.

In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you, they run to evade capture, etc. Even if the total risks of logging are higher I can imagine it is very hard to treat the risks in police work in the same dispassionate way the logger does. Tree leaning while cutting it vs suspect's hands maybe going towards their pocket. Even if the stats in those two situations are identical (I suspect they are not), I think very different emotions are going to be triggered, and without a lot of training those emotions are going to make situations go sideways either at the time or later (treating every person you meet as dangerous scum, etc). You don't hate the trees, you don't fear walking amongst them when not cutting them, you don't want to cut them a bit harder next time to teach them a lesson, and so on.

Anyway, I think all of that results in the 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.

I'm sure the psychological factor is huge. That said, I did come across a few relevant stats [1]:

>>> 2,744 officers were assaulted with firearms; 6.1% of these officers were injured. 1,180 officers were assaulted with knives or other cutting instruments; 9.7% of these officers were injured. The remaining 11,760 officers were assaulted with other types of dangerous weapons; 16.8% of these officers were injured.

That same year (2021) US police killed 1048 people - less then half the number of cops that were attacked with guns, and less than 1/10th of the number attacked with other dangerous weapons.

I wonder how this compares with European countries, i.e. the ratio of people killed by police to how often they police are attacked in a serious way.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/dallas/news/pre...

> In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you

Definitely, some people do. Some don't. Some are trying to commit suicide-by-cop. Some are unarmed and not even a threat. Your post makes it sound like anytime an officer decides force is necessary, that it necessarily must be. Let alone, lethal force. Sometimes police get that determination wrong, whether by accident or intent. Sometimes police abuse qualified immunity. This stuff almost never goes before a jury, and on the occasions it does, if there's no bodycam and no other narrative (i.e. the other person's dead), unlikely to result in a conviction.

Angelo Quinto [0] was an unarmed, non-violent, non-criminal, 30-yo mentally-ill Filipino-American veteran killed in his own home by Antioch PD, by kneeling on his neck, while handcuffed. His mother was the person who called 911, and noone asked for the police, she only asked for medical. He apparently wasn't even committing any crime, just having a psychiatric emergency. But the police killed him.

Antioch PD didn’t disclose Quinto’s death to the public for nearly a month, then only after public requests. And there's no bodycam of his death. None of them were fired or charged, and there's no public mention of disciplinary actions. In response Gov Newsom signed eight police reform bills.

The level and frequency of police use-of-force in the US is also too high. It needs to be reduced.

> 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.

Equally, ignoring all the above also leads to bad consequences too.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Angelo_Quinto

especially because there's a pretty high chance that the abuser is another cop.

> College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive

Sorry, but can we try to talk in facts?

In Canada, since 2000, there have been 704 police-involved deaths [0].

Let's take a conservative population of 30M for Canada (which will inflate this stat) - then we get: 704 / 22 / 30M => 1 in 1 million Canadians die at the hands of police per year

On the other hand, in the US, there were 1022 police shootings in 2022 alone [1].

1022 / 331M => 3 in 1 million Americans are SHOT by police per year.

There's already a >3x discrepancy while using only US police shootings vs all Canadian police-involved deaths, and I'm sure the police killed plenty of people with tasers, beatings, and negligence in the US in 2022 too.

So, in general, I disagree with your claim that university education hasn't done anything to make Canadian police better than US police, and it's unlikely you'll change that opinion unless you bring some statistics into this conversation.

[0]: https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/police-involved-deaths-ca... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

Erm, your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all. You’re just saying Canadian police shoot less people than American police, which nobody is disputing.

> your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all

What I'm saying is pretty obvious, but I'll spell it out for you.

1. Canadian and American cultures are extremely homogenous

2. Canadian and American police have few differences, but a critical one is the Canadian-only requirement of university degrees

3. With no other clearly-defined drivers of police culture differentiation across the border, we see that US police are probably 4-8x more lethal than Canadian police per capita

So, since the police is clearly not about to properly train their people, let's not dismiss the value of a university degree as a filter, since it appears from a high level view that a university degree could serve to make a police officer 1/5th as likely to kill a citizen compared to a diploma.

Will you propose a different reason why US police are so much deadlier, related to crime statistics or otherwise, or will you just continue to say "the police should train their people", not hold them to account for not training their people, and also excuse them for dropping educational requirements that served in lieu of that training?

So, you are actually claiming that the reason American police shoot more people than Canadian police is because Canadian police have college degrees and American police do not?

Even if your premises were correct, it wouldn’t be worth trying to debate that further.

Hint: They aren’t. Do some research on what percentage of US police have college degrees, and what percentage of Canadian police have college degrees. It isn’t what you think.

Also, you might want to look at the demographics of who police shoot in the US, and inform yourself of the differences between Canadian gun culture and the US.

> You might want to look at the demographics of who police shoot in the US

Canadian police are also quite racist, but if you're arguing that "less educated American cops are more racist", that tracks pretty nicely with "please don't accept less educated cops"

> you are actually claiming that the reason American police shoot more people than Canadian police is because Canadian police have college degrees and American police do not?

Do you have a different explanation?

> Do some research on what percentage of US police have college degrees

According to [0], the breakdown of US officer max education of no college/college diploma/undergrad/grad is:

* 49/20/25/5

> and what percentage of Canadian police have college degrees

And, according to [1], for Canadian officers, it's:

* 19/51/29/1.6

Quite a disparity. Especially when you consider sources like [2][3], which argue that:

> "Studies have found that a small proportion of police officers – about 5% – produce most citizen complaints, and officers with a two-year degree are about half as likely to be in the high-rate complaint group"

Overall, I believe there's lots of evidence suggesting more educated police are better police and citizens, and none suggesting the opposite - that less educated police are better.

Across the board, Canadian police are significantly better educated, with the exception of less Graduated degrees.

Across the board, Canadian police are less deadly to their citizens.

Not a coincidence - go ahead and say some more stupid shit though.

[0]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/law-enforcement-education [1]: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2015001/article... [2]: https://theconversation.com/5-reasons-police-officers-should... Source of the quote [3]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... Source of the info behind the quote, paywalled

This butchering of statistical reasoning is so poor I have to assume it is a troll

But in case it’s genuine, consider vast differences in gun ownership, homicide rate, and… honestly so many other things it’s just annoying to list them.

> consider vast differences

I did.

Gun ownership is about 32% of individuals in USA vs 25% of individuals in Canada.

Homicide rate is about 2.5x higher in the US, which means US cops are outperforming this statistic vs US civilians.

> so many other things

It's not just annoying to list them, it's ridiculous; these countries are the exact same place. Across the board, everything you can think of has a lot of statistical homogeneity between these places. But Canadian cops are way better educated, and kill way less.

Around the world, cops that are better educated kill way less.

So why exactly are people excusing reductions in education requirements for police? It makes no sense. There's no supporting evidence that that's a good choice, and literal mountains showing that it's a bad one.

This thread is bizarro world.

Have you considered handguns as a factor?

Handguns are the most interesting statistic here, with the US being a serious outlier (58%! vs 12% in Canada), it could be related

I still don't see how you deny that more educated officers are less violent when I've made multiple links supporting that argument

Your analysis is just dumb. You’re implying this is the only difference. You’re implying the entire outcome difference could be due to this one variable. You have shown no evidence to suggest this relationship exists at all. Like, for example looking at other countries. You’re implying that one thing has to account for the entire effect as a linear relationship by saying homicide rate being 2.5x is not important or that they’re “over performing in spite of it”. But you want one? Fine. Cops killed on duty. About 10x in the US. That settles your desire for a linear relationship on a compelling alternative story. Is that actually a sufficient analysis? No.

You get an F for intro to stats. And an F- for being confidently wrong.

There is no “excusing” reductions in education. You have not demonstrated a relationship between these two things as important.

> Will you propose a different reason why US police are so much deadlier

Guns. 1.2 per American, 0.35 per Canadian [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

That's not a very good argument - those guns are concentrated in the hands of about 32% of the US population [0], whereas in Canada it's probably closer to 25% [1]. [1] says "[t]he overall rate of firearm ownership is at least 241 per 1,000 population and is comparable to ownership rates in other countries where hunting is a significant activity"

[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own... [1]: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/wd98_4-d...

Seems like you don’t know there’s a difference between handguns and hunting rifles.

Crime rates, prevalence of firearms, etc are major differences which could account for the discrepancy. Many police in the US are required to have 60 credits minimum in college education (associates degree equivalent).

If you want to really look into this, legitimately, the best thing to do would be to compare use police to each other based on education. This is likely hard to do. However, state-level requirements and deaths could be compared between states with similar crime/murder rates.

Compare Canada to Vermont, NH, Wisconsin, Montana and Idaho and see if your difference still holds. USA is a big place, with very different cultures and outcomes. Once you compare Canada to states that are culturally like Canada, your university hypothesis doesn't look to be correct.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/police-kill...

Can you provide more sources that show Police education by state? While I don't disagree with the premise you are suggesting in and of itself, the link you've provided is entirely insufficient to make the calculations about police education and per capita police violence rate

I found [0], which in Appendix F has a state-by-state breakdown for only some states. Cross referencing it with your data source is useless, all the top states for per-capita police killings have their data omitted from that table.

[0]: https://www.policinginstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com