I wrote this a few years back, but given all the one-sided, anti-law enforcement posts and re-posts Ive seen lately...Im posting it again: Lets play a little numbers game. For the sake of simplicity Im going to use rounded down, even numbers because Im horrible at math. Lets say there is a small, local police department that has 80 officers on road patrol (that doesnt count other departmental services/personnel like Detectives, K9, Training, Recruiting, Crime Prevention, School Resource, Supervisors, Administration, etc.). On average lets say there are 10 officers working every day shift and 14 working every night shift, bringing the total daily staffing of road patrol to 24 officers per day. We will say that each officer responds to 10 calls per shift. Once again, and estimate leaning toward the low side. That would mean that officers at this small department would answer 240 calls for service in a 24 hour period. Lets say that 10 percent of those officers were doing something illegal or at least exercising poor judgement on a daily basis. That means that there would be 24 separate incidents per day (in one small town department) of police officers violating a citizens rights. For arguments sake, lets say that only 10 percent of the 10 percent gets reported. That means there would be 2.4 incidents per day, in one small town, of police officers acting criminally. What would happen if there were even on article per day in a local paper about police officers acting irresponsibly, criminally, etc.? Back to the numbers... 24 officers per day, 240 calls for service per day, multiplied by 365 (days in a year) equals 87,600 calls for service by one small, local police agency in a calendar year. I tried to find an actual number of police agencies in the United States, but found several different numbers, most of which were a few years old. It would appear that a safe, however extremely conservative, number would be 20,000. Now, these numbers will be extremely low simply because you have an agency like NYPD that has thousands more officers than any small town department. However lets multiply the 240 calls for service per day by the 20,000 departments...that brings us to 4,800,000 calls for service per day in United States (once again, just using rounded down, low numbers for the sake of simplicity). Now I ask you this: Purely from a mathematical stand point, are MOST police officers doing their job protecting the citizens of this country or are MOST of them violating peoples civil rights? If there are almost 5 million calls for service per day in this country and even 1%of the officers on those calls were acting illegally or outside the scope of their duty, there would not be enough time on CNN, Foxnews, MSNBC, CBS, etc. to keep up with all of the stories. Every news paper, website, magazine, etc. couldnt keep up with the stories that would be pouring in. Let me preface my point with this: I am HUGELY in favor of any wrongdoing by any law enforcement officer to be properly reported and dealt with through the appropriate channels. Im not making excuses for any officer who has chosen to violate the public trust. That being said, THE VAST MAJORITY of law enforcement officers do their job and do their job well. I can speak directly to this point not from a position behind a computer, viewing a YouTube video, or based on what Ive heard, but from a position of personal experience. I attempted to use numbers to illustrate that point. The numbers speak for themselves. My intent here is not to undermine or demean anyone or anything that someone might have gone through, but to simply give a voice to the other side of the coin. All to often the isolated incidents that get posted and re-posted showing an officer acting outside of the law are what people chose to base their opinions on. You dont see the videos of what goes on every day, millions of times, of officers doing what theyve sworn to do...protect their communities and the people who live in them. Just my perspective and a little food for thought.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 23:39:19 +0000
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