New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told CNN's Piers Morgan last night that he doesn't "understand why police officers across this country dont stand up collectively and say were going to go on strike, were not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do whats required to keep us safe."
We've been hearing a lot of that recently. Earlier this year, The New York Times reprinted a Department of Justice press release and slapped this lede on top of it: As violent crime has decreased across the country, a disturbing trend has emerged: Rising numbers of police officers are being killed.
Bloomberg and The New York Times are both wrong:
- In 2008, ten times morecivilians regular people were killed by cops than cops were killed by perps.
- In 2011,72 cops were shot and killed in the entire U.S.; in L.A. County alone, cops shot and killed 54 suspects the same year--22 percent of those people were unarmed.
- As Scott Reeder reported at Reason this morning, "Farmers, ranchers, commercial fishermen, loggers, garbage collectors, truck drivers, construction workers, pilots, steel workers, roofers, and others are far more likely to face death on the jobs than police or firefighters, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics."
- And as Choire Sicha wroteearlier this year, "2008 was the ten-year low for police officers being killed, and 2012 is, so far, year-to-date, down 49% from last year."
Bloomberg, the commander of "the seventh biggest army in the world"went on to say that "police officers want to go home to their families. And were doing everything we can to make their job more difficult, but more importantly, more dangerous, by leaving guns in the hands of people who shouldnt have them and letting people who have those guns buy things like armor piercing bullets.
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Mike_Riggs_July-24-2012
Some extra info for how stupid of a thing to say. I bet he gets elected again too. Somewhere. We have to make sure and keep this guy in office. To keep our insults of the government sane.
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