Title: How Police Training Contributes to Avoidable Deaths - The Atlantic
Headings: How Police Training Contributes to Avoidable Deaths
How Police Training Contributes to Avoidable Deaths
To save lives, cops must be taught to think beyond the gun belt.

Content: They saw what they were trained to see. And they did what they had been taught to do. That’s the problem. Police training needs to go beyond emphasizing the severity of the risks that officers face by taking into account the likelihood of those risks materializing. Policing has risks—serious ones—that we cannot casually dismiss. Over the last ten years, an annual average of 51 officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty according to data collected by the FBI. In the same time period, an average of 57,000 officers were assaulted every year (though only about 25 percent of those assaults result in any physical injuries). But for all of its risks, policing is safer now than it has ever been. Violent attacks on officers, particularly those that involve a serious physical threat, are few and far between when you take into account the fact that police officers interact with civilians about 63 million times every year. In percentage terms, officers were assaulted in about 0.09 percent of all interactions, were injured in some way in 0.02 percent of interactions, and were feloniously killed in 0.00008 percent of interactions.