> At 01:51 PM 11/4/03 -0500, jeffrey fisher wrote:
>
>> kelley: i'd love to see those flat stats. any references to hand?
>
> etceterataratarah! :) you can find more at the bls. sorry for the quick
> and dirty cut'n'paste job below. didn't look around long enough to find
> any evidence to support the tentative claim that more sizzlean die from
> traffic accidents than from firearm/knife homicides but i think that
> might have been something a client told me. he used to work for the DC
> police:
Fifteen or twenty years ago I read, in an extensive table of occupations in a magazine article, that police officers had a total on-the-job death rate of about 33 per hundred thousand per year. That figure stuck in my mind because it happened to be almost exactly equal to the one for my job (land surveyor, field work). In that article the author said the same thing you did; the number one cop killer isn't gun goons but traffic. <editorial>So whenever you see them &^%$ orange vests, slow the %$#@ down wiil ya!!!</editorial> The corresponding figure for almost all office occupations was about seven. Convenience store clerks scored fifty-five - two-thirds again more risk than _cops_ for an average 125% of minimum wage! - and loggers, the champs, topped a hundred.
Particularly with respect to these outdoor, physical occupations it is worth noting that for every fatality there are also a couple dozen non-fatal injuries which leave the guy screwed up in various degrees for life. I'm lucky, the driver who ran me down only broke my toes, and they healed. At least a quarter of the guys my age whom I know in my field have permanent disfigurements such as poked-out eyes, lopped-off fingers, snake-bite scars, and the most common one, racked-out spines. You may be thinking "another lazy slug bitching about his achin' back, scheming to cop a few legal pain pills." Well I wish you could see these photos my boss's wife took after his recent back surgery; they opened him up from the back _and_ the front, there's a foot of incision, all stitched up with big black Frankenstein sutures. Definitely not something you'd volunteer for.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net