zlacker

How much of our police force deals with legitimate violent crime?

The vast majority of police do not need guns.

edit:

> hey deal with rape, suicide, murder, assault, domestic abuse, robbery, every week unless they're some small town cop in a gilded neighborhood.

Can you back this up? Statistics I've seen do not support your claim, and put violent crimes under 5% of police investigations.

>>static+(OP)
How do you know before hand if a domestic violence case does not escalate out of hand? How would you access the danger or lack there of in a particular situation before walking into it?

>>static+(OP)
How many interactions do police have in a week? If the number is 20 or more then 5% becomes a common occurrence.

>>mulmen+58
OK? That doesn't matter. If the vast majority of crimes are not violent, it's not really important what the absolute numbers are. It could be 1,000 or 10, the point is that the majority of responders don't need deadly weapons.

>>sreman+l7
Let's go with this. Every domestic violence case may turn violent - and, again just for the sake of argument, we'll assume that this requires the use of deadly force by the police, so we arm them with deadly weapons.

If those cases are extremely rare, and stats I've seen show they are, there is still no need for the weapon in the other cases. We can go ahead and disarm the other officers, and have a small portion maintain arms for potentially violent cases in your given scenario

Of course, I'd argue that you don't need deadly force even to deal with the majority of potentially violent crimes, but that's a separate matter.

>>static+fa
This is like a turkey problem -- every day is a jolly day until thanksgiving comes, once a year.

>>static+(OP)
If violent crimes are 4% of police investigations, then it still only requires 25 investigations per week for the parent sentence to be true.

>>static+S9
95% is not “the vast majority”.

To put 5% in more extreme terms: would you play Russian roulette with a 20 chamber revolver and one bullet?

Each interaction for police is like pulling the trigger in that hypothetical game of Russian roulette. This is why the absolute numbers are actually very important.

>>mulmen+rh
if 95% doesn't qualify as "the vast majority" of anything then the phrase has no usefulness.

>>dpeck+wj
Would you use a hosting provider with 95% uptime? That’s 72 minutes of downtime per day. Would you describe them as being up "the vast majority" of the time?

>>static+fa
DV cases are rare? On what planet? Police deal with DV cases continually.

>>jki275+am
Relatively rare.

>>mulmen+rh
Again, this is not absolute numbers. With the number 95% we can say that 95% of the time they do not need to bring a deadly weapon. It doesn't matter if that's still every day, it means 95% of the time it is not necessary.

>>static+cG
> With the number 95% we can say that 95% of the time they do not need to bring a deadly weapon.

Well, no. 5% of interactions is frequent, especially for police. They need to be prepared for violent situations. That's a pretty core part of the job.

We can talk about deadly weapons being unnecessary for dealing with violent situations but your quoted numbers just don't support the conclusion you seem to be drawing.